Agile has its own fair share of exponents and opponents, perhaps the issues are in the practitioners and not in its practice?

Agile practices provide organisations with a leaner, more structured approach to delivering projects. It enables them to respond far more quickly to change and provides a way to implement high-priority initiatives. To stay effective, businesses need to be able to change quickly.

However, the core focus of traditional project delivery methodologies is to thoroughly understand the reasons for change before the change can be enabled; in the real world, this approach can be far too time-consuming. Gartner predicts, by 2016, Business Agility is the key differentiator and motivator in delivering business outcome. While some organisations using Agile development do not have “Project Manager” and put a strong emphasis on self-organising teams, it is nonetheless beneficial for one or more people on the team to have skills in helping the team work more cohesively, communicate more effectively with their stakeholders and support the team with an appropriate level and combination of leadership and guidance, coordination and facilitation.

Agile methods are revolutionising the way solutions are being developed. With Agile, solution developers and solution requestors work closely together and the focus is on delivering working solutions frequently, with changes welcomed. Organizations which implement these new approaches successfully will reap the benefits and transform their business landscape.