Getting Started with Agile

Not just another Agile ‘How to’ guide – some pragmatic tips and advice on getting started with Agile.

The decision to take the jump into Agile is not one to be taken lightly. However, if you are serious about changing your delivery approach to one which empowers you to deliver value and quality as quickly as possible, it’s really hard to ignore the raft of evidence which sings the praises of the Agile approach.

First things first though – a brief caveat: for the duration of this article, I will be deliberately talking ‘Agile’ and not talking about too many specifics relating to any particular Agile flavour or framework. It’s really important to call out that I’m not just talking about delivering software either – Agile is far more than just a technology focused approach, even if most of the case studies have emerged from the world of software/technology. These tips should apply to any implementation of Agile, regardless of industry.

For the purpose of this article – when I say ‘Agile’, I mean;

“An adaptive method for delivering value iteratively, whilst maintaining high quality standards – where individuals and interactions, demonstrable end products, collaboration and responsiveness to change are valued above all else”

Having been through a number of Agile transformations and picked up the related battle scars and learnings, I wanted to try and distill my experiences into five key tips for setting yourself up for success and getting the most out of working in an Agile way.

1. Visualise your work

When it comes to any type of delivery – if you can encourage your team to have an unblemished sense of purpose and accountability for the work in question, you will find that they will move heaven and earth to achieve your collective goals. The best way I have found to foster that sense of ownership is to have clearly articulated visual summaries of all your teams’ work – preferably in the direct eyeline of the team! When a visual representation of your backlog of work and current outstanding tasks is staring you in the face, it’s very hard to turn a blind eye.

The concept of the BVIR (Big Visible Information Radiator) is something that appears in a lot of continuous improvement and Agile frameworks – it’s essentially a team board that has enough information on it to demonstrate progress and flow, whilst being simple and clear enough that an outsider should be able to work out what the information means without too much explanation.

I’ve seen first-hand on multiple occasions the positive impact of having your work visualised – teams will make extra effort to complete in-flight items and are much more conscious about how much work is in progress at one time. Questions start to be asked from within the team if one person has a myriad of tasks on the board which aren’t moving – and surprisingly, the questions often aren’t ‘why are you so slow?’ or ‘why have you got so much work in progress?’, but much more helpful and pragmatic questions like ‘can I help you complete any of your tasks?’ and ‘shall I pick up the next new task so you can focus on finishing your in-flight work?’.

2. Remember: The team wins, or the team loses

One of the biggest (and hardest) changes in the early phases of adopting Agile, is the conscious shift from focusing on individual success and moving to focus on team success. Regardless of which flavour of Agile you choose to start off with, most will have a massive focus on team goals and team outcomes. This isn’t to say that individual performance and success isn’t important, but for most Agile teams, the team success is greater than the sum of the parts.

Focusing on team success is a real enabler for some of the behaviours which ultimately will help you succeed together – thinking back to the example in point 1 above, it’s important to encourage your team to ask questions like ‘how can I help the rest of the team complete their outstanding work?’ and this only happens when the team is focused on group success.

Why is team success important? Well, let’s say you’re in a team of 10 people. Five of your team consistently complete their work in the timescales you’ve set yourselves, but 5 often miss deadlines. The chances are (particularly in larger organisations), people outside the team will associate failure with your entire team and not necessarily just the individuals who are off the mark. By focusing on team success, you set an expectation with the rest of the business that your team delivers what it says it will. If someone in your team is struggling to hit their deadlines, then the rest of the team can swarm around to help them.

Working this way also helps to engender a real sense of teamwork. If you’re going into a large team delivery and you know that everyone has your back, it really does inspire confidence!

3. Set a regular cadence and stick to it

Many Agile delivery frameworks come with a prescribed set of meetings/ceremonies. Whether to act as a checkpoint for progress and blockages, to give the team chance to plan the next increment of work, or to inspect and adapt how the team is performing, all of these events are most effective if they are underpinned with a level of consistency and routine that enables all the appropriate team members and stakeholders to attend.

By setting a regular cadence of meetings and events, you give the team chance to arrange the rest of their meetings and ‘focus time’ around them. For instance, if your planning ceremony happens every second Tuesday between 9am-11am, with no deviations or last-minute time changes, then your team will make that slot sacred and will plan everything else around it. From a personal perspective, there is nothing more frustrating that having an important team ceremony re-planned at the last minute, meaning you have to scramble and shift your diary to accommodate.

Having dedicated face to face (or face to video conference) contact is also really important for improving team dynamics – in my experience, spending time with colleagues in the typical sprint/iteration ceremonies helps to build your sense of ‘team’ and form better personal relationships.

4. Regularly benchmark your estimates

Estimating can be a real minefield, regardless of the delivery approach you are employing. If you’re attempting to get your team to take on a new Agile way of working, where typically there is a big focus on breaking large pieces of work down into smaller chunks, poor estimation can really impact the velocity and morale of your team. There are a myriad of estimating techniques you can use in the Agile world (planning poker, dot voting, affinity sizing etc), but all of these can be supplemented by having a benchmark to refer back to at regular intervals.

Whether you have taken the leap into using Story Points to estimate, or whether you’re using hours/days or t-shirt sizing, it makes a huge difference in the reliability and accuracy of your future estimates to have benchmark for comparison. For instance, if you are using t-shirt sizing (giving tasks a relative size/effort of S, M, L, XL), it’s really helpful to be able to refer back to previous estimates and use them to help you decide the size of a new item – “well last planning session, we said that delivering Task A was an ‘XL’ – this tasks feels about the same size/level of effort as that one”.

Taking this approach can be especially helpful when you have a few strong characters on the team. Rather than letting the loudest voice or the most persuasive argument win the estimation battle, the team can collectively refer to the benchmarks and attempt to take a more empirical approach to judging the appropriate estimate for the task in hand.

5. Inside out transitions work better than outside in

Particularly in larger enterprises, programmes of change and transformation can be seemingly endless. Moving to Agile ways of working will inevitably be met with some level of cynicism from the teams involved – another change coming their way!

Before we get into the depths of this particular tip, a quick nod to the biology of our brains; there is a construct within our brains called the limbic system – this part of the brain is associated with the most primitive, reactionary and emotive responses to external stimuli. The typical “fight or flight” responses are thought to start within the limbic system. At times of extreme stress – our limbic system takes over and the more developed part of our brains responsible for critical thinking and higher executive functions take a backseat. With that in mind – if we’re going to force massive changes to the way we’re expecting people to work, then we should expect them to feel stressed and to be more likely to drop into the emotive and reactionary responses associated with the limbic system.

So how do we get around this? In Simon Sinek’s 2014 book, “Leaders Eat Last”, Sinek asserted that people who feel they have more control over their own situation at work, suffer less stress. So in short – encourage the team to take control of moving to work in a more Agile way, don’t impose it on them!

This is certainly easier said than done. Ultimately, most organisations taking the leap to Agile tend to pick a framework and roll this out – almost to act as a common hymn sheet that the company can sing from in unison. But how the specific frameworks are employed can certainly change per team and having change champions embedded in your teams can make a huge difference to the levels of buy-in and engagement you get.

One size doesn't always fit all

Picking just five tips to discuss here was pretty tough. Every organisation is different and I'm very conscious that there will never be a blanket approach out-of-the-box which solves everyone's problems. These tips are based on real life experiences from the last 7 or 8 years and I'm confident that they are broad enough to apply to a wide set of scenarios.

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About the author: Alex currently manages the Agile delivery capability within the Experian Programme and Project Centre of Excellence. Whilst being heavily involved in the overall strategic direction of Experian’s Agile transformation, Alex also acts as an internal consultant in the form of Release Train Engineer, Scrum Master and Agile Coach.