Use This 1 Method to Do More Work in Less Time

Agile approaches to completing work have been known to help people to do more than twice the work in half the time. What could that kind of productivity increase do for your business?

Let"s compare what is different in using an agile approach from traditional project management. A traditional project management approach focuses on gathering all requirements up front, making sure everything is planned out and designed thoroughly and then using a phased approach to develop, test, and launch a product to market.

Think about launching a website for example. The challenge with this traditional approach is that it may take a long time to get all of the information together for every single page on the site before going live. However, you don"t really need every page fully completed in order to launch. If you wait several months for a website to be developed, you are missing out on having that online presence and could be missing a lot of business by people not being able to find you and your services.

An Agile approach to launching a website would be to identify a smaller chunk of work that could be completed as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This could be the home page with a nice photo, some information on your business hours, an overview of what you do and maybe a contact phone number. You could probably launch that home page within a week. Then you can build upon that and add a full services page the following week. Then add another page the week after.

The benefit to breaking the work down into smaller pieces is that you can release something to market that is fully developed and tested while ensuring that you have quality built in.

You don"t need to know everything to get started. In fact, often times, things may change based on the feedback that you get from your first release. This can even lead to a better end product by taking the time to incorporate real customer feedback.

Break Things Down Smaller

When you try to launch a large project, it can be challenging. You may run into roadblocks or delays that you hadn"t anticipated. This applies to any initiative that feels big and overwhelming. You may even feel stuck at the beginning and not know where to begin.

When you take a larger project and break it down into smaller pieces, such as just looking at what it would take to complete the home page for a website, suddenly, it can seem more manageable. You may not feel as overwhelmed. You can see progress in completing each page. You could also outsource or delegate portions that you may not need to be the one to work on.

Iterate Through Feedback

The longer you wait and try to figure everything out yourself or complete a whole project in one large swoop, you are putting time, money, and energy into creating a product that you haven"t validated. You can guess at what features your customers may want, but it would be better to get real feedback from real customers.

If you create a minimal increment, you can show that to people and get feedback on what they like, what they may not like, and you can incorporate those changes to improve the quality of your product or service. The whole concept behind working in iterations is that you can better manage a smaller scope of work than trying to tackle a huge project all at once and complete an increment that you can get feedback on.

Focus on Prioritization

Think about the program Microsoft Word. How many of those features do you use on a regular basis? Many people will say they use maybe between 5 to 10 percent and at the highest, I"ve heard around 20 percent. That means that 80 to 90 percent of the features and program capabilities are rarely or never used. Imagine how long it took to create all of these other robust features that weren"t as important as the ones that are used most often (bold, underline, spellcheck, save file, save to pdf, etc.)

When you look at what you should focus your efforts on, look for your 80/20. What can you spend 20 percent of your effort on that will yield 80 percent of the results? Look for what is most valuable rather than trying to do everything. Look for what will bring the greatest return and start there.

When you try to build the perfect product or launch the perfect program, there are often challenges that can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Try focusing on a Minimum Viable Product instead. Find a minimal increment that you can release and get feedback on, then build on it from there. That"s Agile.