Work on having “ALMA”! Do you have an Agile Soul?
To my dear followers that have been working hard, doing what is needed to move out of the Agile Limbo, it is time for consolidation! I provide you with a framework that helps you leverage where you are in terms of Agile maturity, and the areas you need to focus on. For those who don’t know what I am talking about, I do not even know what to say, you are deep in the Limbo! So check out my original article, How to know you are in an Agile Limbo and start your journey to move out of there!
WOW! This has been an amazing journey, I learned and shared a lot with all my colleagues, contributors, and readers, and just have to thank you all for the insights and discussions. Also for the time you dedicated to me and especially to your teams, working to get out of the Agile Limbo, and you know the journey is not an easy one, and this never ends, right? There is always a conflict, a person, or a situation you need to address. And going back to Basics, revisiting the values is always needed. I like an approach took by one of my first Scrum professors. “Always check back to the Manifesto to leverage your decisions when you have doubts”. For us here, it will be “Always check back to the values to be sure!”
You know everyone loves an acronym right? And ours, for me it illustrates what it takes to be an Agile leader — ALMA. This word in Spanish means Soul, so what a great destiny coincidence! Soul is really what is needed to take a mere team to the light of Agility! It is not an easy path, as we have been discussing here, but just people with ALMA can move forward, so here is the framework to understand how big is your Agile Soul!
First let’s talk about the values, that I will call dimensions here. Do you remember what they are? If not check my original articles on Accountability, Learning, Motivation, and Autonomy. For each of them, I gave some levels, where you start with and work that up until you get where we need.
Accountability: Describes WHO perceived as accountable.
0- None
1- Board Only
2- Area Management
3- Team Leadership (YOU)
4- People level (everyone)
Learning: Describes HOW learning is being implemented.
0- None
1- Some occasional training
2- Some cycled reviews
3- Reviews baked into the process
4- Learning culture
Motivation: Describes HOW and WHO follows the company VISION.
0- None
1- We have a vision somewhere (in a presentation I do not know)
2- Upper management always talk about it
3- Team leadership follows it. (You know HOW you give value to your company)
4- People know the Vision and HOW they give value to the company.
Autonomy: Describes WHO is TRUSTED by the company to do things your way.
0- None
1- Upper Management
2- Area management
3- Team leadership (YOU!)
4- Full Autonomy
This gives us the sheet below.
Now, inspired by Disciplined Agile, that proposes a spider graph to diagnose the context of your teams, let us plot it.
Now imagine your company is like this. It seems you need to work hard on Learning and Autonomy, but half-way through Accountability and Motivation! This is a good start. Now you can use the questions and next steps to work with your teams, focusing on the right areas! Isn’t that great?
And what about the situation below? This is called Agile Chaos! And happens a lot in startups and small companies. This means everyone is the boss, but no one is the boss! Get it? A good Agile leader here, would take a lot of steps back on Accountability and Autonomy, and work to define processes, before SCALING team. See how powerful it can be?
And you? Liked the framework? Ready to measure your Agile Soul, and make the Agile dream come true to you and your company? — Let me know in the comments below.
About TheAgilist
Eduardo Martins is a project manager with more than 15 years of consulting experience delivering projects/programs to all kinds of companies worldwide. Agilist by heart, he is passionate about empowering and improving teams. Eduardo holds a bachelor and post graduations in Information Technology, and is certified in a series of Agile methods, holding certifications like PMP, Scrum Master, Six Sigma Black Belt, and more recently he was recognized as one of the firsts PMI Disciplined Agile Lean Scrum Masters in the world. He hosts TheAgilist page in Medium where he writes articles to share and enhance Agility knowledge, and as everything in life, comes from his experience of many years living these situations, and may not be your case.
