Amid today’s fast-paced world, faring with the latest market innovations is crucial to keep your business afloat. And whether you’re managing or working in a small or big enterprise, business development should be a top-of-mind priority to keep your organization thriving. To do this effectively, it’s critical to employ the best methodologies and strategies that will impact your business for good.
So, what should your business methodology and strategy be? Let’s find out!
There are many strategies to ensure business development—and one of them is the agile methodology. This is an umbrella term for management, planning, and technical processes for handling projects, and developing software and other products in an iterative and agile manner. Such methodology seeks to deliver the right service or product with frequent delivery of minuscule chunks of functionality through cross-functional and collaborative teams, and allowing customer feedback and course correction for improvement.
Agile methodology breaks up traditionally lengthy delivery cycles a.k.a. the legacy of waterfall methods into shorter cycles, which are called sprints or iterations. These iterations set the pacing for delivering working products or services to customers, receiving comments, and making tweaks based on their feedback.
Basically, agile methodology is about being responsive to your customers’ needs and demands. This is applicable in numerous fields and systems where there is a workflow and process. It aims to maximize value delivery to customers and minimize the risk of developing less useful innovations.
As your business’ project progresses toward completion, agile fosters flexibility. Typically, the original project vision does not always match the outcome. It becomes better as agile methodology prompts you to improve every step of the journey.
This flexibility is also vital as you develop your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). You can harness prioritization to develop what you need and eradicate features that are only nice-to-have. Adding more features later on is still possible, but doing this will help streamline the process and keep project priorities in the spotlight.
Customers want businesses with faster output delivery. To keep customers happy, businesses are employing the agile methodology to stay intuitive, make swift decisions, and promptly meet customer needs.
Unlike traditional frameworks that only involve customers during the planning phase, the agile methodology allows customers to be involved in the end-to-end decision-making process. Keeping customers in the loop and improving your services or products per their feedback enables you to provide value and improve brand affinity.
Agile cultivates a culture of accountability as it can push your team members to acknowledge the reality and take responsibility for their decisions’ results without fear of criticism or reprisal. This, as a result, strengthens team synergy and maintains healthier spaces that enable everyone to thrive.
Likewise, the agile methodology requires you to meticulously look into the budget, timeline, and scope together and understand how one impacts another.
In terms of product or business development in general, the questions commonly asked are the following:
Agile can provide the answers to these time-cost-scope questions. With its complexity-based estimates, you can get a more precise time representation to completion than hour-based estimates. The historical performance also enables predictability of future progress. It also gives a clear picture of the scope and what they require. These, then, allow you to craft an insightful roadmap that enables release planning transparency.
With the agile methodology, managers can have control over the project. This is mainly because agile enables transparency, feedback integration, and features that ensure quality control. From planning to implementation, quality is often guaranteed with better processes and stakeholder involvement. For stakeholders, they are encouraged to make better progress by leveraging agile’s advanced reporting tools and techniques.
A happier, healthier, and more holistic work culture that results in boosted work productivity sounds like a dream for some, but this is actually possible with agile.
With Agile, you get to avoid a clogged production pipeline because it emphasizes the need for cross-collaboration and appropriate maximization of your employees’ respective skills through effective task delegation. You can also keep employees productive by encouraging a to-do list method. As a result, everyone can move forward efficiently, meet their personal work goals, and keep the business sustainable.
Sustainability is not only measured in terms of employee and customer satisfaction. It’s also crucial for your business to factor in your processes’ carbon footprint to truly say it is sustainable. Whatever industry your business is in, you can take steps to support the environment. For instance, in the fintech industry, it’s a good practice to keep track of your business’ financed emissions to financial services.
Since the methodology works in small iterations that focus on constant delivery, it’s easier to mitigate big project risks. The quicker feedback loops allow you to immediately respond to the customer with what they value and need, enabling you to significantly reduce product or service risk and ensure customer retention.
Some (final) thoughts
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