Agility is about delivering an order of magnitude (generally ten fold or better) improvement in performance over traditional approaches. This may sound like a pretty tricky objective but actually it is not as hard as it sounds.

Most of us have at least some experience of the Pareto principle, more commonly known as the 80:20 rule. Experience of a task we performed where one small thing we did was the crucial element which made everything work. The trick to agility is simply to search out these big wins as an ongoing way of working. Find the smallest effort you can invest for the biggest return and do this task first.

All very easy to say, but how do you identify what to do first? The simple answer is "use your experience and intuition" and test whether you were right. This test bit is really important and is known as test-first (or test-driven) in agile terminology. The better you get at test-first the better you will find your intuition becomes.

So why is this site called agile501?

501 stands for 50:1 and is just a consequence of applying the 80:20 rule to itself a couple of times (actually the real numbers are 0.8:51.2), we have christened this pareto³. True agility is about keeping you and your team as far to the left of the pareto³ curve as you can at all times. Not all tasks lend themselves to 50 fold performance improvements .... but with a little thought more than you might expect do!