When most people hear “agile,” they picture a software team huddled around a whiteboard covered in sticky notes. Standups. Sprint boards. Burndown charts. It’s a reasonable association for something formalized in 2001 by 17 software developers who signed the Agile Manifesto.
But some of the ideas behind agile are much older than that. The Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle was developed by physicist Walter Shewhart at Bell Labs in the 1930s. His protégé, W. Edwards Deming, brought those techniques to Japan after World War II, where Toyota used them to build what became the Toyota Production System.
We also think of this as the origin of Lean manufacturing, Just-in-Time production, and Kaizen (continuous improvement). Concepts like iterative work and short feedback loops gave manufacturers a competitive advantage before anyone uttered the phrase “agile software development.”
Then you have modern agile business practices: the result of 25+ years of research into how humans do their best work together. It goes beyond software. It even goes beyond project management. It’s a set of principles about how teams plan, deliver, and adapt. If your team does those three things, agile can help.
A quick look around the enterprise landscape supports this. We see all kinds of non-IT teams achieve measurable improvements when they adopt agile principles:
· R&D teams
· HR teams
· Operations teams
· Marketing teams
· Financial services teams
You’d have a way harder time finding a team or department that can’t benefit from some version (to be clear: not dogmatic rule following) of agile practices. This article breaks down what agile looks like outside of software, where it’s working today, how to get started, and what mistakes to avoid.
What we've learned is that these principles and practices are less about how great software gets written. It's all about how human beings in complex systems work well together, which is why agile works for non-tech teams.
Business agility isn’t about a specific process. It’s not Scrum. It’s not Kanban. Those are frameworks that implement agile principles. Agile itself is a mindset built on four core values.
The Agile Manifesto states those values in terms of software development, but they translate directly to any team doing complex, collaborative work:
• People and interactions over rigid processes. A marketing team that talks through campaign priorities face-to-face will outperform one that relies on a 40-page creative brief passed through three approval layers.
• Working deliverables over exhaustive documentation. A finance team that delivers a usable quarterly forecast in two weeks beats one that spends three months perfecting a document no one reads.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. An HR team that runs onboarding in iterative sprints based on new-hire feedback will create a better experience than one following a static playbook.
• Responding to change over following a plan. An operations team that can shift priorities mid-quarter based on real data will outperform one locked into a plan written six months ago.
These values apply wherever teams face uncertainty, shifting requirements, or the need for cross-functional coordination. Agile methodologies are best suited for projects where the end state is not fully known at the outset. In other words, it helps navigate Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA).
The critical distinction is between “doing agile” and “being agile.” Doing agile means adopting ceremonies: standups, retrospectives, sprint planning. Being agile means internalizing the mindset: short feedback loops, incremental delivery, and a willingness to change direction based on what you learn.
The first is a process change. The second is a culture change. That’s why cultural resistance is the single biggest barrier to agile transformation.
Widespread adoption of agile for non-tech teams is no longer experimental. Teams across marketing, HR, finance, and operations are applying these principles in production. Here’s what that might look like depending on your department.
Marketing is among the most natural fits for agile outside of software. Campaigns require iterative testing, rapid response to market conditions, and constant reprioritization. ScrumAlliance reports that 42% of marketers use at least some version of agile marketing methodologies.
I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently working with an internal marketing team at a Fortune 500 consumer goods company. In practice, this means things like breaking campaigns into two-week sprints. A content team might plan, draft, publish, and measure a set of blog posts within a single sprint cycle, then adjust the next sprint’s topics based on performance data. Kanban boards might track work-in-progress across channels. Daily standups can help keep the team aligned without the overhead of long weekly meetings.
According to SHRM, HR departments at brands like Pfizer, Gap, Cigna, and P&G all use agile for talent management. Processes like recruitment, onboarding, and performance managemen benefit from shorter cycles and faster feedback.
Consider onboarding. A traditional approach designs the entire program upfront and delivers it the same way to every new hire. An agile approach runs onboarding in stages, collects feedback from each cohort, and iterates. The result is a program that actually reflects what new hires need, not what someone assumed they’d need twelve months ago.
The financial services sector is among the fastest-growing adopters. They seem to value business agility more than most other industries, and we see why. There’s a case study below to show how a financial services firm made planning more productive (and less painful).
The application makes a ton of sense for budgeting and strategic planning. Traditional annual budgets lock organizations into assumptions made months earlier. Agile budgeting replaces that with iterative investment decisions: fund a value stream for a quarter, measure results, and adjust. It’s the same principle as venture capital funding in stages rather than writing one large check upfront.
Continued Reading: For a deeper look at how this works, see Sketch’s breakdown of agile budgeting vs. traditional budgeting.
Business operations teams are also adopting agile at scale. At the executive level, tools like OKRs (objectives and key results), value stream mapping, and iterative roadmapping are replacing rigid annual planning cycles.
The shift is away from building a detailed plan once a year and toward shorter planning horizons with regular check-ins. This gives leadership real-time visibility into what’s working, where resources are constrained, and where to invest next. This is the antidote to soul-crushing annual planning meetings.
You don’t need to overhaul your entire organization to start. The best approach is to pick one team, one framework, and one problem. Here are the options that work best when you're trying to implement agile for non-software teams.
Kanban is a visual workflow management system. You create columns representing stages of work (e.g., To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done), and cards representing individual tasks. Work moves left to right. The key rule is limiting work-in-progress: your team can only have a set number of tasks in any one stage at a time.
This is simple to set up and doesn’t require new roles or ceremonies. It’s a viable starting point for teams that want to improve visibility without a steep learning curve.
Scrum organizes work into time-boxed iterations called sprints, typically two to four weeks long. Each sprint starts with planning (what will we deliver?), includes daily check-ins, and ends with a review (did we deliver it?) and a retrospective (how can we improve?).
For non-software teams, the key is adapting the sprint length and ceremonies to your context. We absolutely do not promote a copy-paste application of software team rituals. A legal team reviewing contracts doesn’t need daily standups. On the other hand, a two-week sprint with a planning session and a retrospective might work wonders.
Most non-software teams don’t adopt a single framework wholesale. We’ve seen different numbers for the percentage of organizations using a hybrid agile approach, but our estimate is close to 100%. At least that’s what we’d advise for 100% of our clients.
It’s beyond ok to pull methodologies from Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc. to fit your specific needs. This is normal and healthy. The goal is to produce better outcomes, not achieve fanatical framework purity.
If you’re not sure where to begin, start with retrospectives. Once every two weeks, gather your team for 30 minutes and answer three questions: What went well? What didn’t? What will we change? This is the simplest agile practice, and it builds the habit of continuous improvement without requiring a framework rollout. Over time, you’ll naturally identify which additional practices (sprint planning, Kanban boards, standups) add value for your team.
Continued Reading: For more on the foundational mindset shifts that support agile adoption, see Sketch’s guide to building an agile culture from the inside out.
Agile is not a guaranteed success. Plenty of non-software teams try it and give up. Here are the most common reasons why, along with how to avoid them.
Daily standups make sense for a development team shipping code every day. They don’t make sense for a finance team running monthly close cycles. Adapt the cadence and format to your team’s actual workflow. The principle (regular communication and alignment) matters. The specific ritual doesn’t.
You can adopt every ceremony in the book and still fail if the underlying culture doesn’t shift. The 17th State of Agile Report found that 47% (and growing) of organizations cite cultural resistance as the biggest barrier to transformation. Process changes are necessary, but they’re not sufficient.
Only 32% of business leaders are actively involved in agile transformations, according to the same report. When leadership treats agile as something the teams do rather than something the organization adopts, transformation stalls. We like to start with the leadership during an agile transformation consulting engagement.
Leaders need to model the behaviors they’re asking of their teams: shorter planning cycles, willingness to change direction, and trust in their people to make decisions. Sketch has written extensively about what leadership must do during an agile transformation and how to get management buy-in when the middle layer is resistant.
Start with one team. Prove the approach works. Then expand. Trying to roll out agile across an entire department at once creates confusion and resistance. It's why we recommend against bulk agile transformation consulting. Pilot programs build evidence and champions that make broader adoption easier.
I’d say most teams without clearly defined metrics will fail in their agile transformations, but there’s really no way to know. That’s the problem. If you can’t measure improvement, you can’t prove value, and you can’t sustain momentum. Define what success looks like before you start: cycle time, throughput, customer satisfaction, employee engagement. Pick two or three, find an objective measurement, and track them consistently.
Related Reading: If your transformation is already underway and losing steam, Sketch’s guide on what to do when your agile transformation gets stuck offers a practical diagnostic framework.
Theory is useful, but real-world results are better. The ability to put theory into practice is exactly what separates the best agile consultants from the rest. Here’s what agile looks like when it’s applied to executive-level strategic planning at a financial services firm.
The company’s leadership team was stuck in an annual planning cycle that wasn’t working. Strategic plans were built once a year, reviewed quarterly, and outdated within weeks. Resource allocation was reactive. Hiring decisions lagged months behind actual need. The CEO and executive team knew something had to change, but they couldn’t get started because it was hard to pinpoint exactly where things were going awry.
Sketch embedded a handsome, charming, experienced agile consultant with the entire executive team to introduce iterative planning cycles. Instead of a single annual strategic plan, the firm moved to quarterly planning with biweekly check-ins. Each cycle included a clear set of priorities, defined capacity, and explicit accountability for outcomes.
The shift wasn’t about adding new meetings. It was about making existing planning more responsive. Biweekly check-ins replaced lengthy quarterly reviews. Real-time data replaced assumptions. And the executive team gained visibility into resource constraints that had been invisible under the old model.
The CEO summarized the impact within two weeks: “Learning to work like this is hyper-exposing our resource constraints, which is good because no one knew where to hire before. Now it’s super obvious.”
That last sentence captures the core value of agile planning at the executive level. Traditional planning obscures bottlenecks. It assumes that once a plan is set, execution will follow. Agile planning surfaces reality: where teams are overloaded, where investment is needed, and where the plan itself needs to change.
This firm didn’t succeed by adopting formal sprints or Kanban boards. They started meeting their goals more reliably because of short feedback loops applied to strategic decision-making. That was enough to transform how they allocate resources and make hiring decisions.
If you need to justify agile adoption to your leadership team or board, there’s a ton of data on your side. Your average agile consultant can give you all kinds of stats about alignment, delivery speed, and employee satisfaction, but some executives get more excited about different metrics…
For example, a Harvard Business Review study specifically looked into non-IT, non-development organizations. Companies that prioritize agile methodologies throughout the entire enterprise report 60% higher revenue and profit growth.
Sketch doesn’t push a one-size-fits-all framework. We’ve seen too many organizations fail because someone handed them a Scrum playbook and walked away.
Instead, we start with an assessment. Our team measures where your organization stands across 33 distinct capabilities that correlate with high-performing teams. That assessment identifies where the real opportunities for improvement are, so we’re not guessing.
From there, we tailor an engagement to your context. That might mean an embedded coaching engagement where our consultants work alongside your team for 30 days. It might mean a leadership kickstart to align your executive team on strategy and priorities. Or it might mean ongoing, continuous growth support as your teams build new habits over time.
Sketch is a 100% US-based team based in St. Louis, Missouri. No offshore handoffs. No change orders. We’ve been trusted by Fortune 500 companies, federal government entities, and SMBs for a decade because we deliver working results on time, every time.
If you’ve been wondering whether agile is right for your team, or if you’ve tried it before and it didn’t stick, Sketch’s consulting services can help you find the right approach. Just get in touch and say an experienced agile consultant with a delightful personality promised you a free consultation up to half a day long.
Related Reading: If speed is your concern, we’ve written about when agile actually makes your team faster (and what to do if it hasn’t yet).
Agile is not a methodology that belongs to software developers. It’s a set of principles for how humans collaborate under uncertainty. If your team plans work, delivers in stages, and needs to respond to change, you’re already doing some version of agile. The question is whether you’re doing it well.
Start with one team. Pick one framework or practice. Define what success looks like. Run a pilot for 90 days and measure the results. Then decide whether to expand.
The principles are universal. The application is specific to your context. That’s where we come in.
Ready to explore how agile principles can improve your team’s delivery? Schedule a call with Sketch to get started.