Forget Pumpkin Spice, add some Agile Spice this Year

Worried about what to ask Santa for this Christmas? As the holiday season fast approaches and our teams start to disappear for much deserved time away, how about a little stocking stuffer of festive Agile?

Before we start, let’s just assume you have Agile (in some form) running well in your teams. 

Now, your reaction to me saying “running well” is probably an indication of your need to spice up your Agile practice. I can imagine a mix of emotions from incredulity to head-shaking from here.

This isn’t surprising. Just like any process after a while things can get stale, aren’t having the impact they once did, or no longer reflect the needs of the business.

But now’s a good time to sit back, reflect and plan a few changes, whether over a warming Christmas hot chocolate or something stronger. It’s a process that I’ve thought through already and here’s a few areas that can really spice up your Agile in the New Year.

1              Demo completed work each sprint. I would say this is one of the most important items that can really increase the excitement levels around Agile (mainly Scrum) in an entire organization. My favorite way of doing this is by demoing live to the whole company. In our case, my team uses Zoom to stream our bi-weekly demos to the entire organization. Not every one of my teams demos every week, but every team does demo.

2              Rethink what “done” means. A definition of done should be a living document. Take some time to agree with your team what it means for 2019. This doesn’t have to be a time-consuming exercise to create a detailed company wide version - just ask your teams and the product owner to refresh their standard. This helps demos become more meaningful to the company and makes the reason why a team might not demo after a sprint less subjective. For example, I’ve seen some amazing demos that were backend code and API responses. Not everything has to be a highly polished UI to demo – let’s face it, the whole world now runs on APIs.

3              Measure your success – and say thanks. One of the massive value points in Scrum or Kanban is the ability to empirically measure the capacity, completed work, impact on revenue, new customers, retention, or features completed in 2018. Take some time to spread the holiday cheer, celebrate now and thank your teams. It is a simple thing to do, but is probably the most overlooked part of driving greater success. We ask our teams to do magic all year long. Make this a time to say thank you!

4              Pick one thing to stop/start/continue. As part of your reflections take a look at what you want to change and make them New Year’s Resolutions. Here’s my particular thoughts:

·     Stop: Pre-pre-planning before release planning. It’s not Agile, it is basically waterfall in disguise.

·     Start: Making demos more of a celebration. I used to literally bring popcorn to the event to help with this.

·     Continue: Being flexible with the process and give teams latitude to adjust. There is no ‘one size fits all’ in Agile.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you think people can spice up Agile in 2019, in particular the one thing you’d stop/start/continue in your Agile practice. Just leave them in the comments section below.

I hope you had an amazingly productive year and are ready for the adventures of 2019!