5 Steps for Successful Agile

February 28, 2023

5 Steps to Agile Success

Before we jump into the 5 steps to adopt agile, let’s do a quick review of 3 of the flavors of agile that helps you understand the core principles and some of the subtle differences

Flavors of Agile

Like ice-cream there a few flavors of agile with everyone having their favorite. Fortunately, they take the core agile principles and solve a 1 specific additional problem

There are 3 mains ones

Scrum – iterative project management for building a product or service
Kanban– an agile process that can be more dynamic
Safe – a multi project, multi product process that can coordinate to a large enterprise

Scrum

Perhaps the the most vanilla method. Scrum suggest

delivering software or features in time-boxed iterations (sprints)
focusing on the highest business-value software features in each iteration
interacting directly with business users to confirm ongoing software usability, relevance and business value throughout the process.

A Product Owner(s) may represents the needs of the business, and are responsible for documenting and prioritizing solution requirements as input into ongoing planning

The Scrum Team, is a cross-disciplinary team responsible for delivering the solution.

Activities of the Scrum team involve:

The Sprint Planning Meeting, held at the beginning of each sprint, where the Product Owner, and the Scrum Team review the highest-priority items identified by the Product Owner and
- agree on the top priority items
- agree the items are ready to be implemented
- estimate the effort and allocate the items to the sprint based on resources available
the Sprint Review, at the end of each sprint, which includes a demonstration of work completed in that sprint and a retrospective review of the work undertaken to enable continuous
improvement for subsequent iterations.

Scrum also encourages teams to engage in daily stand-up meetings, short update sessions held each morning that enable the team to quickly review their completed and planned work and address any hurdles.

Kanban

A fancy Japanese word for a simple process. While the previous Scrum is typically used for product development it can be difficult to plan a backlog in areas like maintenance, bug fixing or where the team must react more dynamically and where priority of work can change on a weekly, daily or even hourly basis.

In Kanban we operate more on a pull process when a resource is available they pull in the next highest priority task to be completed.

They may still have standups, and work in sprint to review progress

Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) – the Ben and Jerry’s of Agile

Scaling agile to multiple teams and very large projects can involve managing multiple priorities and interdependencies. The people behind safe obviously saw a means to promote and sell that as a practice that involves

Coordinating and driving Agile work at portfolio, program and project levels to synchronize the work across multiple Agile teams to align with shared corporate objectives. It promotes a series of practices to

managing the delivery of required outcomes through Value Streams (portfolio level), Program Increments and Releases (program level) and Iterations (team level)
managing business requirements as Epics and Program Epics (across releases), Features (within releases) and User Stories (within iterations)
managing the system architecture to ensure consistency and efficiency in system design at all levels, including an ‘intentional architecture runway’ to support planned work.

The official SAFe® website at www.scaledagileframework.com provides a complete picture of the (complex) framework, including detail on the processes, roles and outputs at each level.

5 Steps to a Successful Agile Project

Step 1 – Choosing the Right Project and Method

We start with the different types of agile so we know we can chose the right project and right method to adopt to become more agile. Ideally we will also have

a project that doesn’t have a lot of complex dependencies or demands that prevent it being more agile
buy in from senior stakeholders to be agile. Stakeholders who want to move to a more transparent, collaborative and less traditional process.
we have business stakeholders to act as requirements owners

Step 2: Avoiding Common Traps

When adopting any new process there can be resistance and mis-steps

Adopting only partial practices a team may adopt a few practices e.g standups, because that is in their control. But fail to adopt the harder practices of

stakeholder confirmation of requirements,
ongoing adjustment of work to accommodate emerging information.

By using selected Agile practices, then one may not get the benefits of agile and end up with same or worse results than a traditional project

Insufficient communication and/or understanding

When introducing Agile in your organization, it is important to consider how Agile principles and practices will be communicated to staff. How each employee will understand their role, trained and provide feedback on issues they encounter.

Similar as a project the project will encounter problems and their needs to be a means of open communication around problems so that they can be solved.

Using Agile as a doctrine instead of a tool

While some of the core principles are essential to provide results, the process is not set in stone and should not be a cult. It is important to listen and have a means to adjust the process to best fit the project or company.

Running 2 Practices at the same time : Adopting ‘Agile’ based project but still expecting all of the traditional practices to be completed like like a large document base, complete sign off before moving to development, excluding the end user or a rigid project plan not based on the backlog, estimates or new information.

Step 3: Establishing your baseline

The old Peter Drunker quote “you can only improve what you measure” hence for the adoption it is worth to have metrics to review as a means to monitor

How quickly we deliver business value
Costs of the current development process
Overhead costs in documentation, meetings between traditional and agile process
how satisfied your stakeholders (external customers, internal business areas) are with delivered software
how satisfied your staff members are with their current work
how much teams are working to plan and how much are they fire fighting
how often are they reporting delays or being over committed

Step 4: Monitoring your investment

Based on the baseline we can attempt to monitor the same metrics to review that we are improving or running into issues that prevents our improvement. Together these add up to the quantitative net business value

Step 5: Improve and Expand Agile

Once you have had the opportunity to trial Agile methods for a few months, it is valuable for you to step back and ask yourself the following questions:

Is work being done more efficiently?
Are the stakeholders getting the outcomes that they need?
Are employees happier to be working in a high-communication environment, rather than in a documentation-centric one?
Is the quality of their work better than before?

Conclusion

While much more can be written about

Using the right (collaborative) tools to support the process
Capturing testable and demo-able requirements
Creating a culture of collaboration and trust

It’s also important not to make your understanding of agile too complex. At it’s heart is a common sense process to deliver value back to our customers as soon and as reliably as possible. Once that principle id adopted everything else is details.