Agile Quiz
Do you know enough about Agile? Agile practices continue to spread deeper into organisations, with your ability to know what Agile means, when it is appropriate, how it will affect your customers and your colleagues and how to use it now the norm.
As someone who helps place people into project and programme teams, I discount anyone who doesn’t have a qualification in Agile, because it tells me something very important about their attitude – they don’t think it is important to keep up to date Don’t be that person!
Answer these simple questions so assess your own Agile maturity:
- Do you have a multi-disciplinary/cross-functional team with all the skills and competencies needed for this project?
- Does your team include representatives from the business areas who will use the project deliverables?
- Are you clear on your delegated powers from senior management, such that escalating decisions outside of the team will be for exceptional situations only?
- Are you planning back to front, starting with the end goal and decomposing it into usable, valuable, frequent deliveries throughout the project timeline?
- Do you regularly present your work to your users, and incorporate their feedback when deciding what to work on next?
- Are you using prioritisation techniques e.g. MoSCoW, where top priority is given to work that creates the greatest business value?
- Are your deadline dates clear to everyone and are they committed to delivering on time, even if that means not delivering all of the requirements for your project?
- Are you defining the implementation/deployment activities needed for each of these deliveries?
- Are you capturing requirements as Epics and User Stories?
- Have you defined the Acceptance Criteria for each requirement/User Story with all those impacted by it?
- Are you holding Agile ceremonies including Daily Stand-Ups, Show and Tells and Retrospectives?
- Are you using visual aids to convey your progress e.g. Kanban Boards or burn down charts?
If you are only answering yes to 1/3 of these questions it is time to act. Agile is the norm, not the exception, and lack of awareness nearly 20 years after the Agile Manifesto was published is no excuse. I have created an Agile Quick Start training event in London on 28-29 October, register now to confirm your place.