Becoming more Agile

Recently, a few charity agile enthusiasts got together on a Zoom to share what we’re learning about increasing impact by embedding agile ways of working in some of the UK’s leading charities. Here are our top ten lessons so far. 

About the participants:

• Kate Nightingale- Head of Marketing and Communications and has been with Crisis for three years. Her team includes Brand & Marketing, Digital, News & Media and also now has a small function that looks at cross organisation supporter engagement.
• Eleanor Gibson - background as a fundraiser, is now an Innovation coach. She coached the innovation team at Cancer Research UK and now supports the Amnesty International UK Communications Team, the Social Tech Trust and other charities to move towards lean and agile ways of working. 
• Linda McBain - is Director of Marketing Delivery at Save the Children UK, leading a department of marketing, digital and agile experts. She oversees five multi-disciplinary squads which plan, deliver and optimise the charity's engagement with the UK public. Prior to this role, she was the organisation's Director of Digital and has a 16-year career in digital marketing. 
• Kelly Southcott – Founder of Kivo, Kelly is a change consultant and coach and has led multiple digital transformations that include implementation of agile teams, including Cancer Research UK, Save the Children UK and currently Crisis. She is an active enthusiast in how the principles and behaviours of agile can bring people together to deliver more.

Save the Children UK case study

In a move away from Product to be audience-first, Save the Children UK created 4 squads across the supporter journey: Awareness, Acquisition (broadest sense with campaign and advocacy colleagues), Loyalty (supporter experience) and Moments squad to take on projects that could distract e.g. rapid emergencies and Christmas. The squads are all made up of a mix of specialisms, coming together to work to achieve a common goal. Each squad has a slightly different make up but will always include marketeers, digital experience experts, creative development leads, a brand expert, analyst, data planner, scrum master and squad lead. The marketeers in squad are expected to cover the full breadth of marketing across all types of channel. The Squad Lead roles own the profit and loss for their squad, specialisms from other areas are brought in where needed and ALL mass marketing outputs are delivered via the squads.

During the first phase of lockdown Save the Children pivoted their whole marketing plan and launched an emergency appeal and 2 new products in the space of 3 weeks through the squads. 

Amnesty International UK case study

The Digital Engagement Team at Amnesty International UK is a team of 10 that delivers digital acquisition and retention, management of the website and owned social channels their objective is to meaningfully engage 2% of UK public with their work by end of 2020. Eleanor was brought in earlier this year to help with three specific challenges the team were facing and more generally achieve better ways of working.

 I’d be amazed if anyone reading this hasn’t been here….

• Challenges with sharing information with the right people at the right time, efficiently. Phrases like “I wasn’t aware of that until now” or “that decision really should have included me”.
• Mini functions or teams working in silos and not benefitting from collaborating 
• The team were mostly reactive to the needs from across the organisation, rather than delivering strategically

When Eleanor started out, she had “no idea how it would look in the end” but she was confident that agile ways of working would help. After moving to agile ways of working the Manager said they had “more moments of celebration in the last 5 months than in the past 3 years”. The then manager of the team Carmen Barlow is now the Head of Communications and is working with Eleanor to roll this out across the department, including audio and video production, design and editorial and communications planning and brand. Other parts of the organisation have also shown interest.

Crisis case study

Crisis is embarking on a move to Agile, and when lockdown began, used agile approaches to deliver its emergency coronavirus appeal, In This Together, and a subsequent campaign, Home For All. While still very early on their journey, using elements of agile helped them to bring multi-functional teams together to deliver quick-turnaround campaigns while working remotely (In This Together launched in the space of just over a week). The intention is to work out how they can bring marketing and fundraising closer together by using agile more holistically.

What is Agile?

For us, Agile is a way of working that brings together multi-disciplinary teams to deliver a shared goal, with relative autonomy, outside of the traditional hierarchy and without detailed plans and milestones. Agile comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Scrum, KanBan, Lean. Here, we talk about mixed methodologies that had been designed to fit the organisation.

Here are some of the things we learned: 

1. Don’t be too regimented

There’s a balance here, but something that can (ironically) be a challenge in implementing Agile, is that people can get a bit conformist, and think it has to be a certain way. There are many scrum evangelists out there. It’s true that there is a process to agile, and that if we’re not clear on certain principles, it can become chaotic, however, we all agreed you need to flex it to make it work for you.

For example, at Save the Children UK every squad runs differently, and Crisis is setting the same principles. It is about empowering people, giving them the training and the tools and then letting them work out what works for them.

2. Start by building awareness

A great way to get leaders and teams excited about agile is to have them watch a live stand up. Eleanor had the Amnesty Digital Engagement team observe a remote standup run by the Cancer Research UK Innovation team. This proved really powerful and helped with buy in at a higher level. You could talk about agile for 3 months but would not have had this impact! As the team watched the stand-up, she asked them to notice agile principles in action and rate those that were important to them. 

Crisis are going to watch a standup at Save the Children, so we’ll let you know how that goes!

3. Think about the results you want to see

At Save the Children UK, to make sure they were all targeting the same goals through agile, they focused on these benefits:

• Deliver long term supporter engagement
• Reduce friction between teams
• Develop more than the sum of our parts
• Unlock the full potential of our brilliant people

The team at Amnesty focused on fixing a number of issues that were presenting, and they have already seen significant results from their move to agile. I’ve used their positive results to call out some of the value markers you might want to track.

• Time spent delivering. (over bureaucracy/politics/managing) The team at Amnesty are spending more time delivering value and doing their jobs, over playing with processes.
• Feedback from within the team. “We have had more moments of celebration in thre last 5 months than in 3 years”
• Time spent in meetings. At Amnesty they have less meetings. In my experience the meetings that agile teams do have are much more focused, energetic and useful.
• Time available for strategy. Time is freed up for Heads etc., as they don’t have to be in detail, giving them time to fill the strategy gaps that so many charities have!
• Cross-team collaboration. Silos have been broken down, people are working well together for example they put out a quiz in February and normally the Head would be very involved but because they went to some stand-ups and knew what was going on, they just signed off at the end  
• Feedback from other teams. Really key if you’re implementing agile for a service delivery team. The feedback for the team at Amnesty has been glowing, despite initial concerns, communication has significantly improved.

4. Set delivery objectives 

This is a difficult one to get right. The struggle with short termism is common. We’ve worked with around 20 charities and getting clarity on objectives has been a problem everywhere.

At Save the Children UK, there is a central planning function that builds out the briefs for squads based on the organisation's supporter engagement strategy. This includes quarterly setting of goals and targets for each squad. At the beginning of the year the briefings only covered the initial quarter but it quickly became apparent that the teams needed a clearer long term roadmap. The team are now building a 12 month view, but retaining the quarterly briefing detail to help refocus or pivot activity as needed. When Covid-19 happened, they had to totally re-plan. They started with top line strategy and narrative and then held co-creation sessions to tighten the plan. Then these objectives and key results were fed into the squads.

At Amnesty International UK they set shorter term objectives. The Head of Communication gives the team context and up to date organisational priorities. The team then vote on what they should do in their next 2 week sprint to achieve their objectives. However, this year they’re creating a more proactive plan. 

5. Balance business as usual and priorities

 At Amnesty they agree what they’ll deliver as a team every two weeks. This enables them to balance BAU work and delivering strategic priorities. The team co-create their objectives, prioritise and then assign work to individuals. This enables all team members to confidently go go to other teams and say ‘we can’t do that this sprint because we are doing xyz’ 

At Save they are able to deal with the challenges of prioritisation by agreeing what they’ll have to swap out in order to swap something else in. There used to be a culture of ‘do everything’ but by having squads, it’s clear that making space for something new means moving something else out, or creating an entirely new team.

By focusing on the audience journey, rather than products or the process, you can really check and double check that the tasks we’ve always done are really important and adding value. Don’t be afraid to have a clean out and let things go!

6. Encourage a supportive culture

We reflected that there are lots of mechanisms that work well to support staff who work in agile. At Save the Children UK an individual’s work tasks are managed by squad leads whilst their well-being and pastoral care is done by their manager outside of squad. This helps, because it means they’ve got the space to get personal support from their line manager, and not just report back on their progress. This can be great for wellbeing.

Two elements of agile that we found game changing are check ins and retrospectives. People actually talk about how they’re feeling! It wasn’t that long ago that opening a meeting with “I’m feeling a bit sad/anxious/low” would have been a no-no. It’s like we’ve suddenly realised that being honest about how we’re feeling doesn’t spread bad feeling, it encourages empathy.

At Amnesty they give a daily red, amber of green status for the amount of work they had the day before which helps balance workload and stress.

7. Celebrate achievements

Celebrating achievement and showing off what’s been achieved in agile teams is a winning tool for building understanding, motivation and trust. It also shows the rest of the organisation how powerful agile working can be.  

At Save the Children UK they have review of work every 2 weeks which is open up to anyone in the organisation. Around 40 people, including members of the management team come and are shown what has been worked on – everyone is always happy to see how much work has been done. Seeing the totality of what is being produced can be really powerful and build morale.  

8. JFDI

One of the few lovable acronyms. As Eleanor attests to, sometimes a ‘just start doing it’ approach is the only way. Moving from traditional ways of working to agile is a big step. It will feel uncomfortable. Some things will work and some won’t. It takes time but the team WILL learn best through doing. The process can be messy and awkward and difficult but it’s about how to bring their skills together. At Amnesty they weren’t sure how it would work but by trusting each other and the trialling scrum they found that after 2 sprints things started to come together, then after six weeks they were facilitating agile workshops themselves.

The key is to start small and get started. We supported Save to implement Agile across Digital and Tech functions through the digital programme long before they took on agile organisationally. Don’t try to boil the ocean straight away.

We all – especially managers - need to hold our nerve. The worst thing we can do is change our mind after six months and revert to old ways of doing things because we haven’t ironed out the kinks. If you’re leading the change, find peers or a coach that can help you to maintain the confidence that it will work, you don’t know what how looks like yet and don’t have the detail, but it will work. 

At Save the Children UK they ran their ‘I am the future’ brand campaign in an agile way as a pilot and used a scrum master to help run this with a strong Head as Product Manager. Elements of that campaign that would normally have taken 9 months was completed in 8 weeks - this helped bring to life the power of agile ways of working.  

9. Reflect on who you need

Some call them delivery leaders, some call them scrum masters, some call them agile project managers, (and some people will be reading this and cringing with my randomised use of role titles to describe a role that they might see as very specific, and sacred.)

From where I’m sat, you need a dedicated role that is responsible for managing the backlog, motivating the team and supporting them to get things unblocked. They can work across multiple scrum teams (I’d say a maximum of three) but they can’t hold multiple roles within the teams. They don’t need five years’ experience as a ‘scrum master’ and they should have some flexibility to do it their way.

Linda maintains that the most important ingredient is people that have a flexible approach and are multi-skilled. Through training and certification, and some coaching, you can build teams through people you already have. But don’t forget, this is subject to having the capacity. For example, if you don’t have any traditional project managers, or if your managers have been filling a gap in delivery leadership, then there might not be anyone to convert! That said, you might find people where you least expect it. And organisational knowledge is an important attribute in roles that will lead change. Find people that are eager to help overcome the barriers they’ve faced. Promote those that are hungry. 

The roles you’ll need, and how you will work will depend on the size and complexity of the change and the breadth of the agile teams’ accountability. For example:

• If you’re looking at embedding agile across delivery of fundraising and marketing, then you’re going to need to shift a lot of behaviours and you’re going to need people to be accountable for the success of your agile team/s. You’ll need: Scrum Master. Squad Lead
• If you’re looking at embedding agile within a delivery team (let’s say digital marketing or technology) as your first step towards an agile organisation, you may not need a full on scrum master. You’ll need: Someone accountable for the team’s success. An agile coach to help build the self-organising team.

 10. Building confidence takes longer than building skills

 For multi-disciplinary scrums to work, members need to be multi-skilled! Otherwise we’d have about ten marketers in every team! One offline, one for content, one for SEO, one for email, one for… you get the point! And that’s just so 2010.

Making space for development is important. You can do this by protecting, say, an afternoon every sprint, or you can limit the number of tickets a squad takes on, making sure they’re prioritising time to think about learning and development and strategic planning. Even after they’re trained, people tend to lean on the “specialist” roles rather than take the leap. And the “digital” roles keep doing the tasks rather than taking a step back and training the people around them.

We also need to support the people that are impacted by the transition to Agile, but aren’t necessarily within the new teams. In some cases people will need to stop doing things they used to do. 

• They might need to stop insisting on detailed updates from their line reports or team (and attend retros instead)
• They might need to stop calling meetings to get updates
• or they may need to accept they’ll no longer be signing off on design
• They might need to use the new time they have for strategy and team leadership, which they may not be used to.

It can be a hard transition. In many ways letting go is harder than taking on something brand new. 

So, on top of the time for development, you need to build in time to build self-belief on top of technical skills. Coaching and mentoring can help with this.

In conclusion…  

Moving to an agile way of working can be hard work. It requires everyone involved to trust in the process, make changes that can feel uncomfortable at first, and support one another through. Benefits such as wellbeing, communications improvements, speed to market and improved skills can be realised really quickly. There’s no doubt it’ll take time to start seeing shifts that will revolutionise your organisation, and there will be niggles and complaints along the way, but it’s absolutely worth it, and with the right support, a whole lot of fun.