As the world becomes more digital, project management methodologies naturally shifts toward a more agile way of working.
This new approach has been successfully implemented and represented by famous start-up companies, namely: Netflix, Spotify, UBER as well as technology giants, such as: Google, Amazon, to name but a few. These companies have all based their successes on rapidly delivering new products which have dramatically revolutionised the market and transformed their profits margins.
The time has come for even the most traditional industry (see banking!) to embrace the new way, unless they want to expose to significant risks, such as losing market shares from new unexpected competitors, in the form of agile tech companies. To name a few: Barclays, ING Bank, Lloyds have already started implementing their own ways of agile working.
Where does Agile come from?
The evolution of Agile has resulted from a need to improve and enhance the traditional Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC), which was, by all means, a strict and inefficient set of sequential phases (requirements, design, coding, testing, deployment, maintenance).
Benefits of Agile
Some of the key elements of agile are:
- Working in smaller independent teams
- Exercising daily scrum meetings (15min stand-up calls)
- Traditional phases are replaced by Sprints (1 to 4 week iterations)
- Collaboration and customer involvement are critical
- Minimum viable product is delivered fast, hence high ROI
Without any doubt, this approach works very well for software development, when the key is to deliver quickly and be competitive in a very dynamic market.
The Challenges
Being used to methodological approaches such as, Waterfall and good old Prince2, I have several questions which come to mind when it comes to implementing Agile:
- How agile can you be when you have to deliver a regulatory project with hard deadlines?
- Can you accept bugs and incident on your live system if you are delivering financial services products (e.g. online banking or payments)?
- How agile can you deliver new servers or physical infrastructure? Kits still need to be ordered, delivered, unboxed, cabled, tested etc… (Hint: Cloud?)
- Non Functional Requirements (NFR’s) can be lengthy and cumbersome – how can you cut corners?
- In one of the banks I worked for, IT Security took between 3 to 10 weeks to sign off against the delivery of a new service. How could that become Agile without compromising security itself? For instance: how can you implement PenTesting, port scanning, application vulnerability analysis within a SPRINT which last less than a month?
- How about change management? How busy will they get and how comfortably they will accept so many more changes coming their way?
In conclusion, it is evident to me, that not all types of projects can be delivered by utilising an agile approach. Having said that, it is worth adopting the best parts of agile such as, implementing daily stand-up calls, organising team structures according to the type of product that has to be developed, these elements can be implemented with a variable degree of agility.
I do not believe that it is possible to bypass all the red-tape processes and complex regulations which large organisations have put in place. They must be there for a good reason (at least some of them!).
Ultimately, comparing Barclays with Spotify is like comparing apple with oranges – be mindful of this!