Progressive Elaboration is the key to sustained growth | Agile Story 23
Everyone aims to progress in life, but the key factor to remember is how and with what pace the progress should evolve.
If we analyse the success stories of a sizable sample of individuals of different walks of life, there appears 2 viable ways to achieve sustainable progress in one’s personal and/or professional life. The triggers for each of these two approaches are:
1) Knowing what to do, but not having complete clarity about how to do & why to do, thereby remaining in a state of confusion or doing the things in such a haphazard manner thereby landing in more trouble than not doing anything at all.
2) Knowing what to do and having sufficient knowledge as tohow and why to do but proceeding with a resolve to reach the goal progressively but within a definite timeframe by — (I) evolving a proper viable plan and attainable timelines (ii) consolidating the needed resources in terms of financial, human and time (iii) periodical monitoring of progress of growth and to take expedious corrective action/s with timeliness, wherever needed.
To illustrate, let’s take the case of Investment Planning:
There are 2 different types of individuals who deal with the investments.
In the first category, people want to invest money to earn more profits with no loss of time, but don’t know how to proceed ahead due to lack of complete knowledge on the subject. In such a state of confusion, they hire some external guy to manage their investment portfolio on their behalf. But in this scenario, often, there exists an avoidable gap and incongruence between the expectations of the investor and the actions of his agent in terms of the objectives of investment, expected amount of returns and growth as also its periodicity etc. Such a situation may land the investor either in a state of success or in disaster thereby creating an uncertainty even at times losing all the invested money what to talk of returns. This happens because, the focus of the investor is only on somehow attaining quick bucks regardless of any plan or knowledge.
As Bad investments leads to disaster, similarly In Agile, moving ahead with the lack of understanding the requirements and jumping to accomplish the work will lead to delays and again rework will cause lot of debt.
As a partial departure to the above, in the second category, the investor adapts a planned approach to his investment project. As a part of this approach, he initially tries to acquire complete knowledge on investment management in terms of its strategies, statutory rules, market moves etc and thereafter draw a proper and viable plan as to how to go about to gain high returns. He starts his investment with an initial small sum and proceed as per his evolved plan. He periodically evaluates the efficacy of his investment in terms of its returns and capital growth etc, learns from the mistakes and pitfalls and takes timely corrective actions and progressively enhance the sum of investment in tandem with the size returns. As he moves ahead with well-thought plan and focus, he gets the grip and masters the art of the game, slowly and steadily succeeds in earning relatively high returns and attains a stable growth path. In this approach, the focus is sustained growth but not on making quick bucks with no plan of action.
Given the above reality, in Agile too, to reach the product/goal, requirements can gradually take a shape, as we understand more about the customer needs and keep adding more inputs in a planned approach which in turn fits perfectly with the concept of incremental growth. This defines the process of having successive iterations to constantly keep planning and deliver the goals and objectives. Alongside, we must keep constant track on the new knowledge and contemporary approaches that are continually evolved on the subject in the business world & the enormous information that keeps flowing as we learn more.
Moral of the story: In our personal as well as professional lives, one should aim and plan to progressively move ahead to achieve sustained growth so that such sustained growth will only fetch value for existence which everyone generally looks for in their life. Forget not, there is no shortcut for success except the hard and smart work. This reminds us of the long-established theme — ‘Slow and steady wins the race’. But in this changed world-order where time is the essence, in the fitness of things, this theme can be re-evolved as — ‘Plan and Progressivity are the cornerstones for sustained growth’.
This is the continuation of sharing our Agile Stories/Thoughts Series. I strongly recommend referring to the link below for previous insightful blogs from our #teamagile in IBM.
Content of Agile Stories/Blogs
#agilemindset #agile #agileteams #beagile #mindsetiskey #progressiveelaboration #letscreate2succeed #teamHCM #manage2succeed #ibmconsulting #teamagile
DISCLAIMER — The views expressed in the article are my own and don’t reflect company’s opinion. Every organization will have different needs depending on culture, preferences, size, etc. They should not be considered as an advice or suggestion in any way.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.