When to use Agile?
Now that you want to embark on a new project or build a new product – you may wonder:
- Should I learn to apply Agile ways of working?
- Or is the traditional waterfall approach good enough?
That’s simple – just consider the two questions (also see the graph below from Henrik Kniberg) :
- Do you know 100% exactly what you want to deliver? Or could the requirements evolve, change over the time?
- Do you 100% know how to deliver what you want to achieve? Or is the complexity of “how” uncertain at the moment, and you may find it out along the way?
If you know precisely what you want to build and how to do it – go ahead – don’t bother too much about Agile.
It’s like making pancakes – take the recipe, follow it step by step, and you’ll get your pancakes (N.B. professional chefs will disagree because they actually apply some Agile practices in the cooking process).
However, if you’re working on something more complex than pancakes, then Agile ways of working may be more applicable. It’s because Agile lets you fail faster, learn from mistakes, improve and thereby deliver value quicker with smaller losses and disappointments.
