How to Explain Agile Development to Your Boss

Let’s say your enterprise is ready to partner with a firm that offers web and mobile app development and integration.

It’s now time to map out your criteria for choosing the right partner, and an agile scrum approach tops your list of must-haves. Your boss glances at the list and simply shrugs at your number one item.

You’ve got work to do to convince your boss that a partner relying on an agile scrum approach will help your company attract and retain customers and save your company time, money, and headaches.

How to explain agile development to your boss

Start with the goals that you and your boss share. For example, you both want products that meet or exceed customers’ requirements (in this case, your company’s needs) and get to you quickly; you need high quality products that work as expected; and you need products that appeal to your end users.

Next, focus on the goal for impacting the bottom line. Agile will save time and money, which means maximizing profit.

Now you have prepared your boss to listen while you drill down to explain the benefits of agile.

Test-driven development: saving time and money

With competition at a peak level and products more complex than ever, customers rightly demand higher quality, quick turnaround time, and cost containment.

Simply put, agile is the answer. Why? Its flexible, test-driven method is designed specifically to reduce errors, contain costs, and please customers.

How? A standard feature of the agile approach—really, of the internal testing and retesting—is to reduce the time and costs involved in quality assurance, which, in turn, means a better product gets to customers more quickly.

As a bonus, if the customer changes their needs mid-way, agile has the flexibility to turn on a dime and meet the customer’s changed expectations.

Course corrections in agile

In agile, course corrections are built in as a natural part of the process, rather than an error found later and fixed by re-opening the process and re-working parts of the product.

• At the start of an agile process, each part of the product is identified, along with the job it has to perform. Then the team maps out the product development, viewing all the parts woven together and working in sync.

• The team working on developing the product—the scrum team—puts their heads together at every point in the process, so that communication and collaboration are built into the agile approach.

• In agile, product development is completed in sprints, from point A to B, B to C, and so on—not in linear, long-distance, A to Z marathons. The scrum team can spot errors during or right after each sprint and quickly make a course correction.

• Because scrum team members include professional designers, engineers, and analysts, the team can spot any errors early on and has the right people involved to decide what course corrections to make immediately.

Agile fosters creativity

Meeting customers’ needs these days often includes creative and innovative approaches to product design and development. Nowhere is this more accessible to customers than with the agile approach.

Scrum teams use the synergy of their combined professional skills and experience to infuse their sprints with more than just spotting errors—they also spot opportunities to create breakthroughs that delight customers.

Once they see an opportunity, agile enables the scrum team to pivot quickly and rework their product development to incorporate improvements and innovations.

The scrum team also incorporates customer feedback along the way, between sprints, to insure that the customer’s requirements are being met or exceeded.

Flexibility, quick course corrections, opportunities for improvements, cost containment, on-time delivery, high quality, and customer feedback and satisfaction—why not turn to a company that relies on agile as their approach to product development?

Need more help explaining the benefits of agile to your boss? Contact us to schedule a demonstration.