By: Isla Ann Wright, Psychologist, traveler, teacher
More
and more IT companies are opting for nearshoring solutions as the
best logistics options for their businesses. With nearshoring come
major communication requirements and it is important to have the
right tools to tackle all the special, temporal and organizational
challenges.
Agile
methods have proven to be one of the best solutions when it comes to
project communication and management. They shorten the production
time, improve quality levels and enhance flexibility in ongoing
projects. There are many benefits that come from applying agile
development
in nearshoring. This article includes the ones that are most relevant
for successful IT project management.
Increasing
efficiency
One
of the most widely used agile methods is
Scrum.
This method puts the emphasis on empirical feedback and team
self-management. It has just three roles, product owner, team and
scrum master who simultaneously handles two or three teams. These
three Scrum roles share the responsibilities of a traditional project
manager.
The
Scrum method includes five meetings, backlog refinement, sprint
planning, a 15-minute daily Scrum, sprint review and sprint
retrospective. This way all obstacles that might appear during
project realization are promptly caught and fixed so that the whole
process can run more smoothly.
One
of the major benefits of using Scrum is the communication that exists
among all three parties involved. The focus is on building open and
more personal relationships, thus facilitating the transfer of
information, plans and tasks.
Improving
quality
Agile
methods break the project down into manageable units allowing the
project team to focus on high-quality development, testing, and
collaboration. The production of frequent builds along with testing
and reviews during each iteration improves the overall quality by
enabling much quicker finding and fixing of defects and early
identification of expectation mismatches.
One
of the main principles of agile development is the integration of
testing throughout the lifecycle. This enables regular working
product inspection during the development process, allowing the
product owner to make any necessary adjustments and providing the
product team with early insight into any quality issues.
Better
risk management
There
are often a lot of justifiable reasons when a development project
misses its release target dates. From the fact that the team didn’t
understand the level of difficulty of the usage of new technology to
the unclear requirements and changing of mind by the customer near
the completion of the project. However, businesses still require the
products to meet shipping deadlines in order for the remaining
business plans to stay on schedule.
The
Agile method has several ways in which it helps IT projects achieve
their release predictability. Firstly, it prioritizes high-risk
aspects of development thus enabling risk reduction in the early
stages. Secondly, Agile offers parallel risk assessment directed
towards risk areas where multiple solutions are possible and the
project team cannot agree on just one. In that case multi-set
development comes into play, with it the need to have multiple teams
working parallel on solving the same problem using different
solutions.
In
regular conditions most teams would not consider this approach due to
possible time and cost requirements, but with Agile method this is
double without the increased costs, so you are able to continue
parallel development of alternatives thus increasing the overall
chances of making the best key decisions.
Conclusions
Apart
from the benefits already listed in this article, Agile methods,
especially in nearshoring, are known for increasing the revenue and
speed-to market. Also it allows better cost control and ensures a
higher level of customer satisfaction. 54%
of companies
that are currently using the Agile method have reported enhanced
collaboration between teams that don’t usually work together, while
52% have reported an increased software quality within the
organizations.
Comments
Post a Comment