Agile Implementation for Business Agility: A Guide to Streamlining Operations and Increasing Flexibility

Business Agility, Digital Transformation, Lean Management, Design Thinking, Scrum, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping, Lean Portfolio Management, etc.…are terms often heard in today’s world that all fall under the umbrella of Agile.

The term "Agile" gained popularity among software developers after the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001 in Snowbird, Utah. This online document with four values and twelve principles that became the foundation for the Agile Movement, 20+ years later, continues to inspire and engage teams, not just in software development but in all areas of business including managers and business leaders.

One might think that its success to spread out around the world and beyond the world of software development was because the 17 people that met in 2001 were able to discover “The Silver Bullet” to transform software development, but the reality is that instead of coming up with a prescription they basically modeled something to the world: How a group of people with diverse backgrounds, ideologies and many differences in opinions, who mostly disagreed on methods, terminology, experiences, and practices could still find common ground and agreement at the most fundamental and important aspect of human nature – a shared set of values and principles that enabled them to coexist and collaborate.

“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.”

The introduction paragraph to the Agile Manifesto is a display of straightforward honesty & humility which makes the manifesto so powerful because it allows any team of people to understand the value of Agile and the Agile Mindset so desperately necessary to succeed in today’s VUCA & BANI world.

As a company, Sparkhound has embraced the Agile mindset that allows us to do the following for our People and our Customers:

• Empower team members to “uncover better ways” of doing what they do best and enjoy doing.
• Work with our customers by developing solutions that help them solve their immediate needs.
• Build relationships with our customers that grow over time by continuously improving how we work together.
• Foster and nurture healthy customer relationships that allows us to go from cooperation to collaboration, aiming to reach the ideal and desired state of co-creation, where the best solutions can be conceived over time.
• Minimizing risk in project delivery and budget management by working in short increments allows us to tackle big problems by delivering working solutions small enough to be tested, used, validated, and measured to be effective, consistently over the life of the project.

At Sparkhound, Perfection, Excellence and Happiness are not seen as goals but moments that constantly happen in our journey. “The Perfect Sprint Planning Meeting”, “The Perfect Line of Code Written”, “The Perfect Team Retrospective”, and “The Perfect Demo of Working Software to our Client”, all become part of daily life because they are not the focus or the goal of our work, instead, they are occurrences and expected outcomes of consistent Agile Habits that become the DNA of a team with clear, workable, and realistic agreements that provide transparency, and accountability for daily collaboration, in a healthy and safe work environment where no individual is left alone but recognized as a valuable team member committed to delivering their best work while continuing to grow and be better each day.