Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity

2Becoming Agile Rapidly and Painlessly

The Agile philosophy simply asks you to work collaboratively as much as possible with your teams and client to build products with quality, shipping early and often, while learning and relearning along the way.

—Peter Saddington¹

To take advantage of today's and tomorrow's unique opportunities, and to rise above the intense existential challenges your firm will face in the months and years ahead, it will be supremely helpful and confer enormous advantages if your operations embody the Agile essence: quick, responsive, dynamic, innovative.

You've got to learn to recognize opportunities and to act on them faster than your competitors do. Hence, in this chapter we explore what Agile means in detail, with a focus on the roots of the Agile movement and its many insights and implications for today's organizations.

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The Agile Software movement was initiated in 2001 by a group of 17 programmers, who, it turns out, have significantly changed the world by inventing a new way of organizing work.

They wrote a humble but ultimately wildly influential document called “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development.”²

Composed of four simple statements, these axioms express the core values of their system for getting work done:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work, we have come ...