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Hang in there.

What their answers came down to was that employee and customer expectations are changing and that in turn, the business has to change. Customers have come to expect Web-based services, and they want them now. That means that IT has to swap out older systems and business processes quickly. Employees don’t want to wait four years — or even four months — for new features and fixes to be rolled out. It’s about giving the business a competitive advantage through faster IT deployments.

If that isn’t enough to convince you, Alex Adamopoulos, CEO at New York-based Agile consultancy Emergn, whose clients include British Airways, British Telecom and Standard Life, has five more reasons for adopting Agile practices:

1. To stop project paralysis: Agile translates into faster feedback and faster delivery. That means that IT delivers projects that keep up with the pace of the market and customer expectations.
2. To accommodate change: Plan for change with Agile, instead of protecting the process and focusing on mitigating the risk of inevitable change.
3. To make room for innovation: Agile allows for employee creativity and better idea management, which is often stymied by heavier processes.
4. To improve the work environment: Agile enables companies to invest in their people and to “up-skill” them. As a result, Agile leads to happier, more productive employees who in turn feel more passion and ownership towards their work.
5. To give the businesses transparency and control: Agile lets businesses identify where the greatest value exists in the organization’s portfolio of projects. Thus, Agile improves overall quality in delivering any type of project in the organization (IT or business related).

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director