Let’s call a spade a spade. We can call many processes “agile,” and teams can claim that they are practicing scrum. Still, there are sizable steps going from following basic agile ceremonies to agile methodologies or cultures.
Specifically, teams are not agile if all they are doing is
- Conducting daily standups
- Utilizing a Kanban board
- Using an agile tool to open and manage tickets
- Creating skill or platform-specific teams
- Telling leaders that they are not waterfall
Obviously, some of these are agile methodology aspects, but you don’t bake a cake by only creaming the sugar. Agile teams need to get the basic ingredients right and use them correctly for agile practices to deliver on their promises.
Driving Delivery Results Requires Agile Principles
Here are a couple of reasons why agile teams don’t get past the basic ingredients
- No team is leading the agile transformation – Process change and improvements don’t happen on its own, nor should it be led by one all-agile-knowing czar. A best practice is to designate a small team to help define agile principles and where agile teams should adopt standards.
- A lack of accountability around delivery – Agile’s delivery should be measured, and process improvement tied to where teams need help. When teams aren’t measuring successful releases, sprints, and stories, where is the incentive to improve agile methodologies? There isn’t, and teams just go along following methodologies handed down to them.
- Failed attempts instrumenting prescriptive agile practices – Larger organizations that elect to scale agile face many hurdles, and the primary one is that instrumenting overly prescriptive agile methodologies are hard to adopt. When teams get frustrated, or leaders run out of runway to instrument change, agile organizations are left with a hodgepodge of agile practices used differently by each team.
- Lack of role definition – Ask ten people in the organization on the roles of product owners, scrum masters, technical leads, and who has what agile responsibilities, and you’re likely to get five or more different answers.
- Agile planning is ill-defined – Most agile practices, including prioritization, standups, reviews, and retrospective, all focus on agile team delivery. When teams don’t have agile planning practices defined, then backlogs are sparse, and just-in-time planning is the norm.
So this leads to five principles I help agile organizations define:
- An agile way of working leadership team
- Basic KPIs on agile delivery
- Guides that help organizations define their agile principles and operating models
- Agile role definitions that organizational leaders can adjust to their cultures
- StarCIO Agile Planning, a continuous planning methodology for planning backlogs and roadmaps
As always, I am here for your questions. If you don’t know where to start, continue, or grow with how low-code can drive digital transformation, please reach out to me!
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