Agile way of working, the Concise Way
At Concise we emphasise human over process to manage the creative software development challenges in an agile way of working together with our clients, partners, and friends.
Software development is a unique project management challenge. On the one hand, modern high-level abstract languages give each engineer incredible power to rapidly create high-quality software products. On the other hand, the process is creative and often defies simple estimation and prediction.
We’ve all learned through a combination of lessons how to cope and thrive with managing to deliver software on time.
At Concise we use a process that is Kanban and scrum styled — while keeping an emphasis on distraction-free engineering and planning.
Here are our four key assumptions of an agile way of working:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
A self-organised and motivated team can achieve their goals in a better and faster way than one that is imprisoned by tools and over controlling.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Even the best documentation cannot represent the actual impression that working software makes. It is better to follow on track in a flexible way and constantly provide the client with working software that can be evaluated, commented, accepted or declined.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Requirements cannot be fully collected at the beginning of the software development cycle, therefore continuous customer or stakeholder involvement is very important to assure that the team is constantly up to date with their impressions, opinion and point of view.
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile methods are focused on quick responses to change and continuous development. It is not a good idea to absently following up the documentation, but rather to be flexible with implementing the client’s suggestions and needs – simply to be agile in your way of working.
We organise our workflow to involve all of the above mentioned Agile assumptions. We work in one week sprints in a way that is fundamentally transparent and engaging for our clients and partners.
Along with our flexible time & material approach for budgeting and ‘poker planning’ or ‘T-shirt sizing’ to estimating the projects, this approach is the simplest way to build an amazing project together in an agile way of working.
More from Concise:
The Beginners’ Guide to Agile Project Management Methodology
Agile Without Scrum – Is It Possible?
Agile estimation: how to estimate software projects?