Category: General News

More or less general news.

Will “COVID-normal” kill agile working?

When COVID-19 hit, flexible agile philosophies seemed perfect for companies weaving a path through its disruption – but as Dropbox closes offices to make remote working permanent, some worry that the isolation of “COVID-normal” could break one of agile’s core tenets.

More than 80 per cent of company leaders plan to continue enabling remote working for the long term, a recent Gartner survey found, while 94 per cent said they would limit face-to-face meetings.

Such distancing is crucial from a public health perspective but challenges the presumption of collaboration that underlies agile, a software-development approach introduced years ago as a 12-point manifesto and now a ubiquitous business catchcry.

Agile methods – which have been credited with helping businesses innovate faster, adapt to change better, and reduce internal friction – lean heavily on physical closeness to maintain commonality of purpose, support iterative innovation, and ensure faster resolution of problems as they arise.

By putting cross-disciplinary project teams in the same room, the methodology reasons, projects evolve faster and more purposefully – but what happens when remote working is the new normal and distance makes physical co-location all but impossible?

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Agile scaling frameworks in brief comparison

Recognizing changes in the corporate environment and reacting to them promptly by adapting the individual components of the business model, such as the value proposition, resources or processes, to the new circumstances – that is the basic idea of agility. However, many companies have yet to build the capabilities required for this. For a company that traditionally works with classic project management methods, even a small-scale changeover can be a challenge for individual teams. It becomes much more difficult when the business environment requires the organization-wide introduction of agile methods. Not least because the first agile methods, such as Scrum, do not even address collaboration across different agile teams. In order to be able to use agile methods across the entire company, several so-called agile scaling frameworks have been developed since then, which enable exactly this cross-team collaboration.

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