Ready to sprint into Agile?

Here’s a quick start checklist

We’d recommend that you check out the 3 articles we’ve written on How to become an Agile Team. There’s lots of the learnings and the ‘why’s’ in there.

If you’re ready to run, then think about the below questions:

1. Have you done your own research about Agile? At a minimum read “The Art of Getting Twice the Work Done in Half the Time”; if you can, go and watch some Agile ceremonies in action in the Tech department

2. Are you clear on why you want to use Agile and what problem it is solving?

3. Which flavour of Agile are you going to use? (we recommend Scrum to start)

4. Do you need sign off to “play” from your line manager and/or key stakeholders? (seek permission or ask forgiveness?)

5. Have you warmed your team up to the idea? Are they willing to play? Are you going to do it with your whole team or part of it?

6. Have you checked out (and downloaded) the tech solutions — Slack, Trello and Google Hangouts? Your team could be playing with these before you even start shifting work to Agile.

7. What is your backlog? Nothing like a tumbleweed moment when everyone’s raring to go but no one knows where to!

8. Who is your Product Owner (and are they willing to play, too)? Who is the Scrum Master (choose wisely)? Who is the Team?

9. What are you going to play on first? (we recommend not going too simple or too complicated)

The follow up article 7 IAQs when implementing Agile (that’s Initially Asked Questions) may help you tackle some of the questions you could get from your team when implementing Agile.

This article was written by Tracey Waters and James Perez