Successful Agility In Product Delivery Requires Dynamic Implementation
Challenging an emerging myth that Agile is dead, and providing insight on key principles & tactics to finding success with Agile-based product teams.
Nowadays it seems to have an opinion of Agile product methods like Scrum. You cannot go a full week without seeing an article proclaiming Agile is dead or describing how we need to think in a “post-Agile” world. However, successfully implementing agility into your company can provide 20%-30% financial gains according to research by McKinsey & Company, and increased parallel process and employee experiences have a direct causal impact on revenue by more than 50% according to Harvard Business Review. Any method with gains like that is clearly alive and well.
But here’s the catch: you’ll only secure that kind of return with a successful, dynamic implementation of maintaining agility throughout your delivery pipeline. It’s not about following a set of rules, it’s about how you equip, inspire, and direct a team to navigate real-world hurdles while still marching toward a world-class product launch.
Agile methods are often taught as fixed steps to follow, but in practice, it requires a dynamic approach to ensure people and products effectively move forward. Being Agile is more about maintaining agility as a team to deliver products better as you face real-world events. Agile methods like Scrum are not a one-size-fits-all framework. Rather, equipping your team with agility is best when it acts as a scaffolding to then adapt dynamically to the practices of a team as they move toward an evolving and iterative goal.
Here is a cheatsheet of principles and actions to best implement agility into your team’s workflow.
Value People Over Process
A core principle of agility is delivering value to users more quickly while adapting to real-world conditions. Technology development is wrought with inefficiencies, blockers, and hiccups. People are by far the messiest variable. To be effective, teams will need to quickly unite, work together, and head in the same direction or face the defeat of falling apart.
While we can focus on better project management, helping to organize and empower people as the most valuable asset of any company is the purpose of any agile method. Adapting is part and parcel of working as a team and agility frameworks work better as a chassis to build onto rather than an absolute process.
There are a couple of strategies to set up the tactical pieces of delivery that hedge against real-world disruptions by better equipping teams executing the plan:
Make a quality agreement up front on any new engagement. Then, allow it to evolve with the team.
Outline a team quality agreement with ways of working backed by valid arguments — and be open to evolving that process as the team tackles real work. A quality agreement is a document outlining how work will be done, the definition of done, and all expectations of a quality product for delivery. It sets everyone on the same course of action, and as unproductive practices arise the team can more easily discuss and propose new methods to make it better.
In practice, the relative sizing of user stories during sprint refinement sessions, where the team estimates upcoming work based on the most recently completed work, should evolve as effort becomes more known. Additionally, taking action items from a sprint retrospective to evolve your approach in real-time will enhance productivity over time. Each sprint is an opportunity to correct inefficiencies and increase the quality of the team’s deliverables from the same starting point outlined in the quality agreement.
Analyze progress from the perspective of where teams currently feel they are on an outcome spectrum.
The attitude of your team and their motivation to be productive heavily impact product delivery. Velocity increases when people are engaged with what they’re building. If the team is struggling to deliver work, has a lot of internal friction, or simply not engaging in regular team meetings, plotting your current state on an outcome spectrum might provide insight as to why.
An outcomes spectrum is one way to clarify your team’s perspective on the processes they use every day. Asking short questions about a specific practice in a snapshot survey can guide team leadership to the most valuable places to improve. Team members rate their enthusiasm about processes on a Likert scale (1–5). Analysis of the answer equates to 1 being useless, 3 being motivating, and 5 being inspiring. Plot responses on a spectrum, and you can see where productivity might be falling through the cracks.
Create A Responsive, Predictable Team
Agility is not a replacement for scheduling or deadlines, but rather offers a different language to ensure value is understood and delivered. Stakeholders will always want to know what is being built, when they can have it, and how much it will cost.
The struggle is that no one can have certainty of all three simultaneously before it’s done. A self-organized team is more like a ship setting out to sail than a freestyle skate session.
The solution is twofold: communicate which of these variables matters most and find agreement on what is fixed and what is flexible. Here are key approaches to minimize surprises, create alignment, and increase accuracy when forecasting product delivery with a responsive plan that allows the team to stay on target.
1. Build around what motivates your delivery team and forget performance rewards for completing work.
Technology development is cognitive work. Research by Daniel Pink uncovered that reward systems in working teams fail dramatically when it comes to cognitive tasks. Instead of rewards, frame questions around the three motivation domains of mastery, autonomy, and purpose to learn what drives each of your team members. Then establish ways of working that rally around those core motivations to get a deeper commitment, higher productivity, and overall better quality of work.
2. Focus on metrics that matter most for all parties.
If it doesn’t help clarify the story of how the work is progressing, don’t use it! There is a plethora of performance data to capture and report, but some are more vital than others at different times. Being data-driven means the data has to mean something. As you discover upward or downward trends, it’s important to frame the story through the right question and leverage the data that objectively supports what is happening. Here are three questions that identify common performance indicators.
Leveraging the team to breakdown features will expose the team to what is coming up, and offer expertise on how to best get the work done. Not doing so leaves story breakdown and forecasting delivery up to the leads who, sure, have more experience and work faster, but often work longer hours, and all too often are not the ones doing the work. Try letting your team walk through a new feature and plan out for themselves how to build it. They might surprise you.
3. SWAG it if you have to.
Sometimes, when the timing is tight, a rough plan is better than no plan. When you cannot involve the team from the onset, rough size it with them and SWAG (Scientific Wild A$$ Guess) user stories based on the team’s most recent estimates. When the project leads SWAG work they should always align it with historical data of similar-sized work from the team.
If historical data is unavailable, walk through the new work with feature-level acceptance criteria to get the team involved as soon as possible. Being predictable is not based on precision, but on regularly correcting course and clearly communicating that to all stakeholders.
4. Use the planning onion model to build forecasting artifacts that evolve with reality.
Forecasting delivery is a necessary, but futile effort. Hurdles slow down teams no matter how awesome they are at developing quality products. When teams are equipped with agility, so are the plans that guide them, requiring business decisions to be flexible and dynamic as well.
Leveraging the planning onion model to build release plans and roadmaps from the core of user stories will help buttress delivery estimates, and focus on more immediate needs. A regular cycle of prioritizing features, breaking them down into the smallest testable increment, then aligning SWAG/team estimates with data-driven team performance and capacity will help keep any product team on the right heading with much fewer surprises at the end.
Facilitate With Expertise In Empathy
Coordinating across disciplines requires active listening and strategic facilitation. Think like an architect: to design and construct a high-performance building requires them to deeply understand the needs of their clients. Clarity is key. They must propose iterative solutions to address feedback from their clients, who are experts in their own areas.
Coordination of all parties with varying perspectives is very much like herding cats, but there are key actions to successfully make a difference:
1. Be a servant leader.
Every leader should round out their perspectives before coordinating a multidisciplinary effort. Architects, for example, plan, design, model, pitch, and then coordinate everything about a building. It helps to know these things when dealing with groups in product, design, and development, knowing the client’s business needs.
Serving those you are leading through active listening of what is being said will help reduce friction, garnish comradery, and encourage the team to settle into their role by letting everyone be themselves contributing to a quality workplace.
2. Avoid the obligatory silence of uncertainty at the end of any meeting or conversation, because confusion is the product killer.
People fall silent because they either legitimately have no objections or no clue what to do next. Make it a habit to ensure everyone knows their next steps. This will help maintain productivity.
Equally as important: letting the team know when the meeting is coming to a close. Confirmation that a meeting is over is a short and effective way for all attendees to align mentally so they can disperse and get started. You won’t believe the number of wasted minutes everyone gets back by just saying “Awesome! Let’s get to it!” at the end of a meeting.
3. Know how to open and close meetings well — even when someone else is leading them.
Listen and pay attention to how a group starts and stops a conversation, as these are critical indicators of clarity or confusion. There are regular behaviors to help successful teams build and keep the momentum going:
4. Have a short and clear agenda for any meeting.
Because agility focuses on people over process, regular sprint ceremonies in Scrum and other meetings should be organized to help the team focus, gain clarity, and execute. Staying on target makes meetings valuable by creating a shared mental model for everyone involved, which in turn, enriches conversations and builds world-class products.
5. Keep it light but stay on topic.
As a scrum master or product owner, it can be helpful to bring something fun to do in a standup or retrospective meeting, like a question of the day or team building game. Make it relevant and useful to the task at hand. After all, your team is under pressure and certainly doesn’t want or need distractions. Like most things in an agile environment, staying dynamic when facilitating conversation with respectful candor and proper tone will help unite a team with the right activity, joke, or ice breaker at the right time.
It’s Critical to Maintain Agility In an Ever-Changing Market
Despite the criticism, the agile methodology is how developers make the most successful products in the market. Successfully implementing agility into your daily practice has proven to increase financial gains, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. We’re living in a fast-paced global economy where market entry opportunities open and close more quickly than ever before. By valuing people over process, creating a responsive and predictable team, and leading with empathy, you’re empowering your company to remain dynamic with agility as you build world-changing technologies.
Learn more about the author at jonathan-essary.com, who is always down for coffee and stay connected.
Cheers!
Originally published on Dialexa Insights
