So you’ve tried agile, but it didn’t deliver what you hoped for. Maybe you faced resistance from employees, or you weren’t able to increase the speed of innovation efforts, or the cost savings that you hoped for did not materialize. Whatever the underlying issues, you are not alone. “Going agile” is not easy. Agile does not deliver guaranteed results, but agile will play an important role in the transformation of your organization — like it or not.

Today’s number one business priority is to improve the ability to rapidly create and deliver new products or services. What actions are organizations taking to speed up innovation? “Going agile” is often mentioned as a solution to speed up this innovation objective.

Agile of course has its roots in software development and thus is most used by tech teams. But what can an agile mindset bring to business lines from its origins in tech teams? Where does an agile approach make sense, and where does it not? How can you benefit from an agile approach in an AI world? What challenges can agile help us overcome, and what challenges does it bring?

These questions are at the heart of the upcoming “Level-Up Workshop: To Be Or Not To Be Agile” at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit EMEA on 10 October 2024 at 10:55 a.m. BST. We discuss both the implications of agile for the tech strategy and also the implications of agile from a change perspective. Thus, our workshop is relevant for tech and business professionals. If you plan to visit the event, you can register via the Forrester event app.

What To Expect From Going Agile

When we talk to tech leaders, we hear that an agile approach helps finish each product iteration to a high standard through rapid and continuous testing. It allows developers to progress an idea all the way through to realization, making corrections along the way based on feedback. This speeds up the production process of features and functions. But agile is not about delivering products faster overall; agile accelerates the value delivery of features.

The implication of agile from a change perspective is that agile breaks product and service production into smaller “pieces.” This way, agile allows for the vision of the product to shift and evolve during the development process in light of constant customer feedback. This has ramifications for how business leaders need to think about value propositions and even business models. For instance, the feature-based aspect of agile delivery opens up the possibility of boosting faster cash-flow generation.

How To Get The Agile Approach Into Business Lines

In many ways, agile is about creating better transparency across the organization and teams. The four building blocks that bring agile into the business are:

  • Stewardship: the consideration and alignment of all stakeholders in the organizational ecosystem to drive influence, awareness, support, and alignment.
  • Solution: frameworks and methods to technically execute your transformation in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
  • Simplification: integration of and adaptation to AI and emerging tech to facilitate the outcomes of your business initiatives.
  • Support: change and communication methods that encourage collaboration, codesign, and cocreation to increase ownership.

If you are thinking about bringing an agile mindset into your business operations, then join our “Level-Up Workshop: To Be Or Not To Be Agile” at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit EMEA. Furthermore, agile and application generation platforms will be covered by our colleague Diego Lo Giudice in his 2024 keynote, “AI, Low-Code, And The End Of Software Development As We Know It,” on 11 October 2024 at 2:15 p.m. BST.