In today's fast-paced digital economy, the ability to rapidly adapt and innovate is a key survival factor for businesses across Nigeria. Cumbersome legacy IT systems and waterfall development methods simply can't keep up with evolving customer needs and market demands. To thrive, Nigerian companies must embrace agile IT strategies that prioritize speed, flexibility, and continuous delivery.

Taking an agile approach begins with adopting philosophies like DevOps, which align an organization's development and IT operations teams around unified practices, tools, and cultural values. By breaking down traditional silos, DevOps fosters seamless collaboration and enables faster software releases with fewer disruptions.

"In the past, it could take us months to get new applications or updates deployed due to all the coding, testing, and infrastructure provisioning handoffs," says Tosin, CTO at Quick, a fintech firm in Lagos. "By implementing DevOps best practices using automation and containerization, we've reduced our cycle times from months to days or even hours."

At its core, DevOps is supported by agile development frameworks like Scrum, which take an incremental, iterative approach to software delivery. Cross-functional teams work in short development sprints, continually shipping working code for customer feedback to guide evolving requirements.

For 9D Energy, an upstream oil and gas company, adopting Scrum and cross-functional teams has been a game-changer. "Previously, our software projects would get bogged down by changing requirements and miscommunications across distributed teams," recalls Solomon, VP of IT. "With Scrum's emphasis on self-organizing teams, we're much more responsive to real user needs."

However, accelerating the full software lifecycle requires organizations to also embrace modern architectural principles like microservices and serverless cloud technologies. By decoupling monolithic applications into modular, independently deployable components, businesses gain far greater development agility.

"As a digital bank, releasing new features rapidly is crucial to our growth," states Olufemi, CTO at Cowry Bank. "By migrating our systems to microservices hosted in the cloud, our developers can update components independently without disrupting the entire application. This allows for faster iterations based on customer feedback."

However, adopting these agile practices requires substantial cultural shifts around leadership, collaboration, and risk tolerance. Companies must cultivate an environment where customer-centric, iterative experimentation is encouraged and expected, rather than top-down directives and excessive oversight.

"It's a significant mindset change we had to go through," reflects Olufemi. "There's less fear now around frequent code deployments or even failures because we've built in mechanisms for constant monitoring, automated testing, and quick rollbacks if issues occur."

Beyond technology, developing true business agility is also rooted in empowering product-focused teams who can rapidly make decisions and validate their ideas through customer data and insights. At Gok, a motorcycle ride-sharing app, the product and engineering squads own their roadmaps.

"We've embraced cross-functional, autonomous teams built around specific customers or business domains," explains Michael, Gok's CTO. "With a dedicated operating model, they can rapidly conceptualize ideas, test minimum viable products, and leverage analytics from actual user feedback to determine pivots or further scale."

Of course, becoming a truly agile enterprise doesn't happen overnight. It's an ongoing journey requiring iterative processes, modern tooling, and flatter, collaborative organizational structures.

Yet the competitive advantages reaped in responsiveness, speed-to-market, and innovation agility make it a crucial transformation for Nigerian companies navigating an increasingly volatile digital landscape. By empowering lean, product-centric teams through agile IT practices, forward-thinking businesses can consistently outpace rivals and deliver superior customer experiences.

As Fadiya summarizes: "In sectors being disrupted by agile startups constantly releasing new innovations, traditional waterfall methods simply won't allow us to keep up. Agile gives us the ability to rapidly experiment, learn, and evolve in lockstep with dynamic market needs."