Top Agile Challenges, Benefits & Common Pitfalls Facing Agile Project Teams
Agile methods of project management that are applied in everyday team struggle, as well as core values and principles that will help your team to completely change the way they work on projects may have challenges too. To avoid pitfalls and other misconceptions of agile team project organization, check out more on agile here.
What is Agile?
Agile is a set of methods and methodologies that help your team think, work, and make decisions more effectively. Agile methodology allows understanding specific agile approaches better and be able to immediately implement them in practice. And most importantly, you will understand how to turn a group of specialists who add Agile to their work into a dream team that really improves the way they create a product and achieve outstanding results.
According to one of our most solid clients Atlassian, agile is an iterative project management and software development approach that helps teams deliver value to their customers fast and with fewer headaches. Thus, instead of betting all you have on a “big bang” launch, an agile team rather deliver work in small, but very consumable increments. Plans, requirements, and results are evaluated continuously so that the teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change really quickly. That’s the agile essence.
Agile methods work in fragments. If you can’t follow all the tips at once, then the benefits of partial implementation of these techniques will still be quite obvious. That’s what makes this approach fresh and highly effective.
Benefits of Agile Methodology
The benefits of agile technology make the managers’ and owners’ jobs easier. The process is organized in such a way that it allows them to have greater control over their projects and great communication with their teams. What makes agile project management truly unique is the fact that it may help focus on both, delivering a high-quality experience and value to the customer, and completing delivery of the project within the given project constraints. Here are some more of the benefits that are possible with Agile:
Timely delivery
Agile projects are completed on time, which is great for teams that want to finish on time and stay on budget.
High-quality products
Agile projects deliver high-quality software, which is important for teams tired of building inefficient, error-ridden software.
No spaghetti code
The code written by agile teams is well done and easy to maintain. This is a big relief for teams accustomed to maintaining convoluted spaghetti code.
Customer satisfaction
Agile teams make customers happy, which is a huge difference from developers of complex software that users don’t understand.
Flexibility
Most importantly, developers from effective agile teamwork and get paid on an hourly basis, so they have their schedules flexible, spend time with family and friends which is extremely important in the new digital era.
Transformation
Agile methodologies are popular because many teams that have switched to it report great results: they create quality Finance software, improve tools, work better together, satisfy their users, help companies grow, and do it all in a relaxed work environment and open communication.
Top 5 Challenges of Agile Methodology
While Agile makes a project less bulky and more transparent, and the team communication really fast, it may offer serious challenges to face, as well, and it’s high time to check out which ones.
1. Changing the company culture & employee perception
You’ve tried various methods, but they didn’t work. Perhaps you have implemented daily meetings and transparent communication, but you still have a lot of problems and you miss deadlines. Or you’ve started writing user stories and reviewing them with the team and stakeholders, but the developers are still dealing with last-minute changes and adding additional features. Or maybe your team has decided to go waterfall in the end because choosing Scrum or Extreme Programming looked like a waste of time as if everyone is doing what is required of them, but the benefits for the projects are not great. Changing the company culture is always painful and you don’t know how it affects the team. Introducing agile is rather about changing their mindsets.
2. Alignment on all organization levels
If the project managers feel that the project is planned by all team members, they will listen to everyone, not to find out how much the plan deviates, but to understand what changes to make to the plan that the whole team was working on, etc. Instead of imposing a plan or rules and then evaluating how closely the team is following it, the managers will work with the members to decide the best approach to the project on all possible levels.
3. Creating a sense of ownership within the teams
Creating a sense of ownership within the teams in agile is all about taking initiative. And that’s a matter of trust and complete freedom of action. We take ownership when we believe that taking business action is not someone else’s responsibility. So, the manager as an individual, and the team as a unit are accountable for the quality as well as timeliness of an outcome, even when they’re working with others.
4. Communication improvement
Within teams in the organization, daily meetups should be a way to make sure that the project is being implemented wisely and effectively. The developers understand that this procedure will benefit their work in the long run, since everything that does not depend on them also performs well. In addition, the knowledge that if the meeting has to mention planning problems, then everyone will listen to opinions and work on the project will go even better.
5. Selecting the right Agile method
How a team’s mindset and attitude can influence the successful adoption of agile practices is the key. An important goal is to help them understand how the team’s worldview affects projects and how they feel about agile if they picked the right methodology for a particular project. By learning Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Programming, and Kanban, they will learn both sides of agile advantages and disadvantages, principles and best practices, and how they can help them build better software.
Conclusion
In case if you’re a manager or owner or stakeholder who is worried about the current team organization working on important projects you may switch to Agile. If you still have no idea what it is about, and that’s impossible to force a team to move to Agile, or do you first need to change both your own and the team’s mind set, hire.net developers who are already agile from us to improve team performance, especially those trained in both Kanban and Scrum, two popular Agile frameworks offering different approaches to workflow management and goal achievement.
We can explain why agile methodologies were designed the way they are, what problems they are designed to tackle, and what values, principles, and ideas they embody. We explain not only “how”, but also “why”, that is, we help to understand the principles that apply to specific development problems specific to your team, company, and projects. And we will show how to use this information when choosing a methodology and practices to improve your development process.
