While agile project management has many benefits for any kind of company, by providing more alignment between departments, ease of adaptability of new measures, and quicker project turnovers, it has its own set of challenges. With an agile mindset and project management approach, every step isn’t outlined in extreme detail and planned out. For many finance departments, who tend to have a more traditional and cautious mindset, this is a big change. When an organization becomes agile, one of the big challenges is funding and financing.
To solve this challenge, organizations need transparency, and a realignment of finance and other departments so that they can work more closely together and understand what’s happening. The business and operational teams need to get finance on board, and it can help to explain that even traditionally cost projects are usually late and over-budget. Finance teams can be more open to change if they’re faced with those facts.
Further, many leaders in the company want to have a detailed plan of the benefits of a project and the estimated total cost before agreeing to greenlight the project. The agile mentality of knowing what a project will cost only when it’s done, or just to do the next project that needs doing without a plan isn’t sufficient for many leaders. Leaders need to adopt a more agile mindset, and also need to understand that agile projects still need a plan, it’s just done differently. Planning in the form of requirements scoping, design work, and architecture of the project, as well as time and money estimates for sprints and points is completely acceptable. Agile can include planning if it’s done in sprint planning and constantly adapting.
Some leaders are tempted to become agile companies just for the sake of it because it’s a new trend in certain industries. If a company goes agile just for the sake of it without thinking whether it’s the best for them, they may actually lower their productivity and lose customer satisfaction. If agile is the key outcome, the plan should be revised to find better business goals.
We present to you, “Top 10 Agile Service Companies - 2021.”
