The Agile Manifesto for Small Teams: A Guide to Solidifying Agile Thinking and Efficiency

Reviewing the Agile Manifesto regularly helps you to improve your process, prioritize work more efficiently, bring good quality products to your customers on time, making everyone involved happy. The Manifesto was written to offer guidance on how to use iterative and incremental development to deliver better software, faster.

But the agile methodology can be applied to many types of businesses and processes.

The agile manifesto is a list of 12 key principles that drive the agile methodology. The manifesto stresses on prioritizing customer satisfaction, delivering high-quality products with speed and efficiency. It was created in 2001 by seventeen people from the field of software engineering. The principles are designed to help individuals and organizations create better products, in a more efficient way, while maintaining a balance between the ambitions of the company and meeting the needs of customers while providing an autonomous and engaging environment for the team.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

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

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.[1]

The agile principles help establish tenets of the agile mindset. They are usually not rules for practicing agile methods but are a handful of principles to instill agile thinking.[2]

The key thing to understand about agile strategy is that it is all about delivering working software, quickly and iteratively. This means that you can respond to feedback faster than if you were doing waterfall-style development.

One of the most popular frameworks for agile strategy is Scrum.

A company’s success is heavily dependent on the performance of their employees. If an employee is not happy with their work environment, then it will affect the entire team. So, it’s important for companies to be aware of their employees’ needs and to take action in order to maintain peak performance.

One way to do this is by implementing Agile Scrum for project management, which focuses on high quality and efficiency, as well as effectiveness. It does this by providing a framework that enables teams at all levels of an organization to work together efficiently and effectively towards a desired goal.

Small teams are important to the success of any organization. They are less likely to suffer from team overload, and their productivity is better.

Following is the list of Agile Principles:[3]

Agile Principle 1: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Agile Principle 2: “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”

Agile Principle 3: “Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

Agile Principle 4: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

Agile Principle 5: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

Agile Principle 6: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Agile Principle 7: “Working software is the primary measure of progress.”

Agile Principle 8: “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”

Agile Principle 9: “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.”

Agile Principle 10: “Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.”

Agile Principle 11: “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

Agile Principle 12: “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

The implementation of a Scrum process in a small organization is not only an opportunity for the company to build a sustainable and competitive business, but also for each employee to boost their career.

It is important for organizations to have a flexible environment where employees feel free to take risks and try new things to keep up with changing market needs. Organizations can use agile practices as a way to build a culture of constant learning, experimentation, and feedback loops that enhance peak performance.

References:

[1] https://agilemanifesto.org/, accessed 1/1/2022

[2] Agile Project Management: 3 books in 1 : Beginner’s step by step guide to Learn Scrum + Beginner’s step by step guide to Learn Kanban + Beginner’s step by step guide to Learn Lean by Andy Vickler

[3] https://www.productplan.com/glossary/agile-principles/, accessed 1/1/2022

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