PRINCE2 Agile Overview – Part 2
Although PRINCE2 Agile is only suitable for projects, it uses a wide range of agile behaviours, concepts, frameworks and techniques that are also used in a BAU environment:
An overview of agile
The term agile is very broad and is viewed in many different ways throughout the agile community. There is a set a well-known frameworks referred to as agile methods and there are also well known behaviours, concepts and techniques that are recognized as characterizing the agile way of working.
The term “agile” refers to well known ´agile methods´ and well known behaviours, concepts and techniques – the Agile Manifesto comes closest to encapsulating them all.
Agile was originally used to develop software, but is now recognized as a mainstream approach to develop products and solutions
Every organisation should have a strategy in place to adopt and tailor agile, and it is currently being used by many organisations within both the private and public sectors
There are many variations of defining accurately what agile is, although the agile manifesto comes closest to achieving this:
The term of agile was created back in 2001 by a group of software development independent thinkers started to look at an alternative to the heavyweights, document driven processes that existed at the time.
Use of the Timebox techniques and MoSCoW prioritisation, will ensure timely completion of each Timebox and hence each increment and the project itself
This was known as the “waterfall methodology”, and these are old fashioned process is comprised a sequence of technical phases that was slow and struggle to respond to changing requirements, particularly when they were mired in too much detail from the start:
This group was already working in ways that later became described as agile and an output from their meeting was the manifesto for agile software development, or the agile manifesto as it is more commonly known.
From that point onwards, its impact and success has been quite dramatic, and the agile manifesto 12 principles became an important framework to be followed.
The reason for agile becoming so popular was that it helped to address the new demands being placed on how software was delivered. In particular software needed to be produced more frequently but the same time being of the appropriate level of quality to meet the demands of new technologies such as the Internet.
Unlike the waterfall way of working, agile phases are smaller and more iterative and incremental.
The agile manifesto only applies to developing software, and most of its underlying principles appeared to suggest that this is in the context of the continual time box development of a software product.
Although it was created as a way to develop software, agile has since been recognized as a successful approach well beyond a software development, and many people use the agile manifesto by replacing the word “software” with “products” or “solutions”.
So agile is no longer seen as just a methodology for IT, as it now includes situations that are large scale, complex in nature and occurring in a wide array of contexts far beyond software development.
It makes sense in today’s world for most organisations to have a strategy in place to adopt agile to some degree, and although it was initially seen as a niche area, it is now mainstream and is used by organisations that are large and small, old or new, public sector and private sector.
