What is agile delivery
Agile delivery enables us to build products and services quickly, test what has been built regularly and improve (iterate) on the work based on regular feedback from users and what the data and evidence is telling us.
Instead of waiting for the product / service to be fully developed before it is released, an agile multidisciplinary team will deliver value quickly in consumable increments prioritising work to maximum effect. Requirements, plans and results are evaluated continuously.
In each short phase or sprint the delivery team will build a releasable increment and test it. The delivery team gives priority to areas of high impact or value to the service area to reduce the risk that it fails to deliver a usable product (or system). At the end of each iteration there is a working product of a quality that the service could deploy and that users can test. User feedback helps the delivery team to improve the functionality in the next and subsequent iterations, identify what more needs to be added to the system and the order of priority.
Why agile?
Our new Digital Strategy 2022 – 2025 sets out how we will take a consistent digital approach across the council to how we re-imagine, design, deliver and operate our services. This means putting users foremost and centre, delivering their needs quickly and iterating based on feedback, data and evidence.
Our services need to be able to be flexible and be able to respond to change. Building a product or service in an agile way enables the delivery team to respond to change and accommodate valid changes to requirements or in technology because the system is built up incrementally. Agile delivery methods allows us to deliver user needs quickly and iterate based on the feedback and data so that they can be changed quickly and improved regularly.
These are some of the characteristics of agile delivery:
- citizens and business are at the heart of delivery
- a service or business change is delivered quickly and continuously improved
- a full service is built from small independently usable releases;
- the team is responsible for making decisions rapidly
- the team continually redirects resources to maximise the value it delivers
You can listen to Sarah Slack, AD of Delivery Homes England talking about her experiences of agile at one of our Digital Community of Practice meetings.
The phases of agile
Agile delivery is split into different phases: Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live. Following these four steps of Agile helps to ensure whatever product or service you create will be useful to your end users.
Further reading
Gov.UK Service Manual: Agile Delivery
GDS team on What we’ve learnt about scaling agile
Agile as a mindset: Methods Analytics talking about their approach to agile for delivery of the Council’s data programme
Case study: The Public Guardian on agile development