What Can Business People Learn From Developers That Work in Agile Teams?
Part 1: Personal Growth
To go Agile, or not to go Agile? Many, if not most, companies are currently asking themselves this question. While it is common practice for developers to use modern development methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban, business people that come from a non-IT background are also increasingly turning to “new” methods and ways of working to find an edge. What can one learn from the other? Focusing on the quality of individual work, this article is the first in a series centred around agile methods and practices. Porsche Digital’s Sarah Ouis, Product Owner E-Commerce, and Robert Wegele, Agile Coach, share a few pieces of advice.
Developers and IT teams have been using Agile practices for decades. Non-tech teams and managers are now also discovering the advantages of small cross-functional and self-organized teams, frequent delivery, and greater speed and flexibility. However, although there is growing recognition of the need for innovative approaches to project management, many executives find it difficult to shift to an agile way of working. In this post, we outline what non-tech employees can learn from developers and try to explain what agile practices could work for you on an individual level.
Before we look at the specific practices and strategies more closely, it is worth highlighting the major benefits of adopting agile, which include:
- improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and quality,
- effective communications,
- personal growth,
- satisfaction with work, not only at a team level but also on an individual level.
Pair programming, or, why working together matters
Pair Programming is a software development practice in which two programmers work on the same code at the same time. One programmer, the so-called “driver,” has control of the mouse and keyboard and does the coding. The other programmer, the “observer” or “navigator,” continuously reviews the driver’s work and looks for potential errors, considers alternatives and thinks of strategic implications. In addition to switching their roles frequently, they both are equal and active participants in the process and share ownership of the product.
While it was designed with software development in mind, the same concept can be applied to other business contexts. At Porsche Digital, we work in cross-functional teams and set up regular pairing sessions to achieve results more rapidly and efficiently, whilst also having fun. Working simultaneously on a task allows us not only to collaborate in real-time but also to compare and integrate different perspectives and ideas across projects. For example, we no longer work with local Excel sheets, but instead, use documents in the cloud that can be edited simultaneously. We also use digital whiteboard tools for workshops. All of which leads to “radical transparency”, at least internally.
In fact, pairing can lead to improvements across three dimensions: process, concept, and social.
- Process: communication is increased, and newcomers can be efficiently trained by experts,
- Concept: issues can be more easily identified, and the error rate is lowered significantly,
- Social: synchronous collaboration reinforces trust and a sense of community. Moreover, when people work on projects in pairs, they do not get distracted so easily and, therefore, the focus is increased.
In principle, parallel pairing (synchronous collaboration) can be applied everywhere, even when developing content, and should be lived in a continuous process.
Focus through capacity planning and the value of face-to-face communication
Most people are used to working on many different projects simultaneously, which often leads to poor capacity planning. That leads to stress or overtime work. To avoid these problems, it is crucial to make workloads and capacities transparent and define the actual scope of your projects, thereby creating focus and clarity. Indeed, by making workloads explicit, trust is built up and strengthened because people do not take on too much work. They can realistically estimate the scope of work and then effectively deliver their intended results. Setting short-term goals and celebrating small wins and successes is also important. At Porsche Digital, we use sprints as well as regular Program Increment Plannings (PI Plannings) to stay agile and deliver features continuously.
Although COVID-19 has changed the way we interact and communicate with one another, it hasn’t changed the fact that face-to-face (i.e. synchronous) communication is still irreplaceable. Despite remote work, written and asynchronous communication via mail, Slack, or Microsoft Teams should not replace verbal and synchronous communication. In our agile teams, we have found that the most effective way to communicate with each other and solve problems is to speak face-to-face in real-time with each other. We always turn on the camera to be able to record and send non-verbal signals as well. That way we do not need to wait for the other person’s response and can move forward immediately.
With whom does it make sense to have jour fixes, weeklies or dailies? With those, you have the most dependencies. Where you do not have any, you should dissolve weeklies. It is important to become your own timekeeper and make capacity planning a priority.
Transparency and a no-blame culture
While mapping the status of our projects, we also avoid using mail. Instead of playing email ping pong, we use project management software such as Jira, which allows us to better organize tasks and see immediately what has to be done and when. In Jira, the only and current single source of truth is documented for everyone to see, whereby transparency is increased.
For everything else, we try to communicate face-to-face via chat software and channels. Our goal is to make our objectives, statuses, and workflows as transparent as possible.
Moving out of the personal comfort zone and speaking honestly and openly about mistakes is key to continuous improvement and perceived and appreciated as the strength of everyone that does so at Porsche Digital. Along these lines, we also embrace a positive error management culture. Mistakes happen all the time, and we do not think of them as failures. On the contrary, we view them positively as growth opportunities and try to learn from them as much as we can. We find post-mortems and retrospectives to be great tools to grow and learn from each other, and we try to share previous mistakes, so others do not have to make them again.
In conclusion, even when you do not work with software, there is a lot you can learn from the practices and workflow developers are used to. These methods and strategies have proven to increase the overall job satisfaction but can also improve the quality of individual work.
Sarah Ouis works as a Product Owner E-Commerce at Porsche Digital
Robert Wegele works as an Agile Coach at Porsche Digital
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