Whether you’re debating the adoption of more nimble practices for your corporation or have been told your department will soon be moving toward Agile processes, you’re probably wondering what that really means. How will your workday be affected?
Don’t stress—exciting things are likely coming your way. We’re here to break down all the details and help ease your mind.
Communication
Firmwide communication practices are likely to change. Agile development teams engage in frequent communication. The goal, though, is to do it in the right place and at the right time to minimize waste-of-time meetings.
Nimble teams endorse face-to-face conversation as the most efficient way to get information where it needs to be. If you’re remote, this can easily be simulated by using webcams and your favorite telepresence software like Zoom, MS Teams, or Google Meet. You can count on regular communication between business people and developers throughout the life cycle of a project to ensure problems are discovered sooner and maximum value gets delivered.
Problem-solving
Teams transform from being order takers—who are fed “shovel-ready” requirements—into solution providers. Team members ask “why” more. They demand specificity about the problems they are solving.
Teams aim to solve problems quickly while eliminating the fluff that does not need to be part of the solution. Fluff (inefficiency and unnecessary work) becomes a nuisance when it is added to a requirements document that has been deemed “shovel-ready.” Agile developers opt, instead, for simplicity.
Transparency
Nimble and flexible development teams are able to embody those virtues because they have all the information they need to do a job. Transparency, in terms of both the amount of information and how it is conveyed, is key.
Teams shifting toward an Agile work environment will have more information and visibility than they did before, and that translates directly into being good solution providers. It’s also essential that executives provide transparency to teams and stakeholders to reduce the need for external management and speed up value delivery.
Teamwork
Often, technology teams are no more than a collection of individuals working on individual projects that happen to meet once in a while. But there is no “I” in “team” and adaptable development teams take this seriously.
Football teams are a good analogy of what good Scrum teams look like. They go into a game with a plan but can change it on the fly if context demands it. Football teams rely on the division of labor that results from the various roles within their team, act quickly, and demand results.
Good teams work together. Good teams build team relationships. Good team self-manage.
Interaction with stakeholders
Seeing the smiling face of a stakeholder is rare in companies that treat solution builders like cogs in a machine. But Agile teams prioritize customer and stakeholder engagement throughout the development process.
During Sprint Reviews, for example, Scrum teams demonstrate their progress toward larger goals through usable and releasable chunks of value to stakeholders and use any new ideas to immediately improve the product. Continuous stakeholder feedback results in a better product and greater customer satisfaction.
Frequent feedback
Feedback isn’t limited to information coming from stakeholders. You’ll also be in touch with your higher-ups, and not just for a vacuous once-a-year meeting with the boss. Feedback on work quality is likely to become a regular activity you solicit because you realize its benefits: to improve your relationships, your product, and your process.
Ownership shifts to the team, not the individual
No single individual owns the work on a good Agile development team. The team owns the work. Distributed ownership prevents people from feeling stuck and silently suffering. It establishes team-level accountability for winning. Again, the analogy to a good football team holds.
No fear of failure
Distributed ownership leads to distributed responsibility with respect to work quality. Agility is enhanced by constant, sustained attention to technical excellence. Working on a motivated, self-organizing team means that you can both rely upon and expect excellence from teammates.
In a sense, Agile teams can’t fail. They might create a product that doesn’t immediately measure up to specs or deliver an acceptable return on investment. But stakeholder feedback and active reflection on improvement provide the necessary ingredients for teams to evolve quickly toward success.
Individuals carry less of the burden of responsibility, making them more likely to cooperate in good faith. Nimble, effective teams with distributed responsibility mean that individuals don’t have to fear failure.
Legitimate goals
In a truly Agile work environment, you can say goodbye to slow hierarchical management practices that get in the way by creating goals that distract from rather than enhance the development process.
Agile development teams create their own goals based on good information—the legitimacy of the goals is baked in. Self-managing teams with clear and accurate knowledge about the problems they’re solving don’t create arbitrary goals in an uninformed way. Goals are the glue of teams. Without goals the team can commit to achieving, you merely have a collection of people taking up the same space.
Focus
Agile development is iterative and is based upon constant improvement in the light of stakeholder feedback. Creating usable products with a high periodicity decreases the likelihood that teams lose sight of Product Goals. A good Agile team is thus incentivized to stay focused on achieving their (self-identified) goals quickly.
By contrast, many legacy practices result in inefficient and ineffective processes leading toward vague or ill-defined goals. But the very structure of Agile development processes prioritizes usable outcomes and ensures that teams remain focused.
Continuous learning and improvement
What does it mean to be Agile? It means that you’re nimble and alert, not lethargic and unfocused. It means that you’re flexible, not rigid. It means that you can easily and readily adapt to change. It means that you continuously seek out what changes might be necessary and never hesitate to make them when appropriate.
Continuous improvement requires continuous learning. So, if you’re looking to enhance your business practices, you must seek out the best learning opportunities available to help you do so.
One should always learn from experts, from those who have been there. Responsive Advisors consists solely of experts in Agile transformation and development practices. We offer Agile training courses that are based upon real-world knowledge gleaned from thousands of hours of experience in the world of Agile business practices.
We’ve logged the time in Agile work environments, and are uniquely positioned to be able to help you understand what they might look like for your company. We promise not to bore you with day-long lectures that you can’t remember. Instead, we’ll transfer our knowledge in a fun, interactive way that doesn’t leave you with three pages of illegible notes (and doodles).
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