“The Agile Business” Infographic

The folks at Gist, who make a manage-the-firehose-of-your-communications web application (I’m taking the beta for a spin) have created an infographic titled The Agile Business which covers how agile software development methods are being adapted for running a business today. Here’s a shrunken-down version:

The original infographic is larger and easier to read; you can grab it from the Gist Blog.

At Shopify, the biz dev team have taken the underlying principles of agile development – the focus on individuals and interactions, stuff that works, customer collaboration and responding to change – and applied it to what their work, which involves drumming up new partnerships and business collaborations. Business development processes, which I’ve seen stretch on for months at my last job (a Fortune 50 company; I’ll leave it to you to ratiocinate which one, and it’s not that hard to figure out) take only weeks and are sometimes even pared down to days at Shopify. Harley and his people call it “Agile Bizdev”.

One minor quibble – note the graphic used to depict the gathering of software developers putting together the Agile Manifesto:

I’m familiar with the story of how and where the Manifesto got put together. I’ve even talked with The Pragmatic Programmers’ Andy Hunt, one of the guys who was there, about it. They most certainly weren’t sitting at a round boardroom table; they were at a ski lodge. In my interview with Andy, I asked if the get-together where they drafted the Manifesto was anything like Hot Tub Time Machine, and he gave a quick non-reply and changed the topic. So I choose to believe it was!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.