Agile — ‘hello world!’ that keeps us on the same line

When we mentioned the success of a team, what came to our mind to describe the team can be various from their abilities to the effort they push to the work, however without unity the team is easily ruined as ‘Avenger’ from ‘Captain America: the civil war’ shows us that even the strong team can be put in hard time, when unity is taken away.

I am quite new to Agile, which was introduced to me by Suwitcha Pondd Sugthana in his course in Mahidol University. For this whole period, he built a solid foundation for me and my friends in the class. I would say this is a perfect jigsaw to fit in the project management related courses, since I practiced the traditional waterfall for a term project in a course [ISAD], thus I got the idea of how project is developed and things like meeting, designing and coding. However, I feel something is missing …

Two month ago, my new journey began with agile ship. Since then, there are many WOW! moment, especially in the class. Started in the first class, Suwitcha Pondd Sugthana introduced us to the important of time and team management via lego workshop by changing the process, which I find that is really really a must for student. In each round, the requirement keeps changing as well as our teammates (they can get fire), however we have to adapt quick, in other words, ‘be agile’ to keep on with the team. I find that team-building activities like Lego and many others are keys that help us experience agile principles in action. Below is the link to LEGO team-building activities.

http://seriousplaypro.com/2014/09/11/team-building-activities-with-lego-bricks/

After learning agile for quite some time, we started a new project follows the agile way. Here is the list of what I find agile useful:

• Frequent product review
• Adaptive to user feedbacks
• Unite our team

“Unite our team” — this is what I find a blood-vessel for the team, since the development is divided into sprint and there is a retrospection at the end of each sprint. This is key that keeps us [my team] on the same page. Retrospection itself is a review of the past sprint, it is a kind of meeting, which each team member expresses their feeling in each day of sprint.

This is the retrospection, I did with my team;

• snow — :D
• sun — :)
• cloud — :|
• rain — :(

From this we see the overall emotion of the team and we dig deeper to the rationale behind each feeling. This is really useful to find problems that hold back the work and we understand teammates more.

Once problem is detected, we focus on solution in the following sprint.

I would say that agile emphasizes the important of process not on product, and it keeps me and my team to understand and communicate more effectively.