Agile is a mindset not a process!

agile — the ability to move quickly and easily.

Agile — a software project management method that is characterised by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans.

Here is my view on what the most important ingredients of an agile team are:

Communication:
You can’t over communicate (You can communicate poorly but thats different) Getting a shared understanding across the team and organisation is integral to ongoing success.

Autonomy:
The team are free to act and operate as they see fit. They are clear on what they are trying to achieve but they decide how they get there.

Collaboration:
Everybody in the team works together. Those that need to be involved in decisions are. Each team member is easily accessible by the others.

The right skills:
Multi disciplinary skill sets that compliment each other. Plenty of T shaped people that collectively build a team of deep knowledge and broad understanding of other disciplines.

Chaord:
Chaotic order. There is no perfect plan. The team are able to flex and adapt as they go. Just enough order to move forward but a degree of chaos in how people are organised. A lot like nature. Integral to this is that everybody in the team is comfortable with the level of chaord.

Direction and purpose:
No point in using your most finite resource, time, to build something that shouldn’t be built at all. Make sure the team understand and believe in what they are building. Not just for monetary gain but for the bigger picture.

Understanding:
Understanding of how the teams going to work, of each persons role and responsibility within the team and of these principles.

Here is what I see many companies believe are the ideal ingredients of an Agile team:

Daily standups — Sprint planning — Retrospectives:
I put all these together because they’re all equally as useless if done for the wrong reasons. People milling around going through the motions does not mean you have an Agile team.

Common problems I’ve experienced in organisations with these:

• People reporting directly to scrum masters in their daily standups to justify time spent on a task. This is called management!
• The team putting tasks in a backlog to appease the management knowing full well thats not how they will structure or do the work. This is then tracked throughout the sprint as if it were how they actually did the work.
• The team not feeling empowered or able to air their problems or frustrations due to repercussions of others in the room.
• The team not being able to adapt, evolve or improve their ways of working because thats not how the organisation run their sprint processes.

Roles and responsibilities:
People being pigeonholed. Just because someone has a job title doesn’t mean thats all they can do. People need to be empowered to bring a diverse range of skills to the table in order to best solve problems

Control:
No person in the team is more or less important than any other. This is not a team that can be controlled by a Master.

Ownership:
The product is not owned by anyone. You may want it to be but it is the sum of all its parts. The team must work as a cohesive unit to understand the problems they seek to solve and then work with and understand the users to ensure it is appropriate.

Metrics:
People are not numbers. You can’t slap numerical values on them and move them around in excel spread sheets. Humans are also rubbish at predicting time, stop trying to work out the time it takes to build something.

Organisations need to stop trying to fit old and outdated managerial principles into the new hip Agile world that they’ve read so much about. Instead they need to look at ways they can empower teams to work together to solve meaningful problems and deliver value to the customer, the business and themselves.