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Getting Started with Agile

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Administrator

01-03-2022

So you want to get started with Agile. 


This is no surprise as companies all over the world look to adopt Agile work practices to improve performance and accelerate delivery. After all, there is growing evidence of potentially substantial gains in utilizing an Agile-based operational model. Research from McKinsey indicates that 93% of business units that had fully adopted an agile model before the COVID-19 crisis outperformed units that had not. 


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Given the prospect of such competitive advantage, leaders and people managers such as yourself have been tasked with adopting Agile practices. So by now you’ve read about Agile, studied dozens of blog posts and watched hours of video – but how do you get started? 

Don’t worry. We got you. You can totally do this. We’ll describe a couple of easy ways to get started. 


First... 


Keep in mind the Agile mindset, which revolves around incremental learning and improvement. Agile helps build a culture, of continuous improvement which is reflected in both process and product. So don’t worry about perfection, just focus on progression. If you are trying to manage your team’s efforts in a meaningful way and need to solve for visualizing and prioritizing work – then just get started. You’ll learn as you go. 


Here are two ways to get started with Agile. 


Use a simple work board 


If you want to get started quickly, it can be easiest to just start with a simple board. Visualizing work in a board helps teams to see whether they are working on the right task, or if they have too much in flight which gets in the way of focusing on the right work. The work board can help develop a cadence of understanding team capacity.  


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Here are the steps to constructing your work board: 

  1. Create a board with columns that reflect your generic work phases – I.e., To Do, In Progress, Done. 
  2. Create and prioritize cards on the board that represent small, executable elements of the work you are doing.  
  3. Meet several times a week, bring up the board, and just do a “Standup” - the Standup is a quick meeting to check in on the team’s work. The format is simply: What did I do since last standup? What am I going to work on next? What are my blockers (things blocking my work)? 
  4. The team moves the cards to the correct columns as you go.  
  5. Ask yourself – are we moving the cards that are highest priority for us? If not, make adjustments. Ask yourself why. Learn what is blocking progress. 
  6. You can discuss as a team what other steps to take in your flow – maybe In Progress isn’t the only column you need. But don’t create too many! Just start with adding one more at a time.  


This is it for now. Just start here and practice. 


To recap:  


Why use a simple work board? It is the simplest way to start.  


What are its benefits? A board helps your team to visualize all the work and get the team focused on the right priorities. 

How do you know you’re “doing it”? Your team will start to feel a flow for the work and experience continuous improvement in clarity, priority, and output. You as a manager will feel confident that you’re doing the right work because your team is more clearly focused on the right priorities. 


Scrum 

At some point, you may want to apply a little more structure, like using scrum. To start, do something similar as above by getting your work on a board to visualize your work. 


With scrum there is the additional element of work iterations, or sprints. Iterations are time-boxed increments of work. Iteration timelines can vary, though one- or two-week iterations are most common. Let’s say you choose a two-week sprint, which means your team puts in all the stuff you think you can accomplish in two weeks. Sprint planning is the process where the team prioritizes and commits to work that you think you can get done in the two-week sprint. All team members are involved in the sprint planning sessions. 


Don’t worry about being perfect. Whatever doesn’t get done moves into the next sprint. The important thing is to continuously learn how to more accurately estimate the amount of work the team members can realistically complete in a sprint.  


As with work boards, you should also do standups in scrum. Maybe twice per week (but no less). The point of the standup is to be laser focused on the work in progress and to get help as soon as possible. If you have issues and you don’t get help for a week, you’re going to be behind.  


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At a later point you can add in other ceremonies such as a retrospective, where you regularly look back and evaluate your process and what your team accomplished. Then add in a demo, which is not meant to be a show-and-tell of completely polished product, but a way to gather incremental feedback on incremental work. 


Sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos are examples of scrum ceremonies. Practice adding one or two ceremonies at a time. In later articles we’ll discuss other ceremonies like backlog grooming. 


One reason to adopt scrum is for more predictability. Over time you’ll come to better understand how much can be done within a sprint. Understanding this eventually helps you be able to review a longer backlog and estimate a few sprints into the future.  

 

Just using a board (without timeboxes and such) is fine when you are just trying to get a process in place and help the team understand priority. Going to scum helps to tackle more complex work with measurement for continuous improvement around estimation of output and value delivery. 


To recap: 


Why adopt scrum? Scrum adds measurement along with regular feedback and improvement. 

What are its benefits? Scrum introduced predictability in team output and quality. 

How do you know you’re “doing it”? You have growing confidence in your team’s ability to commit to work and get it done within a specific time frame. Plus, you as a manager become more adept at managing your team’s flow of value creation and delivery. 


So, why Agile? 


Agile is about continuous improvement. That is what your competitors are doing. They are trying to beat you. They are working to get product built fast and get it out to market. 


Your job is to beat them by serving your customers better and faster than a competitor can, and you can’t improve how you accomplish that goal without transforming how your teams work. 


So adopt the Agile mindset. Just get started. Learn and improve as you go. 


That’s how you win.