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Many agile projects that have begun with good intentions develop rigidity and slowly lose the core principle of Agile – being flexible. As managers prefer established processes and rarely waver from the defined architecture, the application slowly develops inflexibility as the applications becomes more complex, increase in size, demands on performance, unexpected maintenance changes, production changes, team changes, and above all changes in the core technology stack either due to redundancy or version changes and upgrades. Adding to the woes is the fear of change, as teams are worried that if they make any changes, they are unsure of impact on the complete application or on performance.  It is not uncommon, if the enterprise architect assigned to the project during the early phases of the project is given additional responsibilities or reassigned, leading to lesser and lesser time spent with the current project. Leveraging Integrated Agile Delivery Model, we ensure that all projects will maintain the core principles of Agile Methodology.  Architects are embedded in the development team. We ensure that the agile architects are embedded in the teams to ensure that they are completely available to the team, and perform prototyping, and architect review frequently. The architects are part of the retrospectives and ensure that the feedback received is addressed and corrective steps taken. Flexibility on architecting the solution. The architects constantly review the architecture to ensure that the application maintains flexibility, and performance. As the complexity of the application keeps growing with time, they continuously strive to ensure that flexibility and performance are maintained or improved. Ability to adapt to new technology stacks. The architects ensure that they keep track of new technology changes and work to ensure that every piece of the application architecture can be replaced or updated to support constantly changing business needs by taking advantage of the new technology tools and offerings in the market. In the process, they ensure that the technology debt is always low. Breaking down complexity. The architects along with the product owners, scrum masters strive to ensure that they break down complexity of any story. They ensure that the user stories are simple and easy for the development team to code, test and implement. Our architects, leveraging the Integrated Agile Delivery Methodology, ensure that the architecture is flexible and manage complexity and performance as the applications keep growing. The team’s core focus is on ensuring a sustainable software architecture that ensures that new technology stacks, tools and products, can be incorporated into the existing application.

As agile delivery models scaled for enterprise applications, existing tools, processes, and methodologies were force-fit to meet the requirements. Agile delivery became more of coding to production models with a focus on bugs. In the process incremental value delivered has received a narrow definition. In order to ensure that we continuously deliver on the agile manifesto, our integrated agile delivery model ensures the teams continuously strive to deliver value. Every sprint should deliver value independently of each other. The teams are encouraged to keep progress transparent, make decision making efficient, continuously review for improvements, and encouraged to share best practices.  We take a team-centric approach with face-to-face communication to encourage cross-functional collaboration. The teams continuously review the success factors,  activities that went well, improvements, and identify the gaps or areas of improvements within the team and the processes. The teams are encouraged to willingly call out and fix flaws and strive for continuous improvement. Every agile team strives to ensure that requirements for every sprint are granular, well refined and prioritized, defined risks, and an understanding of the unknowns and their impact on the sprint. We believe in an engaged, problem solving, and critical thinking team that provides a culture for innovation and value being continuously delivered to the customer. The teams continuously iterate by improving the knowledge learned from previous sprints with an ultimate goal for customers to reach the objectives of the product. In the Integrated agile delivery model, we focus on the teams and encourage an open working environment that is based on continuous learning, mutual respect,  a hunger to continuously improve, and above all a sense of achievement.

One of key agile principles is customer satisfaction. In practice, it is quite common for agile teams to be focused on their sprint that their complete attention is on delivering the code without any bugs. This leads to an ever-widening gap between the application development team and customers or end-users with every sprint.  At Adroitent, we strive to continuously build an environment that nurtures customer empathy. To ensure that we achieve the focus on customer, we encourage Continuous feedback, not just at the end of the sprint but on a regular basis. The feedback from users are recorded and agile coaches ensure that the best practices are captured, and gaps identified, and corrective measures are taken. Being responsive to our customers. We believe in being responsive not just in acknowledging a message, but ensuring that the customers needs are acknowledged, needs are analyzed, and appropriate solutions are suggested for confirmation and feedback. Our focus on customer empathy permeates across the organization, beginning with recruiting the people with the right orientation. We encourage the teams to outline the customer use cases and storyboard each interaction. These in turn help us in feedback to all strategic groups to ensure that we get the right person for the right customer. All the customer insights are captured, and agile coaches ensure that these experiences are shared and provide insights on the impact of these customer insights to customer satisfaction and empathy. All employees are encouraged to directly communicate with the customer team either during daily standup calls or through usage of collaborative tools like email etc. These direct communication channels encourage the team to develop a sense of ownership. Customer Centricity is a critical focus area in integrated agile delivery.  The tenets of staying adaptable, being responsive, always listening, encouraging continuous feedback ensures that Adroitent delivers to the customer’s promise.