We're no strangers to an Agile process at Dynamo. It's been a part of our development workflow, in one form or another, for 2+ years. We've made a few attempts to incorporate our agile learnings upstream, to the design and strategy portions of a project, with mixed results. What we've learned along the way is that applying agile principles, studio-wide, in a design-centric company that works on multiple, concurrent projects is true challenge. While agile works great for technical aspects of our studio (it was derived from the software industry, after all), we're working hard to make it work for the entire studio by creating our own concept driven agile process.

This past weekend's work retreat was a key first step for us in answering the following question, how can we take everything we love about agile and incorporate those practices studio wide....

Because we are in constant "refinement mode" with regard to both our work and our processes, we often find ourselves pursuing the sweet spot between formality and simplicity. I realize that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but we have found that insisting on formality, no matter how innocuous it may seem, leads often to creating rules or guidelines which are anything but simple.

We conducted the latest version of our post-mortem meeting this morning, and I was really happy with how it played out, despite it not going exactly as planned...

One of our 2010 goals is to become more agile in our approach to design and development. We've been applying agile principles for roughly 2 years now (with great results), but their application has generally been limited to internal, Dynamo-specific projects like our new online store.

The Agile Manifesto reads as follows:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

These principles, when properly applied, have yielded powerful results for us. It's simply a more human way to work. What's allowed us to be agile with our internal projects? Read more to find out....