What are the benefit of Agile?

Benefits to Customer

Customers find that the vendor is more responsive to development requests. High-value features are developed and delivered more quickly with short cycles, than with the longer cycles favored by classic “waterfall” processes.

Benefits to Vendors

Vendors reduce wastage by focusing development effort on high-value features, and reduce time-to-market relative to waterfall processes due to decreased overhead and increased efficiency. Improved customer satisfaction translates to better customer retention and more positive customer references.

Benefits to Development Teams

Team members enjoy development work, and like to see their work used and valued. Scrum benefits Team members by reducing non-productive work (e.g., writing specifications or other artifacts that no one uses), and giving them more time to do the work they enjoy. Team members also know their work is valued, because requirements are chosen to maximize value to customers.

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Benefits to Product Managers

Product Managers, who typically fill the Product Owner role, are responsible for making customers happy by ensuring that development work is aligned with customer needs. Scrum makes this alignment easier by providing frequent opportunities to re-prioritize work, to ensure maximum delivery of value.

Benefits to Project Managers

Project Managers (and others) who fill the ScrumMaster role find that planning and tracking are easier and more concrete, compared to waterfall processes. The focus on task-level tracking, the use of Burndown Charts to display daily progress, and the Daily Scrum meetings, all together give the Project Manager tremendous awareness about the state of the project at all times. This awareness is key to monitoring the project, and to catching and addressing issues quickly.

Benefits to PMOs and C-Level Executives

Scrum provides high visibility into the state of a development project, on a daily basis. External stakeholders, such as C-Level executives and personnel in the Project Management Office, can use this visibility to plan more effectively, and adjust their strategies based on more hard information and less speculation.