One struggle every manager faces regularly is ensuring their team performs at peak productivity. And while there are innumerable ways to make a team more efficient, one of the methodologies that’s gained significant traction in recent years is called agile.
The general purpose of these project management tools is to help make a company more efficient and boost that bottom line in the process. Luckily, depending on your goals and needs, there are multiple frameworks for helping streamline a business. One closely related to lean management and its various principles is agile development.
A Brief History
Agile is work management methodology that can be implemented into most aspects of your business processes.
Originally conceived to be used in a software development context, agile emerged as a way to streamline operations back in the early 2000s when previous work management philosophies weren’t making the cut. Business leaders in the IT and software development space felt that tools conceived previously were clunky and slow and didn’t allow the kind of responsiveness needed to quickly shift strategies as priorities change for different projects.
Although agile is generally used in the IT and software development industry. It was originally devised as an alternative to Software Development Lifecycle methodologies, and offers an iterative approach to software delivery.
Although agile was originally created to help businesses in an IT and software development context, the basic framework is applicable across every industry.
Agile dictates that software is built incrementally from the start of the project rather than attempting to deliver it all at the very end. Each project is broken down into smaller, bite-sized functions and are prioritized and given to different user types. Then those smaller mini-projects are continuously worked on and delivered over two-week spans called iterations.
While these are the basics of agile, the methodology follows a set of principles that dictate how businesses can become more streamlined via these guidelines. Here are a handful of ways to integrate this philosophy into your marketing plan.
The Future: Agile Tools
In comparison to other such tools, scrum breaks down an organization or department into smaller teams and tasks them with organizing themselves and handling certain tasks. Scrum also dictates that work on a project be broken down into a set of deliverables with fixed schedules for completing these tasks (usually between one and four weeks commonly referred to as sprints).
Scrum is merely the tool used in Agile to break projects into these manageable pieces so that cross-functional teams can work on and deliver these actions over the iterations. Scrum generally functions with three prescribed user roles: Product Owner (pretty self-explanatory, as they own the project and are responsible for communicating with the rest of the team/company); Scrum Master (oversees the projects during each sprint); and Team Members to carry about the manageable, bite-sized mini projects during each iteration.
Did you find this agile management tip helpful? Leankor’s workflow management tools can help your team become even more efficient. Schedule your one-on-one demo today!
