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Writer's pictureJacob Anderson

To Agile and Beyond...


Soaring Beyond

With companies that have either tried, currently using or are dabbling with Agile, the craze of the early 2000’s has easily become more mainstream. The question then becomes, what is the next thing to be done? Lots of people are always asking these types of questions.

The running game in football was transformed by the passing game. The three-point shot in basketball changed the dynamics of how basketball is being played where people who would’ve never played in college, NBA or otherwise are thriving because of the permutations that exist now. Even hockey, a beloved sport by all did away with the two-line pass to open up scoring within the game.

What then comes next in your Agile adventure? May I invite you while thinking about this question not as a fundamental change of methodology or sport, this is a question about refinement and improvement. With Agile being such an adaptive method that is used across so many industries, there are permutations that dare I say you have not attempted for fear of not having a positive outcome, fear of failure. By very nature, failure itself is not the outcome but simply a stop along the way to a greater destination.

Here are a few things to consider when you are trying your continuous improvement this year, consider some changes recently made by other companies.

  • Providing Consistent Training to All Employees to Know what Agile Means for Your Company

  • Getting a Uniform Way of Communicating with the Business and IT - Transparency

  • Role Identification and Clarification – Getting the ScrumMaster Established

  • Executive Level Buy-In

  • Having a Single Backlog that a Team knows to Trust for Upcoming Work

  • Setting a Consistent Cadence for Sprints and Sprint Related Meetings

  • Improving the Process of Backlog Refinement and Estimation

  • Setting Up a DevOps Pipeline and Migrating Products onto Sustainable Platforms

  • Establishing a Center of Excellence, Agile Office or Agile PMO

  • Establishing a Backlog of Improvements for the Center of Excellence Team Members

  • Refining Engineering and Testing Practices to Improve Sustainability

  • Refining Backlog Items to be more Context Rich and Less Vague

  • Doing More Valuable Work with Less Output - Outcome over Output

  • Committing to Work and Consistently Delivering It

These are just a few things I have observed with teams and organizations over the past year. What is it that your company needs? Is it role clarification? Is it consistent delivery? Do you oftentimes feel the basic Scrum and Agile principles have outgrown you? Hopefully I am not the first to tell you that the principles are consistent and have multiple levels in which they can be applied. Dare I say that they are constant and the methods leveraged behind them oftentimes take on different changes. So, whether we see a four-point line in the NBA or not doesn’t really matter so much as what level of improvement is occurring. What are you seeing in your company? Continuous improvement or regression? If you are regressing make sure you check why that is occurring. Oftentimes the help of qualified coach or trainer can help to identify those small changes that can get things back on track towards profitability and ongoing improvement.

If you have any questions that we can address, don’t hesitate to reach out to a qualified Agile coach at learnmore@agiledad.com or call us at (866)94-AGILE (24453). We are happy to help get you moving beyond the mundane and into the cycle of continuous improvement.

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