Agile methodology reborn as COVID, AI transform enterprises

Pandemic spurs digital business transformation

A digital transformation was necessary for principles originally designed for software development to be applied to the rest of the business. This process started slowly, often hindered by technical debt, within organizations before 2020. Old mindsets and cultural norms remained resistant, IT professionals recalled.

When Danny Zuccaro, senior manager of developer experience at TD Bank Group, was first invited to collaborate in 2020 with his colleague Dave Rajavickneswaran, now a managing engineer on the same developer experience team, his reaction "wasn't my proudest moment," Zuccaro said during a breakout session presentation at Atlassian Team '25.

"Dave sent me an email. I got that email, opened it, read it, deleted it, and then I decided I had to double down my efforts and make sure I thwarted Dave's evil plan," Zuccaro said. "I got ahead of it and got my version out before he got his version out ... We were very siloed, very competitive."

But by the time Zuccaro and Rajavickneswaran found themselves on the same team in 2023, the company's culture had changed substantially to be more in line with the Agile principle that "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams."

From 2023 on, Zuccaro and Rajavickneswaran took an iterative approach to improving the developer experience at the company and to training both developers and business stakeholders, reflecting the Agile principle by which, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly."

This meant shifting from a "one size fits all" approach to tailoring training sessions and materials to specific personae for 40,000 of the company's employees. Initially, this required breaking down lengthy training courses into a series of daylong mini-conferences, but these also proved too disruptive and didn't hold attendees' attention effectively, the presenters said.

Ultimately, Zuccaro and Rajavickneswaran arrived at a series of mini-lessons, each with three key takeaways. Also, they added hands-on learning exercises so that, "We're not just going to show you those and then tell you to go back to your desk and figure out how to implement them," Rajavickneswaran said during the presentation.

There was a huge talent rush during [the pandemic] that really brought in a lot of new faces and a new culture throughout [the company].

In an interview following his session, Rajavickneswaran attributed the roots of this cultural shift in part to personnel shakeups the company experienced during COVID-19.

"There was a huge talent rush during that period that brought in a lot of new faces and a new culture throughout [the company]," Rajavickneswaran said. "And so we were able to get some fresh perspective as well."

Technology was also forcibly disrupted, as pandemic restrictions on brick-and-mortar businesses made e-commerce and mobile apps a necessity for both business and personal survival.

"Before the pandemic, you saw things take a lot longer to gradually get introduced, and for people to get comfortable with them. But eventually, the pandemic said, 'The only connection that you have is this laptop and a phone,' and it started to change things across generations, too," said Brian Eble, principal of the technology team at business management consulting firm EY, during an interview at ServiceNow Knowledge in May. "We were all in the same boat there. You couldn't be a late adopter or anything like that -- if you wanted your groceries, especially in certain countries, you had to go online to do it."

While another Agile principle holds that, "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation," the pandemic's widespread shift to video conferencing also gave the TD Bank Group's developer experience team fresh tools to bring together a global workforce through asynchronous communication.

"We would host these sessions hybrid -- it's the way of the world now, but also for us, we've got folks in Singapore, in Mount Laurel and Fort Lauderdale, and we want to make sure that we would still be able to bring these communities together," Rajavickneswaran said. "Part of that was … leveraging our video conferencing systems but also having recordings available online that folks could watch on their own time."

The speed of the transition to digital delivery in 2020 pushed businesses into more of an Agile mindset, which prioritizes embracing change, said Claire Drumond, head of marketing for Jira at Atlassian during the April conference.

"We just simply don't have the time that we used to. If you aren't the fastest one to market, your competitor will be," Drumond said. "We need to work much more closely together than when we [had] the luxury before of saying, 'Well, this is my craft, and I'll sit here, and this is your craft, and you sit there, and we'll come together every month for a meeting.' Now that's happening every minute."

With speed at the top of the priority list, and the disruption of the pandemic shaking up tech usage and cultural mindsets, workers had new opportunities to rethink their workflows and apply automation, said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst and founder of independent research firm Valoir.

"A lot of people said, 'If I'm not actually sitting at a desk in the office with somebody to watch me, how much of this stuff can I figure out how to automate to get off my plate?'" Wettemann said during an interview at ServiceNow Knowledge in May. "People started thinking more about process and automating their workday in a way that we hadn't seen before, because the technology had been around for a while, but so had the manager."

Thus, businesses had begun adhering to the Agile principle that, "Simplicity -- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done -- is essential."

Enter GenAI, and alignment with autonomy

But there was still something missing amid the burgeoning automation -- organizational knowledge had not digitally transformed at the same pace as business processes. Manual efforts and the dreaded top-down approach to standardization were still required to apply Agile methodology across large organizations, which made many workers balk.

"People are really allergic to the word standardization," said Bella Pablo, senior director of product operations at Zillow, during a Team '25 panel session in April. "They hear the word standardization, and you know, the four-letter S word comes to mind -- it's pretty slow."

However, as businesses went digital, a parallel effort turned growing volumes of business data into actionable information to guide strategy, first under the moniker big data, which gave rise to machine learning and eventually evolved to incorporate generative AI (GenAI).

Now, these previous efforts at data gathering, cleansing and data-driven workflow automation have become avenues to alignment and collaboration among distributed teams without strict standardization.

"We use Jira as a way to thread the needle on balancing autonomy with standardization … where we can roll up data at a coordinated layer that will help us look across the organization, but in the meantime, it still allows the teams to function [independently] day to day," Pablo said.

IT automation platforms also form the substrate for GenAI-driven automation, which further improves organizational agility, said Max Malloy, vice president of digital experience and strategy at medical liability insurance company ProAssurance, in an interview at ServiceNow Knowledge.

"It feels like all the groundwork that we did -- cleaning up processes, trying to better structure data, consolidating systems -- is paying off because then that allows you to start personalizing [services]," Malloy said. "But you're not having to ask a person to go figure out how each user that comes in will be treated differently. [AI] bots will do that in a millisecond."

GenAI's natural language interface also opens further opportunities for business and technical teams to share information, said EY's Eble.

"You can do things in a very different way now," Eble said. "It really is more of a direct interaction versus a [system where] if you don't get the input exactly right, it doesn't work. You can go back and forth with it, say, 'Hey, make that more of an executive-level summary targeting someone who's got a background in marketing,' and it changes the tone, but I don't have to rewrite the whole thing."

Replacing the manual efforts at standardization that were previously required to scale Agile with highly automated, personalized self-service systems will help more organizations clear the last major hurdle to Agile transformation, predicted Tiffany To, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise and platform at Atlassian.

"Companies like banks, they've been doing that kind of stuff for a long time, but they did it with [a human workforce], and very rigid processes like SAFe," To said in an interview during Atlassian Team '25. "Now, everyone needs to do some level of that, but they're not going to have tons of coaches. It's almost like Agile 2.0 … it's Agile and digital transformation accelerated, because now the effort to get the value from the data and then deliver those insights to people is so fast that they can actually use them, whereas before … it wasn't useful by the time you got the insight."

The word Agile might remain anathema to trendsetters in tech, but there's no separating Agile methodology from the current state of digital business, said Charles Betz, an analyst at Forrester Research, during an interview at the Atlassian conference.

"This has been a complex and fraught effort, and there's a lot of cynicism, distrust and negativity around the operationalization of Agile," Betz said. "There's a whole bunch of stuff that's very quickly sinking below the floorboards and into the IT plumbing, but it represents a huge innovation in how we achieve collective economic goals as humans."

Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.