Does Agile Transformation Make Sense for Your Team?

Here are four clear signs that your team is overdue for an Agile Transformation.

By Ria Joseph

Building balanced and collaborative teams can be challenging. With Agile Transformation, we begin at the level of organizational culture to increase speed and flexibility, accelerate product delivery, and increase team productivity.

There are four clear signs that your team may need a transformation:

1. Siloed Teams

According to the State of Agile report, inconsistency is one of the most significant barriers to a successful agile transformation and a clear indicator of siloed teams.

Siloed teams:

• rarely share information, goals, tools, and processes with others
• are often frustrated by a lack of direction and transparency into decisions.
• have operations that are not integrated

Fragmented operations ruin the cadence and cohesion necessary to maintain a true team atmosphere.

When silos exist at the upper management level, the general organization feels lost due to a lack of direction, transparency and insight into high-level company goals and values. When there’s no direction, employees may find it difficult to work together as a cohesive and productive team.

Break Down the Silos

Take the first step toward overcoming fragmented operations in your organization by identifying silos. Use a top-down approach to set expectations and a vision for the organization as a whole, then provide guidance for upper management to inform the product teams and departments.

• Foster a safe and open environment for productivity by implementing streamlined Team Working Agreements that define how teams want to work together and their expectations.
• Facilitate a culture of communication, collaboration and transparency by establishing strategies for reducing silos and increasing efficiency.
• Identify ambassadors within the organization by introducing Scrum of Scrums (SOS) that update, align, tackle blockers, and identify dependencies on other teams.

2. Limited Resources

As your team grows, you may feel the pressures of balancing how quickly you want to grow with the capabilities of your team. A lack of resources can result in individual team members wearing too many hats and experiencing burn out. The quality of your work may suffer due to the quantity of work.

Overcome Resource Constraints

Overcome resource constraints by deploying Agile principles to establish efficient, cross-functional teams. Empower your team and celebrate your successes to stay motivated.

Build a team with balanced skillsets to meet project needs cross-functionally. Diverse, cross-functional teams pull from a variety of experience, expertise, and knowledge to reimagine and launch new solutions.

3. Little Stakeholder Participation

Beyond the requirements-gathering phase, it can be difficult to engage a stakeholder around project goals. Stakeholders with a vested interest in the project’s success are more likely to participate throughout the project life cycle. Increasing stakeholder participation and feedback ensures the project meets expectation.

“Help stakeholders recognize the value they bring to the project…”

Encourage collaboration

Help stakeholders recognize the value they bring to the project by being present throughout its lifecycle. An engaged stakeholder can be the catalyst for a successful project.

• Encourage stakeholders to be more hands-on in giving guidance and feedback by emphasizing the impact of their participation.
• Show stakeholders how they best fit into the project lifecycle and how they can support the team.
• Give stakeholders an overview of what’s to come and how they can contribute to the success of the project.

These actions can level-set expectations and give stakeholders clarity into next steps.

Identify champions

Stakeholders should be engaged strategically. Instead of inviting stakeholders to sit in on every planning meeting, you might host briefings to clarify the vision and goals. As a first step, you will need to find the right champions who can advocate for your team internally. This will likely be your main point of contact throughout the project. The right champion can also boost your team’s morale.

Define working agreements

Establish working agreements with your stakeholders by defining:

• Stakeholder expectations
• How to prioritize tasks with stakeholders
• How to maintain transparency between the project team and stakeholders
• What meetings stakeholders will be a part of
• How stakeholder participation benefits both the team and stakeholders
• The fallback plan

4. Rigid Operations

If your team has ever experienced a pattern of low engagement, reduced innovation, or high turnover, it could be a sign of distrust with leadership. While a rigid organization is unable to adapt and make decisions quickly, Agile Transformation helps teams rebuild trust so they feel empowered to make day-to-day decisions in alignment with the overall strategic direction.

Build psychologically-safe and autonomous teams

Foster a culture where people feel safe to make mistakes. Empower better team engagements and moderate risk-taking. Enable freedom of expression and creativity. Create an environment where people feel safe to fail fast.

Closing Thoughts

We explored four signs that your team may be ready for Agile Transformation. We love to talk about this topic! Be sure to connect with us for future posts on this topic.

About Author

Ria Joseph is the ScrumMaster at QualityWorks Consulting Group with expertise in software testing and Agile Transformation. She is passionate about quality and process innovation in the software development and delivery cycle. She enjoys leveraging her servant leadership to build high-performance, self-organizing teams.