Discovering Agile as a Corporate Sales Representative

I’ve worked in Sales in most parts of my career and always wanted to be a part of a collaborative team.?Unfortunately,?when I was in sales, I felt like a?'Lone Ranger'?that was pretty much working in a silo to achieve a personal sales target till it was time for sales report meeting and that was basically the cycle of it even during the pre COVID-19 days.?

Despite having the familiarity of the term Agile,?I have always thought that Agile was just meant for technical teams such as IT, project or even operations.

Never have I thought the practices could also be inculcated for departments like sales and marketing till I joined CI Agile.?Glad to finally experience what it is like to be a part of a hyper-productive cross-functional teams.?

Experiencing the potential of Scrum has also led me to attend?the?Scrum Master and Product Owner by Scrum Inc.?training with the intention to upskill myself with the right knowledge in order to help my customers better.??

By becoming a student once again, I have managed to finally grasp the understanding of a Scrum Master and a Product Owner in a Scrum Team which is greatly helping me with my daily role at work now!

Encountering Strong Headed Corporate Individuals

My line of work includes many interesting conversations with people across many functional departments on a daily basis. It is not unusual that there will be people who are willing to share about the experiences of their roles while some remains reluctant to do so.

Personally, the conversations that interest me most are with project managers.?As I have spoken to a number of them, I realized that many are still using the traditional ways of running a project while some function in a hybrid manner of both Agile and the traditional framework. Usually traditional project managers are more adamant on their usual ways of work and some tend to be resistant to the knowledge shared.?

Even though I do not have the title of a project manager, my personal experience of building a product or handling small projects internally always reminds that everyone has a different journey and I appreciate those insights provided by people whom I have the opportunity to connect with.??It was also through those conversations that triggered me to reflect back on my own Scrum discovery experience.??

My Recent Read - 15th State of Agile Report

As a new practitioner of the Agile practices, I have taken some time to look into the current news of Agile globally. This gave me interesting insights on how Agile knowledge has brought values to organizations in a bird’s eye view, especially with the on-going pandemic that has changed the world’s way of working.?

Although software development (the place it started from) still remains as the top adopter of Agile, we are also seeing a significant increase in users from?other disciplines.?

We know how easily Covid-19 disrupts businesses.?Ever since the pandemic hits, unforeseen circumstances surfaced and pressured businesses to accelerate delivery, manage changing priorities and while still maintaining productivity and alignment at its best.?In short, having laser focus on?delivering better business outcomes has became a must have for businesses to thrive.

It is natural to see that the top 5 barriers to Agile adoption pertain to the team and its disposition towards Agility.?

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

?According to the first value in the Agile Manifesto, True Agility can only happen when the team is ready and willing to change while being able to harness their energy to innovate as well as solving problems that stands in the way of progression.

Last but not least, it is utterly important to measure whether an Agile Delivery is successful or otherwise and customers are always the best compass to validate that.??A good Agile Delivery should result in?reduced waste, increased business value delivered, user satisfaction, and teams' efficiency.

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Disclaimer:

This is my own sharing. All the materials are publicly available on Linkedin or other freely available sources. Please let me know if I've made a mistake, I'll be happy to rectify it.