Working in agile has become the new norm amongst tech and development teams across the world. Since the key principles were outlined in the early 2000’s by a motley crew of software developers, agile has gone on to change the way people work and manage business at some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Places like – Apple, Facebook, Atlassian, Uber and Airbnb, just to name a few. But can agile ways of working be applied to organisations and teams outside of tech? Or is it really just for the trendy Silicon Valley crowd?

"I’m obsessed with productivity as the principle that links us all to our work"

Hi Nigel, could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, what you are working on at the moment, and something you are looking forward to doing once the restrictions lift?

What are the benefits for teams outside of the tech and software bubble to work in agile? Can it really be applied to any team?

Agile, in terms of the ways of working, was a response to increasingly VUCA times in the 1990s – lots was going wrong in tech with big projects and enterprise software. You had a group of engineers who were frustrated at the blame for repeated project failure being heaped on their craft, so they set about finding a better way to make code. That is all.

The lean core is doing the highest Value work (as valued by customers); managing Flow to ensure no blockages or friction; and paying attention to eliminating Waste in its many forms. Agile daily management systems were based on everyone having visualised work, prioritised and assigned an owner, with a daily conversation, and once in a while retrospectively reviewing how the factory was working.

Working remotely has been a bumpy road for many businesses, can agile help with this?

There’s more in the Lean toolkit for these remote working times than the agile software development toolbox. People’s misinformed view that you just form remote agile squads, allocate tasks in Jira, and measure story points as progress is counterproductive to making work better to be honest. Luckily there is a tradition of software developers having worked remotely on their code, so it wasn’t all new to many of them!

"Agile and lean both have a learning mindset at the core – people must feel a healthy sense of challenge when things go wrong, not a deep fear of failure."

Are there any organisations you can think of where Agile doesn’t apply? Could Government, for example, run on agile practices?

There are some amazing examples of applying lean and agile thinking within government – all the way to involving citizens in deciding the funding when there isn’t enough money to go to every project and service in a city (check out Participatory Budgeting on the web).

Showing 'Agile Delivery' articles

Why agile isn’t just for tech teams anymore

SIM and RMIT Online join forces to upskill Singaporeans for a hyper-digital future