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Agile Environment

Introduce and facilitate the Agile approach in your organization with KeepSolid Goals. Plan your tasks and manage your teams according to Agile practices.

Create an Agile Environment with Goals

What’s an Agile Environment

The Agile environment is an organizational culture that nurtures and facilitates the Agile approach to project management. Such a work environment creates and supports processes that push teams and businesses to achieve their objectives faster and more reliably. This allows companies that establish an Agile environment to be more flexible, creative, and open to change and innovation. 

The Agile environment typically has certain distinctive features:

  • Focus on working software rather than documentation
  • More individuals and interactions, fewer processes and tools
  • More and better customer collaboration, less paperwork and contract negotiations
  • Quick response to changing environment and requirements

Why Businesses Aim for Agile Environment

An Agile environment creates and supports a working culture that facilitates teamwork toward a common goal. It incorporates the value and importance of individuals and their collaboration. Agile processes encourage team play, working to achieve quality, and acceptance of the inevitability of frequent change throughout the project.

 

To establish such an environment, a manager should turn to the Agile approach. It’s a set of values and principles for breaking large projects into smaller functional pieces that can be developed and implemented quickly. This is also called iterative software development. Even though there exist many different practices that fall under the agile category, it’s the behavior and culture that stay the same.

Benefits of Agile Approach

Most modern businesses acknowledge the usefulness of this methodology and strive to go agile themselves. The greatest benefit that they’re yearning for is the ability to deliver quality products to their clients faster than their competitors. But that's far from being the only benefit of the Agile work environment!

Other benefits of building an Agile process:

  • Stakeholder engagement
  • Predictable schedule and costs
  • Transparency
  • Predictable and early delivery
  • Acceptance of change
  • Improved quality
  • Focus on business value
  • Focus on users

Claim the Benefits of Agile Environment

Agile Work Environment with KeepSolid Goals

The very design of KeepSolid Goals is meticulously crafted to encourage the Agile environment: 

 

  • Keeping an overarching Objective as the center of your project keeps your team focused on what’s important
  • Tying Key Results (sub-goals that are instrumental in the success) to the Objective
  • Defining specific tasks as part of each particular Key Result
  • Presenting your whole project using visual tools like mind maps and timeline to make it clearer, easier to grasp, and more manageable
  • Delivering automatic reports and notifications to keep managers and stakeholders updated on the current state of the project and offer them insights on what works and what needs to be fixed
How to Setup Agile Process in Goals

In addition to everything we’ve described earlier, KeepSolid Goals has a dedicated feature for creating an Agile work environment in your team. We’re talking about Sprints and Kanban boards.

 

A Sprint is a defined, iterative period of time during which your team is expected to finish several tasks and present the results. As long as the Sprint has a specific timeframe, and all the tasks within it are associated with the same Key Result, there can be any amount of tasks in a Sprint.

How to Use Sprints to Become Agile

Sprints are the basis of the Agile approach. To use Sprints for task management in KeepSolid Goals, you first need to enable this option when initially creating a new Objective. Once you’ve done so and created a bunch of Key Results, click on the Objective and go to the Kanban tab. 

 

On the Kanban tab, you will see the list of your Sprints and associated tasks. To add a new task, choose an existing one from the Backlog Tasks menu (you can also create new tasks right there). Then, drag’n’drop the task to the relevant column, according to its current status - To Do, Analysis, In Progress, Review, or Done.

Be Agile with KeepSolid Goals!

How to Ascertain That Your Work Environment is Agile

  • Processes are iterative, incremental, and evolutionary. At each iteration, a cross-functional team is involved that covers all functions, from planning and analysis to development and testing.
  • Efficient and face-to-face communication is encouraged. Team members are situated together to facilitate face-to-face communication and to better establish team identity.
  • Your work environment has a very short feedback loop and adaptation cycle. The Agile process often includes daily stand-up - a brief session where team members discuss what tasks they did the previous day and what they intend to do today toward the goal.
  • The main focus of your practices is on the quality of your products or services. Agile work environment often involves project-specific tools and techniques to improve product quality and enhance the agility of development.

Agile Manifesto - 12 Agile Development Principles

  • Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software
  • Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
  • Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)
  • Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
  • Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
  • Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress
  • Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
  • Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential
  • Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams
  • Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

What is an Agile Environment, and Other FAQs

What exactly does it mean to be Agile?

At its core, Agile refers to a set of practices and processes that encourage breaking large projects into smaller functional portions. Such iteration allows to speed up the development and make teams and businesses more flexible and efficient.

Agile approach - rules or guidelines?

A variety of software development methodologies fall under the description of Agile. As such, it’s important to understand that the Agile Manifesto focuses on general corporate culture and behavior, rather than strict methods or processes.

Where do Agile practices originate?

The word "agile" as a formal term in software development industries first appears in 2001, with the so-called Agile Manifesto. This list described the values and principles of Agile iterative software development.

Why do companies aim to be Agile?

The most important benefit of the Agile approach is that it enables software development companies to deliver higher-quality software to their customers and to do it sooner than their competitors.

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