DEVOPSdigest

Why Agile? DEVOPSdigest asked the experts for their opinions on what are the most important advantages of being Agile. Part 3 covers how Agile enables you to grow and adapt to change.

Start with The Top Advantages of Being Agile - Part 1

Start with The Top Advantages of Being Agile - Part 2

CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK

Agile, Dev/Ops, and Continuous-everything are top of mind for development organizations, and for good reason. Traditional development methodologies result in projects that run behind schedule and over budget while frequently failing to deliver the capabilities that the business actually required from the project. Agile methodologies, on the other hand, not only reduce the time to delivery, but are also more likely to meet actual business requirements. For development teams as well as the business, a great advantage of agile is that projects must be broken down into steps to deliver incremental value, so that adjustments can be made along the way. This means that builds, testing and deployment can be automated to allow for continuous feedback and evaluation, which is critical for overall project success. With agile, development teams are able to to bring automation into the work flow to hit incremental goals, while readjusting where necessary.
Stephanos Bacon
Chief of Product Portfolio Strategy, Application Platforms Business Group, Red Hat

BUSINESS SERVICE VISIBILITY

One of the greatest advantages to being agile is the ability to quickly discover trouble spots and address them faster. This helps IT teams make constant adjustments to improve and gives them more intelligence into the business and services they're delivering.
Muhi Majzoub
EVP, Engineering, OpenText

DATA VISIBILITY

Agile is an important consideration for DevOps managers writing product reviews on IT Central Station. From reading the reviews of DevOps solutions, it's clear that a key advantage of Agile is data visibility at all levels, and for anybody who is a stakeholder or part of the team. Some reviewers note that with a good agile tool, the information is right there, and every team member has the same exact view given the access that they are granted. Projects and tasks are broken down to manageable pieces, and their speed and direction are clearly visible. One reviewer writes that as a result of Agile, his organization can work across several teams and sites, while staying efficient and reducing communication overhead to a minimum.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

ADAPT TO CHANGE

The number one advantage to agility is being able to embrace and respond to changing business demands and requirements. Truly embracing agile empowers the IT team to effectively react and respond when the business customer decides they need something different or something new. Agility helps transform IT from being a “Department of No” to a highly valued business partner."
John Jeremiah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The single greatest advantage that agile practices bring to a team or IT organization is the ability to adapt to change. Seventy percent of the companies listed in the Fortune 1000 ten years ago are no longer there. They were victims of change; unable to adapt quickly enough in the digital economy. Agile practices enable companies to innovate faster with less risk. Organizations can make better, more knowledgeable decisions later in the process. Teams can deliver software faster with better quality, and the business has the ability to respond immediately to marketplace opportunity, events, and trends.
Mark Levy
Director of Strategy, Micro Focus

With Agile, we achieve better business outcomes by implementing frameworks and processes that give us the ability to make timely and effective decisions about our rapidly changing reality. Agile is, at it's core, simply learning by doing, and when we emphasize speedy development cycles, prioritizing the riskiest and most important work first, we can succeed and fail fast. When failure is cheap it ceases to be a negative. In effect, with Agile, we create value in failure by turning it into the opposite of risk: knowledge. Knowledge we can use to pivot quickly and cheaply to achieve consistently positive outcomes for ourselves and our customers.
Caleb Brown
Senior Product Manager, CollabNet

Agile means true business agility. This includes the ability to implement enterprise systems in days or weeks, not months or years. It includes the ability to customize them to the way your organization does business and to change them as quickly as your business needs change.
Colin Earl
CEO, Agiloft

LEARN QUICKLY

The top advantage of being agile is the ability to learn quickly. The smaller the iteration, the faster a team can learn. The faster a team learns –– even if if the learning comes from making initial mistakes –– the faster the team can develop a successful development strategy. This continuous learning loop is a core tenet of agile development, and ultimately the most important benefit. In today's business landscape, speed is the biggest competitive advantage, and any IT organization that fails to adopt an agile approach will struggle to survive long-term.
Eric Sigler
Head of DevOps, PagerDuty

INCORPORATE NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS

The greatest advantage to being agile for a development team is the competitive edge it gives the business in a digital world. If a development team can rapidly and easily incorporate new technologies and methods, and respond to changing business conditions in a timely manner, it puts the entire business ahead of the pack.
Rich Fitchen
GM of North America, Bizagi

IMPROVE SECURITY

Beyond being a critical consideration when it comes to security, visibility is a key requirement for being Agile and an integral component of dev-sec-ops. The practice encourages automation, close collaboration, creating transparency and a greater sense of ownership amongst stakeholders and allowing for increased innovation. In our rapidly evolving IT landscape, organizations face constant pressure to either keep up the pace or fall behind, and Agile Development can help organizations maintain a competitive edge and stay a step ahead of cyber threats and IT challenges.
Ananda Rajagopal
VP, Product Management, Gigamon

Go to The Top Advantages of Being Agile - Part 4, showing how Agile impacts team productivity.