Spark joy in your organisation with a little agile

Agile. Everyone’s implementing agile working techniques and singing its praises; it’s almost as trendy as decluttering your home with Marie Kondo, whose method, KonMari, offers a solution to our over-materialised lives. Agile principles, however, help organisations to gain a competitive edge by being able to effectively anticipate change in the constantly evolving business climate. But what do these two approaches have in common, besides being trendy in both personal and professional lives?

Here’s our simplified attempt at describing the common link between those principles:

By decluttering your belongings, you get to focus on items that are important to you, that “spark joy”, leaving you feeling more organised and satisfied – that's the KonMari method in a nutshell. Similarly to this, by implementing agile you can reduce complexity and prioritise activities that deliver the most value to your customers, achieving operational agility that results in more motivated employees and, naturally, improved productivity.

There are proven and documented benefits of adopting agile:

• It increases team productivity and employee satisfaction, as agile practices have the value of individuals and interactions as a central principle
• It improves customer engagement and satisfaction by adapting to customers’ changing priorities, and brings the most valuable products and features to market faster
• It reduces time wasted on micromanaging functional projects, allowing senior managers to dedicate themselves to higher-value work that only they can do: creating and adjusting the corporate vision; prioritising strategic initiatives; simplifying and focusing work; assigning the right people to tasks; increasing cross-functional teamwork; and removing anything that can hinder the progress.

Perhaps most importantly, agile project management helps you save money. The Project Management Institute’s (PMI) 2017 “Pulse of the Profession” survey found that, for the first time in five years, more projects met original business goals while being completed within budget. Investing in agile approaches was identified as one of the many reasons why organisations are wasting less money due to poor project performance.

Furthermore, in a recent study, 61% of respondents saw an overall increase in team productivity as a result of adopting agile methods; with 64% saying that they saw improvements in their ability to manage changing priorities, and 66% citing improved project visibility as one of the key measurable benefits.^[1]

But... agile is not a “one size fits all” solution. It’s important to understand where agile doesn’t work as well, and when not to force it on your team or project. Similarly, Marie Kondo’s magic doesn’t always work – for example, her life-changing magic doesn’t make any sense to parents who, on a daily basis, wash, dry, fold, stack, tidy and rearrange! Clutter has a way of crawling back into your life if you have kids. Or if you’re a book lover and your whole collection still sparks joy to you, then