Your goal is to have an amazing agile team, great! It’s in our DNA to want to improve and develop which is what agile is all about. It’s supposed to be different and ever-changing depending on each team and its circumstances. Let’s share with you our 5 key strategies that can help you on your way to agile paradise!
5 tips to help you on your way to agile super-stardom
1. Appreciate the finer points
Would you say that the key term is agile or team? You could conclude agile, but really… the operative word is ‘team’! In a legacy team, it’s very easy to get yourself into a silo and concentrate only on your responsibilities. However, this just won’t work when you’re part of an agile team. To be truly agile, you need to nurture an environment where everyone is responsible for the final product. This empowers every team member to see that their efforts are contributing to the bigger picture, while also reaffirming the entire team concept to fail together and succeed together.
2. Patience is the name of the game
When you consider what a truly agile team looks like, you likely imagine something that performs like a well-oiled machine. And, in a perfect world, that’s how things should work, but as we know, not everything can always go to plan.
It’s all a matter of time before a team knows and gets a feel for how the co-workers work together so that the system can fall into place – this concept exists whether you’re operating as part of an agile team or not. And according to Tuckman’s “Stages of Group Development”, teams go through different phases: forming, storming, norming, and performing. This process typically takes time.
3. The ability to respond to change
Agile would be much smoother if you could merely set everything in stone, and then know that everything would remain the same forever, right? But, as you already know, that’s not the way it works.
Transformation is inevitable and a key element of agile teams is the capacity to respond to those changes, rather than constantly trying to stay devoted to an earlier plan. The best teams continually re-evaluate their priorities and change their resources accordingly. Yes, agile relies massively on management and organization. But, you can’t be so stringent that there’s no flexibility for you to roll with the daily issues thrown up.
4. Focus on results
The value of an agile team is that it concentrates more on results and outcomes, rather than obsessing over processes and procedures. By laying more importance on the results, team members feel empowered to make judgments, solve problems, and produce innovative solutions using whatever skills and expertise they have. It doesn’t matter what type of team you’re working on – everybody wants to feel trusted, valued, and empowered to get work done.
5. Seek and use feedback
The ugly truth: It doesn’t matter how slick your processes are, or how fast you’re able to churn out the software if you aren’t actually creating the right product. And, the only way to know that you’re on the right path is to collect lots of feedback.
Successful agile teams have systems and practices in place to get their software out in front of customers as soon as possible so that they can collect feedback early on and include it into the product.
Beyond customer feedback, great teams are also very transparent with each other. They don’t brush their problems to the side, they remain totally open and honest and view any roadblocks as opportunities to continuously learn and improve. Holding regular retrospectives can help hugely to achieve this.
Why choose Valiantys?
Valiantys is an Atlassian Enterprise Platinum Partner. Want to find out how we can help your enterprise can transform the way its teams work with agile methods and tools? Contact one of our digital transformation experts today and see where we can help your business. Maybe you’re already agile and you are looking for an expert to help you scale? We can also assist and find the right solution.
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