Agile methodologies that you can apply in your SME

Agile methodologies will allow you to leave behind those traditional plans in which the ability to react is lower. Forget about pyramid organisation, bottlenecks or long approval processes. These Agile methodologies are designed to save time and costs and improve collaboration among team members. These tools will help your SME and your staff to better adapt and be more efficient to change. 

Increase your business productivity.

Let's take a close look at the different types of Agile methodologies that your SME can apply depending on its needs.

Agile

Each project is split into small controls that allow to know continuously the development of the project. These reviews enable the project plan to be adapted according to the results obtained. Agile methodology seeks customer satisfaction and team motivation. Both are essential to promote the creation of coordinated and collaborative networks.

Scrum

It is one of the most widely applied Agile methodologies in companies. It consists of dividing processes or projects into sprints or blocks of time. A sprint usually lasts about 3 weeks, and in each of them there are different phases:

• Sprint planning: meeting at the beginning of the sprint in which the whole team participates to organise and plan the tasks to be worked on during the sprint.

• Daily Scrum: daily meeting of about fifteen minutes to discuss the previous day's progress, objectives and possible roadblocks.

• Sprint review: meeting at the end of the sprint to review the work, observe progress and resolve any unforeseen issues.

• Sprint retrospective: reflection on the last sprint of the project, identifying possible improvements to be taken into account in the following ones.

Kanban

In order to implement this methodology, a visual chart should be drawn up showing the pending tasks, those that are in progress and those that have already been carried out, so that the whole team has an overall view of the project's development. This methodology is especially useful in projects where one or several teams must perform many activities, thus avoiding repeating or forgetting tasks.

How can you introduce Agile methodologies in your SME?

Now that you have a little more knowledge about the different Agile methodologies and the benefits they can bring to your SME, you will discover that you can apply them to most areas of your business. Here are a few examples.

• Long-term projects.

If your SMEs business model is based on long-term projects, perhaps you can implement the Agile methodology to be able to observe the weekly progress, rectify problems and know the possible barriers that your employees face when carrying them out.

• Product launches and product development.

If, on the other hand, you have a new release or are developing a product, you can apply the Scrum methodology to have better coordination between workers, a solid control of progress and a greater ability to react to possible problems.

In addition, you can complement all the above situations by using the Kanban methodology, in which you can know the status of the project by having all the activities organised in a very visual way.

The implementation of Agile methodologies can be an important competitive advantage for your SME, providing further growth and consolidation in the market. Now the question is, which of all the methodologies are you going to introduce?