How to Be Agile in Your Small Business
If you’re the owner of a small business, then chances are that you and your employees wear many hats and operate without perfectly scripted roles and titles. You each need to respond to customer feedback, and you must work together to get things done.
What is agile development?
Agile development at its core is a philosophy on how people collaborate to get work done. It is a framework written by software developers in the agile manifesto.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
While initially created as a new approach to software development, its popularity has spread across disciplines. Because it is not a defined process, but rather a mindset about how to respond to feedback and change, it has applications for small businesses of any kind.
What does this mean for me?
Being agile means fostering a mindset of continuous improvement in the products or services you provide to your customers. This is accomplished by consistently delivering incremental solutions to your customers, not being afraid that your work isn’t perfect at all times, and improving it over time. Are there mistakes on this website? We hope so.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
- Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn
Here at Twindeavor, we apply agile in our digital marketing projects in a few ways:
- Cross-functions: For example, while Ivy oversees most of our marketing work, Dan wrote this and several other of our blog posts.
- Iterative delivery: We deliver proposals that provides first steps in our deliverables, rather than outline a detailed, step-by-step plan for the year.
- Response to feedback: We craft our first deliverables based on the data we have at the time and create the next as more data comes in.
Want to learn how to use agile in your endeavor? We can help.
