Why bother with agile?

Basic

difficulty

Stage 1

Agile IQ® Level

Team Setup

EVENT

Introduction

Many organisations seek agility. Its promise is faster delivery, higher quality, and lower costs, all with sustainable pace.

71% of organisations adopt agile to reduce project costs - CollabNet VersionOne (2019)

What's in it for me? And the team?

Self Management

Agile teams are self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

When teams self-manage, they are more effective:

  • More effective
  • Faster decision-making
  • Increased productivity 15-20%
  • Higher quality
  • Achieve goals more often
  • Feel more useful
  • Feel more challenged

Agile teams are responsible for all product-related activities from stakeholder collaboration, verification, maintenance, operation, experimentation, research and development, and anything else that might be required. They are structured and empowered by the organisation to manage their own work

What does the manager do?

A manager’s role shifts from task management and being directive on what to do and how to do it to:

  • Establishing the guardrails that guide self management
  • Managing the environment that the team works in.

What’s the catch?

Self-management comes at a cost. Agile teams are expected to:

  • Work within the guardrails that managers establish for decision-making. The more mature an agile team, the more it makes its work transparent, the greater the autonomy managers will give to the team.
  • Deliver an Increment of work each Sprint, one that is of high enough quality to give to stakeholders and users to use.
  • Work within timeboxes for agile events like planning, review and retrospectives.
  • Hold each other to account as professionals.

Learn More

Self-Organisation

Self-organising teams are more effective than manager-led teams. You can easily achieve 15-20% more productivity this way.

Manager's role in agile

What is a manager's role in agile?

Continuous learning culture

Agility gives you room to improve and to be active in learning and taking time out for experimentation.

Sprinting

Working in a cadence of rapid, short work cycles, is key to receiving fast feedback to learn, innovate, and pivot to change.

References

CollabNet VersionOne (2019) 13th Annual State of Agile Report.

Sutherland, J. and Schwaber, K. (2020) The Scrum Guide. The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game.

agile iq academy logo 2022-05-05 sm

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