Agile Investment Process

Agile Software Development Process is well known methodology, and people from IT background might have fair idea about it.

Agile methodology emphasis on many aspects which could be leveraged in our investment life cycle.

Below is my attempt to compare Agile Manifesto to our investment life cycle.

1. Individuals and Interactions. Team should be self motivated and capable to handle given task. They should have frequent interaction. This manifest can easily be implemented in our investment life cycle. People should be self motivated to implement investments for their goals. They should be capable to understand risk associated with investment and make investment with calculated risks, should they need help they shall induct Financial Advisor in their team. They are expected to have frequent discussion with their family and team to understand any changes in their goals and/or it’s timeframe.
2. Working Product. Working product is more useful then pages of product specifications. Similarly, having investment in good product is more useful then spending more than enough time to research for best product. We fall to Analysis Paralysis when we do not take action and keep on research for best product. Typically, it should not take more than 30 minutes to find a good quality product, if you can’t then either you need Financial Advisor or you are paralyzed by analysis.
3. Customer collaboration. Most of time requirements can not be collected at the beginning so team should have frequent interactions with customer to understand requirements, as they evolve. Similarly, we may not know all goals and it’s needed corpus. We should have frequent reviews of our goals as we progress in life. Our goals may change as we stumble upon the life changing event like marriage / child birth / nearing investment timeframe. So we should access our goals, it’s timeframe and it’s needed corpus frequently.
4. Responding to change. Agile methodology is focused to quick response to change and continuous development. Similarly, we should be quick to identify goal changes and adapt to it by implementing investment changes accordingly. At times the investment product may be doing below average compare to peers, so take calculated decisions and change investment product as we need.

So, we should be as Agile with out investment life as software developer are with their products.

Enjoy! And, be Agile.

Originally published at The Simple Personal Finance.