Question

Reopening the economy is an example of an Agile project. Do you agree or disagree? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

COVID-19 pandemic has strongly and hugely impacted the world's most emerging and stable economies. While, world population is fighting against the pandemic by staying at home, economy is trying to survive the downturn it has faced in the recent months. In this era of World quarantine and underperforming economies, it is very essential to plan and organize the post pandemic activities and design the supply chains in such a way that the impact is minimized and countries suffer least out of it. While, the question of getting rid of this pandemic is an important one, another important question is the reopening and reviving of the economy. In this time, the idea of agile stands logical and rational for reopening of the economy.

Logical aspect of agile being implemented in reopening the economy can be advocated as most of the industries such as travel, tourism, crude oil, hospitality, Production etc are going to suffer for a lot of time period after the pandemic. In this case, it stands logical if economy is opened in iterations and respective measures are implemented every time to the industry. While Work from home has become the new reality, most of the IT companies are announcing to retain the policy of work from home for future. This will drive down the costs for them. However, other industries has suffered a lot and supply chains will be completely disrupted, the demand will no more be the same as that in the past. Example - The demand for gasoline will decrease as more and more people will be allowed to work from home and travel industry will get affected. Automobile Industry will also be affected with the same. Hence, logically, using the iterative approach will be beneficial for assessing the new trend of demand and implementing respective policies in each industry with every iteration looks rational.

This can be the non exhaustive list of advantages that we will get from the agile reopening of the industry. Also, there can be many advantages including, cost savings, disruptions, using digital technologies, Social Distancing etc. which leads to the fact that economy cannot be reopened all at once and must be divided into iterations which will provide improvements with every feedback.