Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Overcoming Obstacles

Despite clear benefits in the current context, the Agile approach isn't without challenges. Sometimes these challenges are purely institutional. In a large manufacturing firm, the group responsible for new product development may be required to be profitable as a department. While this makes sense from a strictly business perspective, an unfortunate side effect is that it inspires an aversion to error that can be detrimental to Agile development methods. Remember, the Agile approach tends to accept mistakes as not only inevitable, but as a potential source of valuable information.

Create Opportunities

In an environment where exploration leading to a dead end is viewed as an expense to be reduced, true innovation is difficult. However, even in corporate environments where this structure exists, one can avoid this creative damper. Inside engineering departments, engineers, scientists, and developers are often more appreciative of an experimental approach. If the management structure above them occasionally turns a blind eye, exploration can still flourish. In any case, at some level, we have to loosen the reins of pure profitably as a metric around the personnel and departments we hope will be the sources of innovation.

Build Accurate Prototypes

There can also be problems if the modeling or prototyping used as the basis of iteration is incomplete. In 2001, Boeing announced the development of the Sonic Cruiser, a new commercial flying wing that broke the rules of commercial ...