SPG Recap: Agile 101 - York Solutions

Welcome to our Think IT Strategic Partnerships Group, two-part series for the fall! The topic of choice after much consideration is; Agile 101. Thank you to everyone that was able to attend our first session last Friday, and thank you to Wayne Arnold and Luann Arnold for leading the discussion. As always, a huge thank you to Medica for hosting our group.  

Traditional Project Management is very linear where the phases of the process occur in a sequence. Each project follows the same lifestyle. What’s coming to the surface in today’s industry, is that each project may not fall into the same lifestyle. The rise of an Agile methodology continues to take our world by storm.  

In the early 2000s, the Agile Manifesto was born, and it has been continuously picking up steam since. This manifesto lays out four key values as followed: 

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation 
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
4. Responding to change

Along with values, there are twelve key principals that stand behind them: 

1. Satisfy the customer  
2. Welcome changing requirements 
3. Deliver working software frequently  
4. Businesspeople and developers must work together on a regular basis 
5. Build projects around motivated individuals – and trust them to get the job done 
6. Face-to-face communication is best 
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress 
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and the user should be able to maintain a constant pace 
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility 
10. Simplicity is essential 
11. Self-organizing teams 
12. The team reflects on how to become more effective and adjusts accordingly 

Source: https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/12-principles-behind-the-agile-manifesto/ 

After discussing the basic values and principles of Agile, we jumped into Scrum. What is Scrum? It is an agile process that allows us to focus on delivering the business value in the shortest time. It is based on three pillars; transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Scrum roles consist of a team, a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and a Development team.  

We went through the different artifacts of Scrum which include a product backlog and a sprint backlog. A product backlog is the master list of work that needs to get done and is usually maintained by the product owner. A sprint backlog is the list of items, selected by the development team for implementation on the current sprint cycle.  

This scratched the surface of what Agile is, and how it started. During our next session, we will jump into how we can effectively utilize it in our space.

What would you like to see discussed at our part-two meeting titled Applied Agile and Strategic Partnerships?