So, we’ve reached the end of our series – Being Agile in Practice. Here is a summary of our top tips and some questions to ask yourself that will help you to master agile in practice. Click the links in the titles to delve deeper into each topic.
Part 1: Healthy Backlogs
- Who creates the items in the backlog?
- Do you allow team members to collaborate with the product owner to create higher-quality user stories?
- How accessible is the backlog?
- Is your backlog DEEP? (Detailed Appropriately, Estimated, Emergent and Prioritised)
- Do you have a timebox for regular backlog refinement sessions?
- Do you have a work intake mechanism to prevent garbage from making it to the backlog?
- Do you have a definition of ready? Is it lightweight enough to support experimentation but robust enough to ensure quality?
Part 2: Stable Teams
- Get the right people on the team
- Get the size right
- Invest in the team
- Track the team turnover
Part 3: Deliver Often
- Make Your releases smaller
- Invest in automation
- Build a culture of testing
- Empower your teams
Part 4: Technical Excellence
- Test, test and test some more. If you don’t have more test code than production code, you aren’t trying hard enough.
- Integrate early and often
- Deploy to production early and often
- Automate as much of your workflow as possible
- Read the documentation
Part 5: Speed to Decision
- Using “High Velocity Decision Making” principles
- Decentralize decision making
- Be ruthless with prioritisation
What’s Next?
As our series has shown, you don’t have to be using Scrum, Kanban, Scaled Agile, or anything else to be agile, but you can take lessons from all and more to be agile in practice. This is the mindset that we look for in our coaches and embed in our clients on a daily basis.
There is no one size fits all to being agile, but there are thousands of small experiments to run to get the size that fits you.
We hope you’ve found this series a useful resource full of practical tips! If you are looking for extra support to put agile into practice in your organisation, get in touch with our team today to learn more about our agile training, coaching and consultancy services.
Or consider joining our Agile Masterclass leadership coaching series which has been designed to help leaders overcome personal and organisational transformation challenges.
