What is the Agile method? For us here at Annex, it's a mindset.
Thankfully we have the extremely capable Joel Hancock, our Delivery Lead, who has documented some insights around how it works for us.
The word "Agile" in product development seems to mean different things to different people. For many, Agile is something you "do"; rules to follow, daily stand-ups, a kanban board and team retrospectives. But for us at Annex, Agile is a mindset that's at the heart of our entire approach. Sure, we use the Scrum Agile framework to get stuff done and we love our team retros and our Jira boards. But we use those processes and tools because they help us work in a way that realises the values of Agile. It's the reasons for the rules, not just the rules themselves, that are important.
Our growing team has decades of combined experience in I.T. We've seen all kinds of projects between us. We've seen some great projects and we've also seen the other kind. We know what a great project looks like and we know why the other ones are so-so. For us, the values of Agile align perfectly with what "great" should look like in our work; a committed group working together toward a common goal, delivering an uncompromising high-quality product, collaborating closely with our clients as part of our team and welcoming change to refine and improve the products and solutions we deliver.
Agile principles have also helped us grow as an organisation outside of our project work and beyond our project teams. Much of Agile is about close groups of people working together to constantly improve; making small but meaningful changes to learn, to refine behaviour and attitudes, to make things better, to be better. We don't ever want to rest on our laurels, but instead, prefer to support each other to strive toward excellence.
Ultimately, we want to make things that help people and we want to have fun and grow along the way. And we believe that an Agile mindset helps to make that happen.
