Change. Forward. Fast.
That’s this year’s theme at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. More and more of the groups we’ve worked with in recent months have brought new challenges to us, with stricter requirements for doing more with less in a faster-paced market than we’ve ever experienced before. We’ve increasingly seen that the older, established models of large and long project plans and “clear” long-term goals no longer fit the quickly changing publishing world.
A discussion at this week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference helped drive home the fact that a new age of working and thinking is upon us, and the concept of agile deployment is something that we all need to embrace to be successful in more than just development. In fact, discussions about agile methodologies are peppered throughout many of the discussions occurring at this gathering of leading-edge publishing minds, highlighted by presenter Kristen McLean of Bookigee.
So many of us have grown up in a publishing world where accuracy, fine-tuning, and perfection have been driven home as absolute necessities. Agile methodologies challenge those expectations in a way that helps publishers to embrace a new way of working that adapts to today’s market and rapidly changing demands.
Here are several concepts that support the agile model:
1) Think in terms of smaller, more attainable goals. If the goal is large, the world will have shifted under your feet before you’re done.
2) Learn as you go. Don’t plan to know it all when you start—it’s no longer realistic. You’ll get off the dime and get productive more quickly.
3) Organize small, collaborative, enabled teams that all have skin in the game and respond to the current state regularly.
4) Test new approaches or markets quickly, so you can learn and respond more quickly.
5) Set the expectation across your teams, management and customers that you will be creating, learning, testing, adjusting, and responding. They’ll see results more quickly, and so will you.
The overall lesson: Think small, act quickly, and adjust frequently. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Posted by: Margot Knorr Mancini
