This article explores how the Agile methodology plays a crucial role in today’s fast-changing business world. It looks at the core ideas of Agile, which focus on being adaptable, putting customers first, and improving work step by step. The piece also shows how Agile can be used not just in software development but across all areas of a business, boosting efficiency, innovation, and staying ahead in the market.

Introduction

Agile methodology started as a way to develop software by breaking projects into small, manageable pieces, allowing teams to adapt quickly to changes. This approach is becoming more popular in different industries because it helps businesses respond faster to changes and challenges in the market.

Agile Principles and Their Application in Business

The Agile Manifesto talks about valuing individuals and interactions, working solutions, customer collaboration, and being open to changes. These principles guide businesses to focus more on delivering real value to their customers quickly and efficiently.

Agile Frameworks and Tools

Frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean help implement Agile by providing structures, roles, and processes. Tools and technologies also play a significant role in making Agile work smoothly, helping teams track progress and collaborate better.

Agile Transformation in the Business Environment

Real-world examples from various sectors, such as technology, finance, and retail, show how adopting Agile can lead to success. However, transforming into an Agile organization also presents challenges, such as changing the company culture and getting everyone on board with the new approach.

Benefits of Agile for Modern Businesses

Agile helps businesses improve their operations, leading to better product quality and happier customers. It also makes companies more flexible, allowing them to adapt quickly to new opportunities or threats in the market.

Future Trends and the Evolution of Agile

Agile is spreading to non-traditional areas like marketing and HR, showing its versatility. It’s also starting to merge with new technologies like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, pointing towards an exciting future for Agile methodologies.

Conclusion

Agile methodologies are vital for businesses that want to thrive in the digital age. They offer a framework for adapting quickly to changes, focusing on customer needs, and improving products and services continuously. As the business world evolves, Agile principles are becoming more relevant across all aspects of business, not just software development.

Nearshore outsourcing delivers companies with greater performance, faster growth, and a higher response when it comes to time to market. All of this is achievable through specialized talent, and at Nearshore Portugal, as a nearshore development provider, we know all about that. Among the many advantages, the benefits of a similar time zone difference are undoubtedly one of the most well-known assets.

So, is there really that much of a difference in developing projects with a time zone difference?

Agility At Its Best

The Agile methodology plays a crucial role in nearshoring, revolutionizing a company’s efficiency and overall output. With Agile development, developers must work closely together. This means, collaboration with cross-functional teams to continually grasp new knowledge with constant communication. This approach is all about turning the collaboration knob to 11. Making sure there is constant information and feedback between the team and the customer.

Here’s a typical scenario: Imagine you have a team on the other side of the globe, both parties arrange a specific time for a meeting to discuss the project, it’s evolution, and issues. Meetings done, everyone goes home, and the developer from your provider realizes there’s a high probability of disaster concerning a deployment that wasn’t discussed in the meeting. Instinctively, this must be discussed ASAP. Urgent matters of this sort can’t be delayed. Otherwise, the whole process of communication becomes inefficient, and there’s a name for it: Offshoring.

With Agile development, constant communication prevents such situations. Allowing the customer to be well aware of any potential problems, progress, and decisions making needs on the minute. Practically speaking, there’s no beating the efficiency that nearshoring can provide when comparing to the offshore way. 

Nearshore Development More Relevant Than Ever

Organizations worldwide are working at full-speed, preparing for the future economic struggles created by COVID-19. More than ever, companies need to balance their software development projects output, and nearshoring is the solution. According to a study by Statista, 39% of surveyed CIOs and IT executives worldwide expect a decline in their IT budget for 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. On the other hand, 21% expect their IT budget in 2020 to increase, while 40% forecast no change in the IT budget.

These projections force companies to look at their current situation and evaluate what type of outsourcing solution is ideal. Yes, offshoring can be less expensive but will compromise cost-effectiveness in your teams, collaboration, time to market, and potentially increase delays. On the other hand, nearshoring become less costly over time, has competitive rates, provides expert developers experienced in an agile approach, delivering greater performance with one key advantage: a similar time zone. This means a much larger communication window, proximity, reduced expenses, and quicker travels when you decide to visit your providers HQ

Quality Regardless Of Location

Nearshore development companies have top-class developers and engineers with competitive rates as the ones offered by offshoring companies. With over 10 years of experience and 400 IT professionals, Nearshore Portugal provides customers with seasoned and expert professionals in multiple technologies, experienced in nearshore projects across Europe. Furthermore, Nearshore teams have little cultural barriers. What makes these experts so efficient and adaptable is precisely their different backgrounds. This drives better problem solving, increased creativity, innovation, and new solutions. As a result, building optimal software becomes quicker and less troublesome.

This level of innovation and adaptability are essential trades. Especially in current times where businesses worldwide need resilient, yet flexible and focused professionals to deliver results even with unpredictable lockdowns. With remote working common with nearshore developers, an adjustment comes easier as developers are used to remote meetings with a flex-work approach. This is turn, enables these talented individuals to optimize their environment and workflow to the max.

More than ever, ensuring your business is as agile as possible is key. With leading talent and an experienced provider, organizations can guarantee they project continuity with access to specialized developers.

Is your organization looking for greater innovation and support? We provide a Team Extension, End-To-End Teams, and Project Development services.

Get to know more about our methods at

https://nearshoreportugal.com/how-it-works/

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The requirement for experts has increased, and likewise, the number of openings for tech jobs that won’t be filled. Canada, for example, is predicted to have 218,000 tech jobs open by 2020 and they’re not alone, the U.S market is expected to follow in giant figures as well. This drives companies offshore to countries like India too, as expected, to keep up with development needs. The reason for offshoring software is all about meeting affordable necessities with knowledge and expertise. However, there’s a but: the Agile way does not work for offshoring.

Traditional Offshoring challenges

With Agile development, developers must, unsurprisingly, work together. This means, collaboration with cross-functional teams to continually grasp new knowledge through client feedback, delivering new code that can be tested regularly. This is used to increase the speed at which the company can test hypotheses concerning the client’s wants and needs without wasting precious time or above effort. At the end of the line, engineers will present a minimum viable product, testing it to determine if it works. Providing feedback from clients until all potential issues are gone before the product hits the market. Unfortunately, due to the traditional offshoring software model, part of the flexibility and iteration speed becomes difficult to achieve.

Using the offshoring model presents itself with some issues. A company in the United Kingdom and its outsourcing partner in Finland may only a bit more than a couple of hours to solve issues, discuss future needs, and organize their work. This leads to less time for team members to communicate. Resulting in an extra effort when it comes to communicating, with only two options: or very early or very late.

One way to tackle this passes by the Canadian team producing documents with detailed instructions and recommendations that the Spanish team can read before the work starts. Still, this may pose another problem. Besides reducing real-time meetings, it can add complexity to the overall task since the risk for different interpretation exists.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Nearshoring!

Companies far and wide are realizing the impact of an agile environment and how outsourcing software must walk hand in hand with the agile way. The answer has increasingly become a nearshore approach, which provides several advantages, in this case, similar time-zones are crucial.

Top tip: If you want to know more about key nearshore benefits, take a look at our article Nearshore vs. Offshore: Why Nearshore is the best option!

By applying a nearshore model, developers from the U.K have the possibility to partner with a foreign development team in a country set in the same time-zone, such as Portugal. Providing a more efficient and increased means for communications. With the nearshore model, you’ll have the benefits of a talented workforce. That is to say proficient and different languages, mainly in English, in a country classified as one of the safest in the world with the ideal technological infrastructures, technical quality, and attractive costs.

Offshoring will always be the first choice for many companies. However, in the near future, those who will lead the market will be nearshore companies. Resulting in the optimal choice for cost and reliability, providing speed-to-market and a functional agile approach

What is the Agile method all about?

An Agile methodology is an approach to project management adopted in software development. This method refers to methodologies concerning ideas, requirements, and solutions centered on collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams. This approach supports teams taking into consideration the unexpected turns that software building can take. The value of the Agile approach focuses on providing a faster response, agility, and faster experience to sudden changes. A recipe designed to build the ideal Agile team.

How does an Agile team work?

Agile was developed as an approach to conventional project management. Instead of focusing on one big goal that leads to a final product, Agile breaks up that goal into several independent products that can be developed and released more efficiently and thus, more quickly. Agile focuses on two project management styles, specifically, Kanban and Scrum. When it comes to Agile workflow elements, there are some defining specs:

Daily standups

Members and leaders review the achievements, highs, needed improvements of the previous day, and what each member/team is working on at the moment.

Sprints

A sprint is all about planning all stages of a product, from development to evaluation. It’s commonly divided into five events: sprint, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

Reviews and assessments

Most companies see regular reviews as a must and this is especially common with an agile team. Even though an Agile team is all about managing themselves, there are still steps to make sure all stages of the work are being reached within the standard and quality expected. Assessments, are a key part, allowing members and managers to understand, evaluate, and set with detail the work or the best route to take.

Scrum Roles

As said previously, frameworks such as scrum help teams to follow agile principles, providing needed support to optimize work. These frameworks serve ultimately as the team’s guide, a compass to true north. Yet, the makings of an ideal team rely on its arrangement, from the number of team members to their role and a scrum team focuses on three:

Product Owner

The product owner plays a key role considering that he has the idea of the final product and how it should turn out for the specific project at hand. Passing important information, amendments, or adjustments. He is the one with the hands on the steering wheel that defines the route, team goals, tasks and has the final word on any changes.

Scrum Master

Besides having a Zen master like title, the scrum master also plays an important role. These individuals are the all-wise keepers of the scrum board. They are the second in command and mentor junior members in ways only masters can. Besides checking the daily work, they provide feedback to the team and make sure procedures are correctly applied. In sum, this experienced leader performs like a star player since it’s he who provides guidance and support to all. He is the bridge between the product owner and the team, accountable for performance.

Team members

The team members are the builders of the product, the backbone of any project, a skilled workforce of developers, designers, content experts and many more that are in charge of delivering all projects with the utmost quality and within the set deadlines. The right team members are all about supporting one and another, always aware of needed improvement while communicating with the scrum master, constantly brainstorming thanks to the different experiences they bring to the table. No skilled scrum master or product owner can deliver an amazing product without the right team members. Success starts with them.

Ultimately, an Agile team introduces benefits when it comes to improving development and high-quality software. A methodology focused on self-organizing cross-functional teams with autonomy, technical expertise and higher performance.

Agile is supposed to be different and ever-changing depending on each team and its circumstances. To start building one, you need to get support from the management team by showing a plan to reach. Then, there are some strategies you can adopt in order to create an awesome team. In this article, we’ll point out some tips to build an effective Agile Team.

Be patient
An efficient agile team is not always consistent. Things don’t always work out right at the first try and team members need to get used to a specific workflow and the group dynamic. This process might take some time, s you need to be patient to overcome workflow obstacles.

Good communication
The way to know if an agile team is on the right track is with a good communication system. Agile teams organize themselves to present their software to customers, so they can collect feedback as soon as possible and apply it to their work. Agile teams adopt a philosophy of transparency and view obstacles as opportunities to continuously learn and ultimately improve.

Be open to change
Change it’s just around the corner. It can happen anytime, mostly in agile teams. Although agile teams rely on plans and organization, they need to have the ability to respond to change.

Focus on results
Instead of obsessing over processes and procedures, agile takes emphasis on the results and outcomes.

Give voice to every team member
The concept of a team has to be taken seriously: everyone is accountable for the final product. Identify the goals of the team and adjust your goals to it. Stay realistic: the bigger the goal the more risks you take when it comes to reaching it.

There isn’t a perfect formula for a perfect agile team.
Either you implement scrum or decide for Kanban, invest in building an independent team able to adapt quickly to changes and work well as a group.