About Agile

Term "agile" means flexibility, repetition, and openness to change.

Agile as a project management approach was introduced to the world in 2001 in the United States. At a ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, 17 self-proclaimed organizational anarchists came together and combined several lightweight processes to create what we know today as the Agile Manifesto. The creators of Agile intended it to be a set of values and principles that would improve upon and transform existing software development processes, but companies in various industries quickly saw the value of Agile, too. Soon, Agile was adopted across all fields.

Four values of Agile:

Individuals and interaction Over Process & Tools

Focus on - People communicating with each other more

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Teams should prioritize spending time working on things that actually create value and avoid spending any more time than they really need on debating, writing, and reviewing documents.

Customer collaboration over negotiation

Customer satisfaction

In Agile projects, customer satisfaction is considered the highest priority of building a high-quality and valuable product. After all, if it's not valuable to the customer, then there's little point in spending time on it.

Agile values having the freedom to collaborate with customers early and often. In doing so, teams can quickly react and adapt to what customers need, rather than waiting out the process of negotiating contract terms just to make a few changes or request resources.

There will still be contracts with Agile project management, but the focus is on identifying what's really needed and leaving space for collaborative, customer-focused work.

Responding to change over following a plan

As a project manager, the key takeaway to remember here is that the most successful projects are the ones that are able to smoothly integrate change. Agile project managers still create and value their plans, but they can cope with and are able to adapt if the plans need revising at any time during the project.