Managing Collaborative and Agile Teams of the Future.

This is a no-brainer — companies need to reinvent their approach, embracing new sets of tools and principles. With the initiation of business management practices, today’s business environment has become versatile and uncertain. The requirements of clients are changing. To avoid any risky circumstances, the project management team acts quickly so that project timelines and priorities can be achieved. Traditionally, the practice of project management followed a linear approach. Based on the assumption that projects have an open-and-shut definition of “finished,” project managers are accustomed to work towards clear-cut and pre-established deadlines, budgets, and scopes. But that premise is becoming continuously more distorted. With the concept of a finished project becoming hazy, the systems that drive many of our organizations are becoming continuous as opposed to fixed. For these reasons, modern crisis teams are turning from command-and-control systems to more adaptive, agile approaches.

It is no coincidence that large-scale enterprises as well as smaller firms are jumping in with both feet, to adopt a model of small teams that work in short cycles and learn continuously. They are chasing outcomes rather than output, accumulating facts and engaging in real-time priority-setting to determine their next steps rather than taking the blind alley down a predefined plan. This conquers the unpredictability of rapidly evolving technologies and customer behaviors. Agile project teams have to be very adaptable and self-sufficient, since they have to be at the helm of changing customer demands at every stage of the project.?The variability and volatility of events are too high for rigid directives.?????????????????????????????????????????????

With agile management, teams are urged to focus on responding to change rather than follow a linear map, allowing for more wiggle room. The need to respond quickly while still delivering results could lead to a sticky situation, but agile makes that changeover to an alternate strategy cool, calm and collected. The sum and substance here is that business objectives would have to be satisfied in shorter time limits instead of just getting a huge number of tasks checked off the list.

Many companies came on board to embrace agile because it was the newest wrinkle being grasped by the most successful organizations. Companies were headstrong about adopting the agile practices and engaged in all the formalities of having dedicated teams and daily standups with two-week sprints. But would they be able to unlock its full potential if they were to stop here? A host of questions arise at this point… are the teams giving precedence to items from the backlog that bring the maximum returns or are they pulling items that are easy to do? Are they sticking to their waterfall practices and have only shifted the implementations to two-week sprints? Are you deriving full benefit from your agile teams? Are the agile practices delivering on the promise of innovation, faster business outcomes and better quality?

Communication - the end all and be all

Agile processes and tools provide support, but the central weight bearing mechanism of the agile approach is not the scrum or the sprint. Rather, it’s the team’s communication link — the way team members interact — that ultimately determines success. The dialogic process describes how the team uses conflicting views to good advantage. Communication is the winning formula- so communication, even over-communication of the strategic intent to a broader range of people is encouraged. Strengthening the lines of communication among the teams helps avert bottlenecks. Some gold standard practices of an agile team include daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives after every sprint, pair programming and buddy reviews, collaborating with customers, and more face-to-face time instead of mountains of documentation. These exercises promote frequent and open communication.

Two’s an agile team, three’s a crowd…

Exaggerating teamwork is not necessary, recent studies discovered that agile organizations ought to rightsize it. This indicates taking into account how much teamwork and how many teammates are needed at each stage of a project to get it done efficiently and effectively. By puzzling out if teamwork is necessary or not, time wasted can be significantly reduced.

In such a case, by popping the questions, who should be involved? why? and when? will take your relationship with agile to the next level. If teamwork isn’t the perfect companion, then it's best to break it off. According to a concept proposed by Jeff Bezos, a team that can't be fed by two pizzas, is awfully big.

Learning takes center stage

The driving ambition of any agile leader is to create a workplace ecosystem that empowers employees to be innovative troubleshooters. However, this undertaking cries out for advocating a collective awareness of the purpose and developing an inclination towards rapid learning. To accelerate the pace of learning, throughout each phase of the plan, implementing learning loops to test, learn, iterate, adjust and re-test will testify progress.?This fleet-footed environment is forcing organizations to turn the corner and lift their systems, processes and their people — as a means to forge ahead and ensure continued relevance and a competitive edge in the current volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions. There should be an urgency to keep reviewing, reflecting and improving. Maintaining Continuous Learning vouches that workforce are versatile and innovative in the face of unpredictable challenges. This process allows the agile team to show work to “users” who provide genuine feedback. Which can be used by agile teams to gain insight, reinforce ideas and to learn. It all boils down to stakeholder communication and user interaction within the team, sans which user needs and business objectives are far from being met.

The increasing volatility, uncertainty, growing complexity, and ambiguous information has triggered a business environment in which agile teams are all the more relevant. If the scope of a project needs to change for whatever reason — maybe?for instance, the market has been affected by a pandemic, agile embraces change without the blood, sweat, and tears.