Good Agile management depends on these practical methods!

From 2001 to 2021, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development celebrates its 20th birthday. During the past 20 years, Agile development has extended from the IT industry to most industries that implement project management. According to PMI market research, about 70% of industries in Asia Pacific apply Agile methodology, and most hiring managers believe that the ACP Certificate is valuable for both company growth and personal career development.

In addition, as is often the case with agile learners, learning Agile in classrooms and exams is always "You can not learn well by books only." How to implant Agile concepts in work? How to use Agile practices to improve team quality and efficiency? How to get relevant parties to recognize and support Agile management? Now I'd like to share a few thoughts on becoming an Agile practitioner of knowledge and action.

Source: Freepik

Agile is easy said than done

What we learn about Agile is that: 3355 of Scrum (3 core roles, 3 artifacts, 5 key events and 5 values), Kanban, teamwork, service leadership, etc. All of these are the explanations and practices of Agile. But when you apply Agile you will find that the rules are seemed simple but difficult to practice. The following examples are some common "ghost stories":

• The leader requires a single point of responsibility, so the Scrum Master and the Product Owner are becoming the same person.
• The stand-up meeting changed from a "ceremony" to a "form", and "tomorrow" repeated "today", which lowered the morale of the team.
• Similar content is often repeated on the Retrospective Meeting, no progress on the discussed issues, and even canceled the Retrospective Meeting.
• Progress on Kanban board is not updated in time.

Do you still remember the first sentence of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development? Not "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", but "We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."

The difficulties of applying Agile comes from here -- The "Agile" we pursuing is textbook Agile, a refinement of other teams' practices, and an answer found by people with sufficient practical experience based on their own environment. And when we implemented Agile practice after passing the Agile certification exam, we find that we haven't done it, and neither has anyone else around us.

We can't agree with the team on the problems to be solved in this situation. And it is difficult for everyone to build confidence in such a large adjustment of the working method, which makes it difficult to implement Agile practices.

Therefore, more pragmatic promotion ideas are needed to break the gap between Agile learning and practice. These ideas are typical "invisible" knowledge, which is easy to spread in the interaction between people and difficult to accurately convey through words.

I'd like to share some common problems and solutions in Agile practice.

Case 1: Agile promotion is point-to-area

Scenario

Source: Freepik

A company started Agile Transformation recently, M, who is Agile certificated, is appointed to push this forward. M thought that he could finally show his skills, so he used his influence as a project manager to organize a training quickly.

During the training, he found that the response was not as strong as he felt in the Agile course. Besides the game session, the response to the intellectual content was lukewarm or even slightly resistant. After the training, when he started to implement a new way of working, he found that it was almost impossible to implement Agile practices according to the training content. The daily stand-up meeting was turned into a daily report, and everyone just formally divided the work into weekly iterations, everything else remained the same. The leader was not happy about it.

Analysis

Why like that? What's going wrong? M asks questions in the Agile learning community. Senior Scrum Masters in the group asked M why the company was making the Agile Transition, and why did they train all employees without selecting their audience. M believes that the Agile Transformation of the company is to achieve transparency in management and ensure that the problems and stutters encountered in the company's development process can be reflected. The Scrum Master then reminded M that there was nothing wrong with the company's motivation, but those who implement Agile must realize that Agile starts with improving the collaborative way of front-line teams with small scale in the working process.

Therefore, in the process of promoting agile, do not have the idea of overnight success. Start with the team that needs help. For example, a team that often misses deadlines needs to clarify requirements through rolling planning to ensure that there is no unfinished work in each cycle. With this in mind, M adjusted his approach and made rapid progress.

Conclusion

Promoting Agile practices at the company level is not about direct all-hands training, but about incremental influence. The most effective way to influence is to get to know the pilot team, using methods such as shadow following to identify the real issues that the team needs to address, such as delivery speeds that are not quick enough, and production defects that are not tested in time. First, introduce practical tools to achieve short-term success, and then expand the scope of Agile promotion and the types of practices that are popular. In a word, in practice, Scrum Masters not only need to promote Agile practices to ensure that everyone has the same understanding, but also learn to apply Agile methodology point-to-area.

Case 2: A balance between textbook and practice

Scenario

W's project was experiencing painful delays, with work moving slowly and with no way out. W learned Agile project management in her spare time, wandering to implement daily stand-up meetings in the team to control the project management. She first found the project manager but failed to get support. Then she tries to organize team members for stand-up meetings by herself. In less than a week, the meeting went nowhere.

W is confused and asks a senior Scrum Master for advice. The Scrum Master asked about the details of the stand-up meeting, everyone in the meeting is facing the schedule list and introduce what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what is the problem according to the three classical questions on the 《Agile Guide》. Under the questioning of the Scrum Master, W realized that although everyone is sharing the project status every day, nobody knows the task status of others in the task decomposition, and they are just bystanders and don't know whether to provide help to others.

Analysis

There are three elements in an effective stand-up meeting: First, the granularity is reasonable, that is, there will not be a lot of cases where one member does something yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and other team members cannot determine whether he needs support or not. The second is a shared goal, where everyone knows whose task is being delayed is unacceptable, and helps them when the work at hand is finished, rather than continuing to complete their own follow-up tasks. The third is visualization, that is, the first two elements can be viewed at any time every day through electronic tools, whiteboards or sticky notes, without having to ask questions. After W strengthened the decomposition of project work and timely followed up the progress of the project, the situation of project delay finally stopped getting worse.

Conclusion

We learned about different Agile awareness or tools and their roles in the Agile Certification, but if we do not understand the basis of tailoring, it may cause specific tools and technologies to lose the role of implementation. We have to discover by ourselves in the learning process. Find the promotion and interdependence between tools and technologies through practice and discussion. Only in this way can we find the right medicine and effectively improve team communication and collaboration through Agile practices, thereby improving work efficiency.

Source: Freepik

Case 3: Get the Agile keys of interested parties

Scenario

Z worked as a Scrum Master in a company, and the business department was usually unable to cooperate on time in the project, which brought great difficulties to Z's work. The clarification, sorting, and acceptance of requirements cannot keep up with the stable rhythm. Z tried to organize Agile awareness training for leaders and business managers but none of the people he was most expected were involved, and the business changed nothing.

Analysis

When Z discussed with senior Scrum Masters, everyone focused on two things: The first is the order and efficiency of the current IT team's internal delivery; the second is the team's ability and automation level. At this time, he found the pain point: the delivery problems of the IT team were mainly concentrated on the instability of requirements and the uncertainty of business acceptance time; The automation level of the team is low, unit testing is not popular, and some requirements cannot be tested at any time; Team integration testing adopts an all-manual testing approach, which is far from producing software at a steady pace in each iteration.

As a result, the business department does not agree to frequent participation because they are dissatisfied with the status quo. Only by improving the technical level and delivery commitment within the team can we win the trust of the business and get them involved.

Conclusion

The project needs better external participation. The Scrum Masters need to help create a better working environment for the team. No matter is the traditional method or Agile method, the best way to engage stakeholders is to reassure them. When the team still has room for significant improvement, it is difficult to rush to adjust the participation of external stakeholders. It is necessary to change and improve from the inside out to gradually build everyone's confidence in participation and achieve a win-win situation.

Bridging the gap between Agile learning and practice

The goal of Agile project management is to deliver maximum business value in the shortest time. It is an iterative and incremental approach to managing information projects in small steps, high flexibility, and frequent interaction with users. This also determines that there must be a gap between learning and practicing agile. In the process of Agile implementation, "Start from where you are" is a principle to be kept in mind at all times. Click here to know more about Why Project Management Tools Are Important for Teams