How to Make Your Startup More Agile

Operating a startup is never easy; the odds are stacked against you and every day presents a new set of challenges to overcome. The management style that you adopt will make an enormous difference to the experience that you have as a manager. If your style clashes with the personalities of your workforce, you are going to find yourselves at cross-communications throughout your business’s operational lifespan.

The Agile approach to business management began life within the world of software development, but has rapidly expanded and is now commonly used in a wide range of industries. Startup businesses in any industry can benefit from the lessons and principles taught in Agile management. Here’s how it can help your startup to thrive.

Strive for Efficiency

Efficiency and collaboration are at the heart of the Agile approach. If there are glaring inefficiencies in your workflow and hurdles are preventing good communication amongst your workers, you are going to have a very difficult time instituting any meaningful change.

When you are assigning new projects to your team, avoid overloading them with excessive information that they don’t really need. Keep things as simple and succinct as possible. As long as you are able to disseminate information to your project managers efficiently, they will be able to direct the rest of your workforce.

For smaller startups that consist of just a few primary players, efficiency is best achieved through the division of labor. Apportioning work out to your workers in a thoughtful and considered way is always going to produce better results than just randomly assigning tasks to one another.

Be Receptive to Feedback

The Agile method began life within software developers who utilized its principles to develop software more efficiently. In the world of software development, user feedback is extremely important. Most major software releases will be preceded by the release of a beta or test version that is used to garner feedback, identify bugs, and fix any issues that the developers have overlooked.

These same principles are just as applicable to other businesses, and every business should aim to foster a more positive relationship between their workers and the feedback that they receive. Even negative feedback provides your business with the opportunity to grow and learn. In fact, you should make customer feedback a central pillar of your decision-making, incorporating the feedback that you receive into your strategies for the future.

Use Your Available Time Wisely

There are only so many hours in the day and even the most efficient business will have to make some difficult decisions about how to allocate their available time and resources. In a business that is practicing the Agile method, your workforce should be able to be divided into teams, each of which is capable of operating as a single unit or in conjunction with others.

As a result, managing your time effectively should be easier for a business for which the Agile approach is engrained. When the individuals and groups that make up your business are working according to optimized workflows, they are able to manage their own time a lot more easily. Trying to micromanage workers across an entire business can quickly get exhausting, but with the agile method, your workers will have the grounding they need to manage their own time efficiently.

Scaling Up

The Agile approach to business was born in the world of software development but is now utilized throughout a range of industries and businesses. The principles of Agile management can be applied to entire organizations and can inform the strategy of your whole business, not just individual teams. However, the scaling-up process can be fraught, and if you approach it the wrong way, you will end up spreading more confusion.

If you want to know how to go about scaling agile the right way, then Kanbanize is a great source. Not only can they help you to disseminate the Agile method throughout your business, but they also have a plethora of awesome resources to help you do so. For example, the Kanban board is a very effective productivity tool and the Kanbanize platform provides users with access to said tool as well as a host of other useful features.

There is a good reason that the Agile management style has become so popular throughout a variety of industries. By adopting the principles of agile management, businesses can manage individual projects more efficiently, as well as their organization as a whole. While it may have initially been developed with software development in mind, the principles of better collaboration and more efficient workflows are things that any business can benefit from. By using cloud-based SaaS platforms like Kanbanize, you can take advantage of the tools they provide to easily integrate the agile management method into your general business philosophy.