Agile working

GDS and GOV.UK set the standard for working in government and agile is now the main way of working when building services. But what is agile?

What is agile?

Agile is a flexible and adaptable methodology that involves breaking the project down into manageable phases, focusing on continuous improvement. It is an iterative approach to delivering a service throughout its life cycle. Agile life cycles are composed of several iterations, or incremental steps, towards achieving the outcome.

The 5 stages of the product life cycle

Discovery

Discovery is the process of researching your users and their needs, validating a problem based on your research and beginning to think about how your product or service can solve it.

Alpha

In alpha, we create and test different prototypes and ideas with users. We should not be afraid to fail or to discard ideas that aren’t working. Alpha is about experimenting to be sure we’ve arrived at the right solution.

Beta

In beta, we take the best ideas and insights from the alpha stage and build the product or service for real, preparing to launch it to real users. This occurs in “private beta” to a limited audience first and then in “public beta” after you are confident you can run the service at scale. It is important to analyse user feedback and data to see how your product is working.

Live

During live, we support the service in a sustainable way while still iterating and making improvements where necessary. We continue to work closely with users to ensure the product or service is fulfilling a real user need and achieving its outcome.

Retirement

We retire a product or service if it is obsolete or no longer addresses a user need. We share experience and user insights with teams working on replacement services to help users transition to that replacement with minimal disruption.

Agile working

Agile focuses on people rather than processes, incorporating user feedback into each iteration, with each life cycle stage containing multiple iterations.

A team using an agile method such as Scrum or Kanban will work in short, focused periods called sprints. During sprints, the team will research, plan, build and test their product all at the same time.

At the end of each sprint, the team comes together for two meetings, one called a ‘sprint review’ and the other a ‘sprint retrospective’. In a sprint review, the team discusses the work completed and goals achieved during the sprint and plan work for the next sprint; in the retrospective, the team reflects on their working practices and discusses how they might improve or change anything that they are currently doing.

An agile approach allows the team to respond quickly to changing priorities. For example, a team needs to be able to adapt to a change in government policy to avoid wasting time and resources on a product or service that is no longer fit for purpose.

If you would like to know more, you can read about agile in government here.

We will learn more in the next step about why government adopted agile working practices.

Task

Have you worked in a team that uses agile working practices? Share your experiences with other learners in the comments below.