It's 9 a.m., and I feel a vibration on my wrist. My smartwatch is reminding me to stand up and move around for a minute. As I do so, I can't help but marvel. This device, which constantly senses my movement and vital signs, is also exchanging data with the cloud to provide analytics and suggest tweaks to my health goals. It could even communicate with my healthcare provider to devise a better fitness plan.
The watch is an amazing combination of hardware, software, firmware, cloud connectivity, datasharing and complex algorithms. By communicating with other devices, it's part of a vast emerging digital ecosystem: the internet of things (IoT). Project teams working in this space know that their product's potential value derives from how rapidly they adapt and respond to changes in the ecosystem. Agile principles are well-suited to product development projects: They help reduce the delivery life cycle time and promote the continuous and rapid flow of value.
Here are three reasons agile is essential in the IoT space.
1. Speed to Value
Many companies will find it hard to succeed in the IoT era “not for lack of technological expertise but because they'll fail to recognize the value of design in connected product development,” noted the authors of a Harvard Business Review article published last year.
Agile principles help teams to achieve this value through build, measure and learn cycles of continuous feedback. Teams must understand the user's experience—the functional aspects of how the device behaves. They observe, learn and iterate improved redesigned versions in tune with what people want and will actually use.
The IoT is “primarily about information and time. How fast can you make a better decision?” Uday Prabhu of Bosch said at a conference in Bangalore, India a few years ago. He's right: The success of an organization in today's hyperconnected world depends on its ability to generate insights from real-time data. Insights might indicate the need to pivot a product development project. Fast decision making is imperative to realize value. Teams empowered with agile approaches can bypass bureaucracy and make speedy decisions.
Teams empowered with agile approaches can bypass bureaucracy and make speedy decisions.
3. Constant Collaboration
IoT is about networks of devices working together. This means teams responsible for delivering an IoT product need to be cross-functional. Collaboration between hardware and software professionals and other players in the IoT ecosystem is a must-have. Agile approaches foster collaboration, helping people to share ideas and understand problems that emerge quickly in a fast-changing environment.
In the end, IoT devices are just single actors in a large drama. They would have little to say if standing alone. To offer real value, my smartwatch must collaborate and evolve with other actors. The same can be said for the project teams behind these amazing products. PM
| Priya Patra, PMP, is a regular contributor to projectmanagement.com and a program manager in the IT sector who lives in Mumbai, India. |