Setting up an agile innovation team

My friend Daniel is a superstar software developer. A few months ago I spotted a book on his bookshelf called ‘Coaching Agile Teams’. Judging the book by its cover, I was expecting something dry and tech-y but quickly realised there was lots I could learn to help the innovators I work with to work more effectively. I borrowed the book, read it cover to cover and still haven’t given it back to Daniel. Just as well, because 2 weeks ago I started as Team Coach for the Innovation Team at Cancer Research UK.

The innovation team’s mission at Cancer Research UK is to lead the creation of trailblazing propositions to beat cancer sooner. My role as their coach is to get this team for 10 running like a well oiled machine. I believe that the best way to do that is to transplant the agile ways of working that software product development teams use into this non-technology team. The innovation team aren’t software developers and they’re not yet building products but I believe that applying agile principles will enable them to deliver awesome innovations in future.

Luckily for the team I bring more experience than just reading one book. For the last 12 months I’ve been leading a team creating an in-house service which coaches fundraising teams to test and learn their way forwards and adopt agile ways of working. (Julia, who’s part of that team shared what she’s learned about embedding agile in non-Technology teams here).

My aim for the next 2 months is for the Innovation team to be working together in a non-hierarchical way to plan and manage their work; setting and improving their team vision plus the short-term goals and specific tasks that will get them to that vision; regularly reflecting on how they’re working in order to improve on how they work. I took the first step towards this last week. The team pooled their ideas on what we should do to set up the team then voted the 3 things to do first. They chose:

- Set a vision for the team (what do we want to achieve together?)

- Agree how we’ll work together (what tools, meetings etc will we use?)

- Get to know each other as humans (who are we as individuals?)

A member of the team each ran a quick exercise to create our first iteration of each idea. My input was to facilitate the whole day and ensure we focused on creating our first, quick and dirty, iteration of each thing rather than crafting something polished. You can see all the detail of what we did here. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll check back in on actions we created and we’ll make the next iteration of our three things above.

I’ll keep you posted on progress!