Design Thinking and Agile Improve Application Outcomes

While there are benefits from adopting an agile strategy, your organization can take success to the next level by also utilizing design thinking to identify problems.

According to IDC, 30-to-35% of IT projects fail. Other research puts the figure upwards of 50%. Regardless of the exact numbers, the consistent reason cited for the failure of software development projects to deliver intended outcomes is misalignment of user and business needs.

Many IT leaders believe that adopting agile methodologies like Scrum will address this problem. After all, applied correctly, agile helps development teams iterate towards optimal outcomes by developing solutions incrementally, with a focus on greater communication and collaboration. Research from the Standish Group shows that, particularly for medium and large projects, the failure rate for agile projects is half that of waterfall projects.  

Despite these merits, agile alone is no guarantee that teams will consistently deliver truly engaging, impactful solutions. While agile can provide a highly effective way of solving problems, it doesn’t guarantee that you’re solving the right problems.

Use design thinking to find the right problems to solve

A growing number of enterprises have begun leveraging agile development in conjunction with design thinking. Whereas agile is an approach for problem solving, design thinking is an approach for problem finding. It calls for a high degree of empathy and understanding of end users, and an iterative process for developing new ideas, challenging assumptions, and redefining problems.

There are five stages of design thinking:

Use agile to iteratively build solutions that solve problems

Once you’ve identified the true nature of the problem to be solved, your team can leverage agile to incrementally build out the solution, taking it from MVP to pilot and on to large-scale production. Agile becomes the mechanism to enhance the solution over time, making it a “living product” that evolves.

Like design thinking, a key tenet of effective agile is seeking frequent input from end users to iterate to the right outcomes. Early on, this includes establishing the project business goals, writing user stories, and creating backlogs. Throughout the development process, this input should manifest itself in other ways.