AGILE METHODS
Find out what agile ways of working can do for your organization
We unleash the true potential of an organization by transitioning the unit of performance from individuals and processes to high-performing teams. With clear strategic priorities, an adaptable organization, and a set of agile practices and mindsets, teams can be engaged and energized to become far greater than the sum of their parts.
Strategic alignment
Continuous innovation
High-performing teams
METHODS THAT ENABLE AGILE
The official history of agile can be traced to 2001, when a group of developers met to discuss how to enable rapid changes to software in the face of a fast-moving external environment. The values and principles they agreed upon became the backbone of the agile movement within IT.
Less well-known is that this movement owed much to practices crafted and honed in the broader business realm decades earlier.
The most notable of these was the iterative, lean manufacturing approach used extensively in Japan following WWII. A scientist named William Demming was stationed there after the war, and applied statistical analysis to improve manufacturing processes. Toyota, influenced by Demming’s ideas, developed the Toyota Production System, which enabled the company to become the giant it is today.
Still, only recently has agile caught on more widely. Enterprise Agility, which takes agile practices and mindsets and applies them across an organization’s functions, is quickly becoming the go-to approach to create value in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. And for good reason: agile projects are 3x more likely to succeed than traditional approaches.
Agile is a system of mindsets and practices enabled by metrics, tools, structure, ceremonies, and the work environment. At the team level, agile uses commonsense methods to generate accountability and trust, productivity and creativity, freedom and joy.
However, for agile to succeed at the enterprise level, the entire system must work in concert. In addition, agile practices and mindsets need to be customized to an organization’s unique goals and culture. A disciplined implementation can then set the stage for transformation to take root, and for the system to sustain itself indefinitely.
HOW WE HELP
Cross-functional teams of 5-9 members form the building blocks for performance in an agile organization. These teams typically take on end-to-end responsibility to deliver customer value—that is, the team is no longer judged on producing deliverables, but on the overall satisfaction of customers with the product or service produced.
In agile, a project or initiative is delivered in a series of sprints. The objective of an agile team is to produce something of value for a customer or end-user at the end of each sprint. To do so, the team operates in a sequence of ceremonies and exhibits behaviors fundamental to agile.
Enterprise Agility can profoundly affect an organization’s performance: reducing time to market and improving innovation, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction.
A critical, but under-appreciated enabler of agility is the physical and virtual environment where employees work. A great work environment can attract and retain talent, improve flexibility, and increase creativity, inspiration, and collaboration.
Structure teams to enhance agility
Small, cross-functional teams of 5-9 members form the building blocks for performance in an agile organization. These teams typically take on end-to-end responsibility to deliver customer value—that is, the team is no longer judged on producing deliverables, but on the overall satisfaction of customers with the product or service produced.
The teams work autonomously in short (1-4 weeks), iterative cycles called sprints. Once a decision is made at the beginning of the cycle about what needs to be achieved, the team collectively decides on how to achieve what needs to be done. Leaders typically lay out priorities, constraints, and rules, but otherwise the team is responsible for determining how to proceed.
With priorities for the cycle in place, leaders and teams will generally stick to the decided scope of work for the duration of the sprint.
To maintain discipline within the team, specific roles, such as the Product Owner and Scrum Master, ensure that the team embodies agile practices and mindsets on an ongoing basis.
Leaders also play a pivotal role. They help teams flourish by providing appropriate opportunities, access to customers and resources, coaching, and “blocking and tackling.” This gives teams the freedom to operate, fail fast, learn, grow, and produce efficiently.
One of the core ideas behind agile is that leaders should lay out the strategic direction and priorities, but not exert control over day-to-day operations. In other words, they trust the team to deliver without the need to micromanage.
This does not mean that leaders give up all control in the agile model. Between cycles, leaders can accelerate projects, add new priorities, change direction, or “pull the plug.” Leaders make decisions about agile funding, and release funds incrementally to valuable initiatives based on lean business cases and metrics. They also are in charge of resource planning. In agile, instead of allocating individuals to work, leaders allocate initiatives to teams.
With leaders providing priorities, desired outcomes, and resources, but not the instructions on how to achieve these outcomes, the teams have stability, capabilities, and bandwidth to demonstrate and deliver value.
We work closely with organizations to customize the agile model to their situation, and help roll out the most effective structure that accounts for unique strategy, culture, and dynamics.
Embed ceremonies, mindsets, and behaviors
In agile, a project or initiative is delivered in a series of sprints. The objective of an agile team is to produce something of value for a customer or end-user at the end of each sprint. To do so, the team operates in a sequence of ceremonies and exhibits behaviors fundamental to agile.
To begin, the Business Owner, Product Manager, and Product Owner collaborate to determine the purpose, objectives, scope, and metrics for the project. The Product Manager details the customer journey and customer personas, and highlights current and potential features that drive value for these personas.
The Product Owner then generates the product backlog by developing user stories for each feature. The PO also prioritize the backlog, and assesses and allocates capacity.
Each sprint officially starts with the entire agile team participating in sprint planning, where the team’s capacity for the sprint is determined, user stories are fleshed out, and acceptance criteria are developed. The team estimate how long the work will take, commit to sprint goals, and sequence and assign work amongst themselves.
A number of agile ceremonies kick-in as the sprint proceeds.
Brief daily meetings, known as daily standups, are common for agile teams. Often just 15 minutes long, they offer a chance for team members to share progress, goals, and problems to be resolved.
Team members limit the amount of work in progress, providing focus and ensuring work regularly gets carried to completion. Simultaneously, they update the Kanban Board and any metrics related to the sprint on publicly available information radiators.
Scrum Masters take responsibility for removing impediments, fostering team dynamics, improving flow of work, and creating a growth environment.
Product Owners meanwhile continue to groom the backlog to be ready for the next sprint.
At the end of each cycle, the outputs are reviewed against the stories, in a ceremony known as the Sprint Review. Demos are held with the Product Owner and other relevant stakeholders to get their feedback. If work meets the required acceptance criteria and standards of quality, it is considered done.
Teams hold an internal Retrospective that reviews what worked and what didn’t in the sprint. Quantitative, qualitative, and root cause analysis is conducted as needed. This provides a basis for improvement in the next sprint.
With each sprint, the team iterates towards delivering valuable products or services to customers, safe in the knowledge that they are generating value continuously.
To be successful, an agile transformation must pair agile ceremonies with appropriate mindset shifts. For example, because there is no micromanagement, team members need to be accountable for the end-to-end outcome of their work. This means taking the initiative to seek stakeholder input, trusting each other, and help each other out as needed to get the work to “done.”
We help leaders and team members in an agile transformation by training and coaching them in the relevant agile ceremonies, mindsets, and behaviors.
Measure performance to continuously improve
Enterprise Agility can profoundly affect an organization’s performance: reducing time to market and improving innovation, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction.
The agile system is designed to drive value and impact for the business. To function well, data-driven transparency and measurement of impact are required.
In an agile environment, productivity is front and center, from the Kanban board that each team member considers before, during, and after completing a piece of work, to the burn-up and burn-down charts that are used to assess team effort, to the standups and retrospectives that regularly consider the question of productivity.
In addition, agile focuses on a different aspect of productivity: outputs that generate value, instead of process steps and time spent. With this emphasis, agile environments can improve productivity by up to 30% over traditional environments.
With the accelerating pace of change and shifting competitive landscape, time to market is another critical measure of performance.
Again, by their very design, agile tools make it easy to measure time to market. From the moment a product or service idea hits the backlog, to the time it generates value for a customer, progress can be tracked and measured. What’s more—because of its iterative nature, reduction in hand-offs, and insistence on staying focused, agile reduces time to market by between 20% and 40%.
Many leaders are drawn to agile as a way to increase innovation—and some have seen 75% improvements in this key area. In agile, product and service hypotheses must be tested with customers before any large resource commitment is made. A simple way to measure innovation is to consider the number of hypotheses tested, the resources consumed, and the time it takes to drive new value in the market.
Product quality is another key metric. With integrated testing, frequent customers demos and feedback, and iterative improvement cycles, product quality increases by up to 50% under agile, as measured by errors, failure, and incident reports.
Finally, customer focus and impact are central to agile. No cycles are wasted in generating customer value. The customer drives the backlog, provides regular feedback, and in a way ensures that value is created by the team (if a product is not valuable, it will not see the light of day).
We help organizations devise the appropriate metrics to measure and improve performance. We also coach teams to develop and maintain relevant, easily accessible information radiators, and help teams use these to build insight, trust, accountability, and the free flow of information.
Design the optimal agile work environment
A critical, but under-appreciated enabler of agility is the physical and virtual environment where employees work. A great work environment can attract and retain talent, improve flexibility, and increase creativity, inspiration, and collaboration.
A rapidly changing external environment calls for new and unique ways for organizations to drive competitive advantage and revenue while reducing costs. For many, this means a work environment that can increase empowerment and transparency, break silos, and encourage efficient use of space.
Generational change has shaped what it means to go to work. For millennials—who are used to information flowing quickly, multiple methods of communication, limited formality, greater autonomy, and tech giants’ disrupting the notion of a “typical workspace”—a flexible work environment is an expectation.
But an agile workspace appeals to more than just the millennials. It not only enables teams to work together, but also provides many benefits deeply rooted in human psychology. Being able to work in different locales spurs creativity and inspiration. Informal meeting spaces and break rooms encourage conversations and collaboration. Collaborative team spaces are direct enablers of team productivity. Open space creates transparency and trust. Relaxation rooms provide revitalization and serendipity.
By giving staff the freedom to work from the best workspace for their situation, leaders show trust in their people’s judgment, and workers feel empowered to make decisions about how to utilize their time more effectively.
Across a variety of agile organizations, a wide range of environments and work arrangements have been experimented with: hot-desking, brainstorming areas, informal meeting areas, inspiration rooms, dedicated phone areas, outdoor relaxation areas, bar areas, concentration rooms. In addition, a number of agile environments have workspaces dedicated to agile teams, complete with whiteboards, docking stations, lightweight laptops, and video conferencing and projecting technology.
What one organization or team finds indispensable, another might find unnecessary or even counterproductive. Any agile work environment must take the organization’s strategy and culture into account.
Finally, it’s important to recognize that agile teams may be distributed across locations. This means that in addition to the typical hardware and in-person tools, certain activities will require cloud-based software, such as, collaboration tools for agile ceremonies and project management, Kanban boards, online whiteboards, chat tools, video conferencing software, and knowledge management tools.
We utilize a wealth of experience in strategy and a deep understanding of Enterprise Agility to advise leaders on developing the ideal work environments—suited to their specific culture, employee personas and desired agile behaviors.