Agile Outside of Software

In the over 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was written, we’ve seen Agile approaches applied in a large variety of fields outside of software development. Scrum has been used for sales, marketing, manufacturing, human resources, gas plant design and construction, academic research, schools… the list goes on.

Agile approaches lend themselves well to circumstances where:

• we have cross-functional teams,
• people are doing knowledge work (i.e. their work requires thinking, rather doing routine repetitive tasks),
• adapting to change helps as opposed to just following a plan,
• there is a common goal or purpose, often called a Product Vision,
• collaboration would help the team.

In many of these examples, the groups don’t use Scrum itself, rather they invent their own flavour of Agile that works for them. Things that come up time and time again include:

• work in small chunks,
• start with a rough plan and assume it will change often,
• regularly examine what has been built and change the plan based on feedback,
• give control of the work to the team,
• make team improvement a core part of the work,
• make improving communication and collaboration a regular part of the work.