Is your team Agile Enough?

We all know that Scrum Masters are accountable for the performance of a process and for ensuring the process delivers value to its stakeholders. How will a Scrum Master make sure that agile values are implemented and imbibed in his/her project?

Take a scenario. You’ve got a Product Owner in your team. You’ve got a product backlog. You’re working in two-week sprints. All the scrum events are in place. Congratulations! You’re an agile team!

Well on a second thought, are you really an agile team? It depends.

A common challenge within teams is that while they’ve implemented various pieces of the Agile, they never truly get to experience all the benefits of the process. That’s the difference between doing agile and being agile.

As a process owner I will look for few traits and behaviors within my team which will help me understand whether my team is operating in the spirit of agile.

1.??????I will see whether my team is in touch with customers and responsive to their needs. The key to becoming a true Agile team is to involve stakeholders at all stages of the development process.

2.??????Whether team is having team-defined work plans as opposed to orders coming down from project managers or PO.

3.??????Whether team is highly collaborative and self-organizing.

4.??????Whether they are continually delivering output that is usable. Does the team regularly produce value for stakeholders?

5.??????Whether they have ability to focus on essential work while eliminating the unnecessary work.

6.??????Can they remain calm under stress and make a sound judgment?

7.??????Are they working on feedbacks? Does the team strive to improve their process?

8.??????Whether the team is empowered enough to make decisions?

I will ponder over these sorts of questions to gauge the agile maturity level of the team.

If I get a positive answer for most of these questions, I can say agile is being implemented and agile values are imbibed in my team to some extent. It will help me to plan my next course of action, be it an agile workshop, a session on mindset change, agile games, coffee chats, hackathons or any team building activities. This exercise will help me focus on the areas where team still need to improve on agile mindset.

I like to highlight three main aspects before I conclude. First, Doing Agile can be achieved overnight, but being Agile is a journey. Second, doing Agile is easy, but being Agile is difficult. Finally, doing Agile satisfies the management while being Agile defines the Agile culture.

Agile is designed to deliver results, not processes. Use the questions above to determine if you are actually achieving those results, so you know all the effort you're putting in is worth it.