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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?

Continue reading “Will “COVID-normal” kill agile working?”