In 2020, the most challenging year in recent times, speak “the new normal< /span>” is annoying. But if there’s one thing that has become different this year, it’s the feedback.
The “new feedback” – this term is horrible, I know, but it is very necessary – as physical and social contact was restricted, the work became all remote, causing us to have new concerns and risks in our professional routine.
Following most of the research that attributes teleworking to quality of life, I decided to share a little reality to rub in the face of those who do research that: quality of life is not working from home.
According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn (published by InfoMoney) , 62% of professionals are more anxious and stressed about their work than they were before.
In my opinion, this issue of quality of life is much closer to having a job with career tracking and clear goals about its development, in which we have time to learn and having more time with our family and friends than having to work from home.
But what does this have to do with feedback?
Well, this is an extremely important tool and it contributes a lot to having this quality of life.
In the classic scenario where you work in the same physical environment as your team, it is much simpler to observe a behavior of sadness, joy or anxiety, for example.
That’s because the fact that you are in face-to-face contact with a person and with a keen perception, makes you able to recognize these feelings in the air and act promptly on those people.
In remote work we stay inside our homes, usually with a much higher workload than in face-to-face work, making people’s mental stress triggers very sensitive, pushing them to the emotional edge. And then the main question of this text comes back:
Giving feedback to these people and teams, all from a distance, was one of the biggest challenges this year, plus all the chaos caused by a pandemic.
However, one of the things I most considered when giving and receiving feedback was my own perception of teleworking and how much it affected me.
From the fear of being fired, all the adaptation to this new reality that we are still living, to conformism when seeing that things are not changing, surrounded by the thought of “if I do, fine” and “if I don’t, fine”.
This year, feedback has gone from being formal and given in a certain period to daily.
Sometimes, even every hour, as new situations arise and are unforeseen events or new realities, in which we have to be side by side with our team, understanding and adapting to each scenario.
Talking about any kind of topic with the team, gives information on how people are feeling in their daily lives and how they look and think about the future; so that I, as Delivery Manager (responsible for the team’s deliveries), can really have a better perception about the wishes and desires of this person and the team as a whole.
But if you’re still unsure how to give feedback, I’ll list some points that are really important:
Pay attention to details!
Increasingly, talking and meeting people is super valid.
Today it’s just us and our co-workers, but nothing prevents you from understanding a little more who they are, what makes this person happy, what doesn’t, which her family relationship, what is her leisure time, if she had anyone affected by Covid-19 or any other type of illness, etc;
Learn how to read the ambient
Understand the right moment and prepare what will be said in advance.
The feedback must take place within a specific context of the event so that it generates a reflection on that and a possibility of action to reinforce or improve something;
Invite the person to participate in their own improvement
In other words, help her build an action plan for resolving that situation.
Of course, always following her during this evolution, asking from time to time how things are going;
Far beyond personal feedback, team feedback is essential.
My job is to develop a team in which the team itself is bigger than anyone else within that group. But that subject I’ll leave for another article!
I’m not even going to talk about “resource”, after all I can’t explain again the difference between resources and people in the middle of 2020.
If you haven’t learned this by now, STUDY and don’t call resource people.
Well, those were my tips on how to give feedback in this “new format”.
I understand that working with people is always being attentive, much more than waiting for a magical and wonderful dynamic for feedback, in which you fill in a sentence with a keyword, you exchange it with your friend and each one will self-evaluate and bla-bla-bla…
I hope that, with all this, we learn to be less prescriptive in managing our team’s feelings and evolution, as this makes our work and our relationships very more human.
In 2020, the feedback for me has a lot to do with a phrase I heard from a good friend of mine named Vilson Laerte: “we’re with people, working with people and developing something for people, the rest is computer, chair and old desk.“
Pillars of agile transformation to develop better digital products
Continuing to talk about how you can develop digital products that truly deliver value and stand out in the market, in addition to understanding your company’s current landscape, it’s important to understand what your organization needs go through changes in structure, processes and culture.
In this article, we’ll learn more about the pillars that need to go through a journey of change to create digital services and products in a more agile and innovative way.
The pillars of agile transformation
Here at Agile.Inc, we believe there are 5 areas in organizations that need to evolve, have an agile culture, a much more digital mindset, to truly create products and services that meet the needs needs of users these days.
These 5 pillars are: Culture, Internal Capabilities, Structure and Governance, People and Business Models.
To be truly agile and digital, it’s important to ensure continuity and ownership of change processes at all levels of the company. Check out the 5 pillars of agile transformation below:
Culture
As mentioned above, it is very important that there is a change in the organization’s culture, as these are one of the main areas that show whether a company is undergoing a digital transformation. After all, it all boils down to a change of culture and mindset.
In this pillar, the main changes we noticed are:
- Really put the customer at the center of your business;
- Having a culture of applied innovation;
- Empowering teams, but with high alignment;
- Create a culture of “not being afraid of failure” and
- be more transparent in actions, decisions and plans
Internal Capabilities
The teams in your company will start solving more complex issues, so they will need to have new skills and be able to follow the transformation.
It is important that the professionals in your organization:
- Know how to work with new technologies (Big Data, Blockchain, Machine Learning, among others);</ read>
- Have agility in product development,
- Have lean management in product design;
- Make use of design strategically.
These are some of the skills professionals need to develop to be more digital, depending on the context of each business.
Structure and Governance
How is your company organized? The way your company’s structure and governance is composed shows whether it is still in a traditional or digital paradigm.
To find this out, you need to raise some questions, such as:
- How are the areas of the company structured?
- How to break the organization’s silos?
- How is the budget defined?
- How are initiatives prioritized?
- How is the work done in a transparent way?
- How to create greater operational efficiency, for example with automation?
Again, these are some examples of issues that are addressed during this transition from Traditional to Digital companiesl.
That’s why it’s important to have the right experts helping you in this process of change, showing you the best way to structure your company to be more digital.
People
Do all members of your team know their roles and responsibilities? In an agile culture it is important to have these issues resolved clearly, to have more engaged people.
- Roles and responsibilities (emphasizing that it is not enough to just be defined, but must be followed and monitored in a natural way by everyone ),
- How is people’s motivation;
- And which leadership model to apply.
Here at Agile.Inc, we think at the end of the day, it’s always people working with people to create products and services for other people.
But, unfortunately, we still see many companies treating professionals as resources, in a very “commoditized” way, in which it is enough to just hire employees from the cheapest consultancy, for example.
Business Models
The fifth pillar of Digital Transformation is thinking about new business models for the VUCA world. The way people buy and consume services is changing and companies need to adapt as quickly as possible.
The work then consists of developing these five pillars for a correct Digital Transformation in organizations. We feel that each company has one of the pillars more or less developed, or with the need to develop a pillar first, etc.
However, we strongly believe that some points are levers for transformation, meaning that not everything will happen at the same time. The levers are:
- Developing leadership
- Enabling teams
- Applying Agility Concepts
But how to start the transformation process?
To start the process of agile transformation, we at Agile Inc. provide several products that will accompany you along this road until the moment you start walking alone.</span >
Squad Assembly
It is important to have a team of people with adequate skills for some processes, the SQUADs. Each client is unique and specific, and it is necessary to analyze the working conditions to assemble an adapted multidisciplinary team that will help your team to improve and become more and more agile.
Consulting
We use the right concepts, methods and tools to transform the way you create products, to help you connect with your customers and generate competitive advantage.
With the help of experts, it is possible to break the traditional mindset so that agile transformation can take place. It is with this type of service that you get to the top of the pillar of structure and governance faster.
Trains
We carry out training to adapt and improve the team according to the needs of your company and your employees. All of our certificates are in partnership with Scrum.org and made by Agile School.
Now that you know the main pillars for developing better digital products, contact our consultants and transform your company forever.
Discover the stages of agile maturity
Agile transformation is something much discussed nowadays by companies that want to be aligned with the market and develop better products and services. However, being able to identify what level of agile maturity your company is at is an important part of the process, and often quite complex. Understanding how agile your company is already is a journey, sometimes quite a long one, that people need to go through to know what needs to be transformed within a team, an area or even the entire organization.
Read this article and understand all about the real agile transformation.
Knowing your maturity levels will help you get to a high stage faster and more effectively. That’s why, in this article, we’ll explain what characterizes each stage of agility so that you can identify where your company is in this transformation process.
The stages of maturity and agile transformation
Being agile is developing capabilities that offer agility to your business. Technologies, culture and work processes create an environment where it is possible to carry out small deliveries of a product in a short cycle, in order to prove a hypothesis that will generate efficient operations and greater capacity to generate current revenues.</ span>
There are many benefits to being an agile company, and to take advantage of them, you need a systemic view of your business.
Traditional companies, for the most part, have long processes, a lot of command and control, lack of engagement and ownership among employees, areas that don’t talk to each other, among other features. An agile company, on the other hand, focuses on short processes, with shorter delivery times and improvements in alignment between teams. Unfortunately, most companies in the market are halfway there, they want to be agile but have a traditional mindset that holds them back in the transformation process.
According to 14th State Of Agile, 95% of the companies that participated in this research use some kind of agile method in their daily lives. However, 82% of these organizations have not incorporated these concepts across the enterprise and still need to increase this level of maturity in order to expand these concepts beyond small teams and enterprise-wide initiatives.
With streamlined processes and a new mindset, agile companies have an easier means of identifying faults. Remembering that when we talk about agile transformation, we have 4 pillars:
- communication — individuals and interactions more than processes and tools;
- pragmatism — product working more than comprehensive documentation;
- collaboration — collaboration with the client more than contract negotiation;
- adaptability — responding to change rather than following a plan.
Knowing the Agile Maturity Stages
Stage 0 – Traditional Companies
These are those companies where the employee or manager has heard about agile transformation but hasn’t put it into practice yet.
Usually, these are companies that, a person who has read a book or article on agile methodology, understands the importance of this process as a whole and will start looking for a consultancy to in order to have professional help in the transformation.
She even tries to implement some concepts and practices, but because she doesn’t have all of this incorporated as a whole, she ends up failing or even giving little result.
Stage 1 – Agile Mechanical
This is the stage where most companies are!
At this point, you already know the conceffect of agile transformation, but not the complete process.
Normally, the company already uses methods such as Kanban, has daily alignments, changes area names to squads, uses post-its to organize tasks and some other organizational methods.. . Despite this, it still cannot be considered, in fact, an agile company.
- It is not yet a transparent organization with clear objectives</li >
- There is no transparency of information, with a lot of visual management</li >
- It still does not have short cycle deliveries, with a focus on value generation</i >
- There is a need for more visibility, improvement in processes and more collaborative areas</ read>
This is Mechanical Agile! A stage in which one already knows and uses some agile concepts and practices, but the culture, the mindset is still completely traditional and Taylorist. Is it possible to change the behavior of this company and reach another level of agile maturity? Yes, with training, consulting and building high performance teams – which is what we do with the help of Agile School – our educational area and at Agile Inc, developing enterprise solutions.
Stage 2 – Trying the agile
These companies are at an intermediate level, halfway through. Despite being past the mechanical agile stage, it still lacks the continuous workflow to be at the advanced level.
Processes still need to be improved and employees still need to develop skills, knowledge and experience.
This is a process stage where companies are starting the agile journey. It is a passing stage, where companies stay for a short time, as they are in the race for agile and digital transformation.
Stage 3 – Professional Agile
The company is already reaping the fruits of agile transformation and has already completed the entire transformation process. The areas connect by working together, mainly supporting the business areas, and really put the customer at the center of decision making.
They have more transparency and give visibility to what’s happening for everyone. And they prioritize deliveries and always ask themselves “are we doing the right thing?”
Companies that are running an Agile Professional have the Agile mindset on a daily basis within teams and decentralize decisions, but with high alignment. Not only the leadership, but the teams already understand the importance of having clear and well-defined goals, as well as alignment in the execution of processes.
The teams are empowered, each one has a certain freedom of decision, not being all centralized in a single manager. Furthermore, innovations happen all the time, as there is complete freedom to adapt in all areas of the company.
Employees work motivated and therefore produce more solutions.
In agile leadership, goals are determined, the company knows its customer in depth, promoting the delivery of value and removing impediments.
The 4Ps of Agility
Here at Agile.Inc we classify companies into 4 stages, we will better understand each of them so that you can identify which stage your company is at and thus make improvements until reaching professional agile, that is, at the top of agility.
Process: teams with goals, visual management, agile product delivery, flow management
People: roles and responsibilities, clear goals, self-organization, multidisciplinarity, values and principles
Product: product backlog, management, metrics, UX, UI
Engineering Practices: quality, devops, clean code, Agile QA, automation
The 4P’s at the Mechanical level:
- development team falling out
- product owner proxy: just take orders without caring too much</ read>
- is a team that doesn’t think about valuing the product</ read>
- does not have an integrated view
- no portfolio
- many things are done based on guesswork and not on having studied metrics
- scrum master or agile: is one who is in his first experience of agility. It still doesn’t have much expertise, bringing something more theoretical.
- it is not clear where your responsibilities begin and end</li >
- predictive leadership, which monitors your collaborators.
- the team serves the leader
- long flow, each area has its task and priorities</ read>
- documentation is unclear
- tests are done manually
- staff is seen as coders
The 4P’s at the Professional Agile level
- the team understands each other and works together
- has a fully integrated view of processes
- have an overview of what’s going on
- processes collaborate with the delivery of product value</li >
- people expose problems
- employees bring new insights
- errors are accepted and are part of learning
- it is necessary to use self-organization, using the wisdom and intelligence of the whole team.
- the team is engaged, motivated and with purpose
- leadership changes its profile, being a culture of delivering value, avoiding waste.< /i>
- leader serves the team
- teams work together with the same goal, making jobs finish quickly</span >
- team is a co-author, they know the best solution to a given problem</i >
Creating an agile product is complex, so there’s no way things can be done separately (as is done in the traditional way). For everything to work correctly, operations, professionals need to be integrated so that everything is done quickly and with value delivery, so the company is able to identify a problem still in production, without this problem reaching the user< /span>
How it all happens…
Imagine the following.
A company manager analyzes the market and realizes that he needs to be more agile. With this idea in mind, an agile method is implemented in the company, but only that.
The organization’s culture is not modified, it has no foundation principles, that is, this minimal change is made mechanically.
This makes the team’s productivity drop, as the manager doesn’t have enough expertise to know about the status quo change, he just wanted to be more agile, but he didn’t made a strategic study about this.
This is where the famous J-Curve enters, which we’ll explain below.
J-Curve – The Curve of Change
The J-Curve was developed by psychotherapist Virginia Satir. In psychotherapy, the change model is described in 5 stages, which have an effect on feelings, thoughts, performance and philosophy. By going through these effects you would be able to improve how you process change and how you help other people process it.
When we talk about organizational agility, you can also use the J-turn as a road to be traversed. In many ways, a level of agility helps to reduce risk. But when we’re talking about organizational change, this agility, most of the time, will first express itself in a slight decline in performance.
It’s important to say that this is totally normal, and is directly linked to changes in the organization’s status quo, which shortly after the decline will start to elevate its performance.
In general, this process happens when a person in the organization reads something about agility and realizes that they need transformation (even if they don’t really know what it means to be agile). Due to this shallow perception of ‘being agile’, the method is implemented in this organization in a mechanical way, causing the team’s productivity to drop. This is exactly what the J Curve says.
Identifying the stage of maturity of my company.
There are some perspectives that can be analyzed and taken into consideration to see how agile your company is considered.
Practices and Roles
The aim is to understand if the organization is using processes efficiently and also if everyone knows their respective roles within the company.
If you don’t know how to identify this, there are a few questions you should ask:
- Is it clear what the responsibilities of the roles currently available in the company are?
- Is the teams workflow visible?
- Do teams have explicit policies (eg definition of ready to work, definition of done etc.)?</ span>
- Are bottlenecks and queues visible in the teams workflow?
- Do the teams have clarity on the main sources of rework?
- Are software engineering practices being used to keep code healthy?
- Is the publishing process automated?
- Are there automated tests?
Metrics
The intent is to understand if your company has been using business and process metrics. And if so, at what level?
We need to stress the importance of developing benchmark metrics that will help improve your business. To analyze this, ask yourself:
- Are business metrics being used in the decision-making process?
- Are they visible for everyone in the company to review?
- They are used as a reference in the process of defining an initiative (ex: which business indicators will be leveraged by project X) ?
- Do teams use process metrics to project lead times?
- E for ansmooth the health of the process?
Business-oriented prioritization
Does your organization set priorities? Or is everything seen as a priority? When that happens, nothing is really a priority, after all, everything is on the same level.
You need to understand if there is a structured prioritization process. Ask yourself:
- Are there clear prioritization criteria?
- Has prioritization taken into account customer needs?
- Are business metrics used in the prioritization process of initiatives?
- Is an analysis of dependencies between initiatives carried out before finalizing the prioritization process?</li >
Financial result
Does your company measure the financial results of its initiatives? This is very important in the agile process and to find out if you are already doing this or not, ask yourself:
- Is the organization’s leadership clear about the business objectives of each initiative?
- Are the teams measuring the financial result of deliveries?
- The organization is able to classify the initiatives according to the expected result (ex: this initiative will generate greater efficiency in the business, will help to conquer market share, will it be an innovation, will it anticipate the cost of delay?)
These 4 analyzes will help you diagnose what stage of agility your business is at and where you need to improve.
Ok, I know my stage, how can I improve?
Now that you’ve identified what stage your company is at, we at Agile Inc. have some solutions that can be done to help your company move further along the J Curve. quickly and reach the desired status quo.
In this case, some things will be analyzed, like:
- what is the company’s maturity problem?
- what is the executive’s mindset
- how is your team, is it lined up?
- how have agile methods been implemented so far?
After analyzing this pitch and the manager understands that they have a problem to be solved. We will help you accelerate the J Curve and thus move your company forward on the transformation path. These solutions consist of training, consulting and building squads.
First, we will make a radar of your organization, which consists in understanding where the flaws are, where you need to improve, so that we can build a right strategy optimized for your company.< /span>
Squad
It is important to have a team of people with adequate skills for some processes, the SQUADs. As each client is unique, it is necessary to analyze the working conditions in order to set up an adapted multidisciplinary team.
Consultancy
It uses agile methodologies to transform the way you create products, help you connect with your customers and generate competitive advantage.
With the help of a consultancy, it is possible to break the traditional mindset so that an agile transformation can take place.
Trains
Training to adapt and improve the team according to the needs of your company and your employees. All certified by Scrum.org and made by Agile School.
Now that you know your agility stage, contact our consultants and truly transform your company.
Do you know what Agile Transformation really means?
Adopting an agile methodology is what everyone wants to do. Agile companies can increase productivity, shorten the delivery cycle and still improve quality. No wonder everyone is in the race for agile transformation.
However, for many this is a big challenge that involves several redesigns. When the company works in a traditional way, the path to agile transformation is a little longer, including:
- new values
- differentiated mindset
- new tools
- change of attitude and interaction with the world
In other words, a total renewal of the company’s organizational culture.
Because of this, the agile transformation needs to be planned and executed by experienced professionals, covering several areas of the organization. Having the mission, with a cross-functional team, of optimizing the value chain in order to fulfill the wishes and needs of customers in truly effective solutions.
But is your business transforming properly? Is your company really agile?
Agile Transformation
Agile Transformation is driving Digital Transformation. In the world of Digital Transformation, companies break down barriers with innovative products that fulfill desires that customers didn’t know they had. The products and services are made-to-measure adding value to the business.
In a world of change, it’s important to stay ahead. Stimulating knowledge, improving processes, giving visibility to people, that is, delivering solutions that will add value, this is the concept of agile transformation.
In short, the purpose of using agile concepts is to simplify the way projects are executed so that they have an increasingly positive end result.
While the more traditional models use long processes with defined objectives, in the agile methods, a proposal of shorter processes is used, with deliveries in less time that focus on improvement and in team alignment. Making the identification of faults easier and generating greater flexibility in the work methodology.
When we talk about agile transformation, we are talking about 4 pillars:
- communication — individuals and interactions more than processes and tools;
- pragmatism — product working more than comprehensive documentation;
- collaboration — collaboration with the client more than contract negotiation;
- adaptability — responding to change rather than following a plan.
But should agile transformation be part of your company or is it just for the IT area?
Agile transformation is just for IT?
When you’re running a business, it’s important to embrace risk. It is not something that is done automatically, but it is a very necessary practice in the transformation journey towards a new way of managing a business using more and more digital and integrated technologies.
Agile methodologies will help your business overcome operational, planning barriers by adopting a more flexible, change-able approach.
Businesses need to take the first step, start seeing the benefits of transforming and stop hiding behind those who say agile transformation is just for IT. Everyone can benefit and change the history of their areas.
Agile maturity stages
To help a company understand where it is at a stage of agile maturity, we use our own concept, the 4P’s:
- Processes: how are the internal processes
- Products: how are the products created
- Practices: how are the practices and tools used
- People: how are the people in this organization.
Analyzing these 4 P’s it is possible to identify which stage of maturity your company is in and see which points are needed to improve:
0. Traditional Company
It’s that company where some contributor has heard about agile transformation, read a book on the subject (like the “The art of doing twice the work in half the time”, by Jeff Sutherland) and realized that this was necessary for him and, at this point, he seeks a consultancy to help with the transformation.< /span>
1. Agile Mechanical
Most organizations are at this point, where they know the concept, they do parts of the agile transformation but not the entire process.
At this stage, normally, the company already uses kanban, post-its, and organizational methods, but it is not enough to be considered agile, since there is still a lot of plastered process .
Flaws are often frowned upon and therefore it is not a transparent organization with clear objectives.
Analyzing the 4P’s of the agile mechanic:
Processes: unscaled, no metrics, value stream…
Product: Has no product vision, doesn’t usually know the customer well.
Practice: no agile quality, agile engineering.
People: still have traditional culture.
With consulting, training and a good squad it’s easy to elevate from this level to the level of agile professional.
2. Practicing Agile
The company that is at the “practicing agile” level is right in the middle of the road. It has already overcome most of the malfunctions of the agile mechanic but has not yet reached the continuous stream of value of the “agile professional”. It is a time where processes still need to be improved, people need to develop their skills, knowledge and experience. With the help of experts, meaning people more experienced in the journey, it’s easier to go through this stage and go to the next level.
3. Professional Agile
Here is what we all wanted from the start. When we talk about the benefits of agility, they can all be reaped at this stage. Both the team and the leadership understood the importance of clear goals and alignment in execution.
Decentralization happens, teams are empowered to make decisions (but of course, with restriction). Innovations encompass all areas, as everyone is free to adapt.
Employees and customers, that is, people are at the center of everything. Value is continuously generated as motivated employees produce user-focused solutions.
Agile leadership sets goals, knows the customer, promotes value delivery, removes impediments, knows how to support and develop team members.
This makes everything in the company run fast and, in fact, agile.
“When you have an agile and clear process, with well-defined rules, any project can be more successful.”
Agile Methods
Now that you know what agile transformation is and have identified what maturity level your company is at, let’s understand a little more about agile methods, how they work and of course, how to apply them.
Scrum
It is one of the but to use agile methods in projects. Its main objective is to assist in the management and development of products, fitting in very well in medium and long term projects.
As it is one of the most popular methods, it is often confused with the very concept of agile methodology.
To put it into practice, it is necessary to know all the positives and negatives of your team, and define for each employee the role and function.
In Scrum, there are new roles such as the Product Owner who defines the Backlog of things the team must do, as well as defining what is value for delivery, the Scrum Master who has the objective of helping the team in the delivery, and ensures that agile concepts are being applied and there is also the Development Team, which are people from different areas, with different skills, who make value deliveries. This team will deliver higher value and faster, generating innovative solutions and increasing the competitive advantage for the area or company.
The Scrum method is very important for projects with high complexity and delivery urgency. For this, cycles known as Sprints are created, which are nothing more than time intervals for the development of pieces of the solution. It all starts with planning what will be done in that cycle, followed by the development stage. At the end of each sprint there is a review of what we have done and a retrospective for improvement as a whole. This runs the product development cycles in Scrum.
eXtreme Programming (XP)
XP, together with Scrum, is one of the first agile methods and is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changes in what is generated for the client. This method advocates frequent deliveries in short development cycles, with the goal of improving productivity and introducing checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
Other XP elements include: pair programming, code review, unit testing, emerging architecture, code simplicity and clarity, changing customer requirements over time, and frequent customer communication with the development team. The methodology bears in its name the idea that the beneficial elements of traditional software engineering practices should be taken to “extreme” levels.
Kanban
It is one of the newest and simplest agile methods to use. It consists of visual and practical elements to promote the flow of activities.
Kanban has gained a prominent position and can be a way to perform project management in a super adaptable way.
The main idea of kanban is to seek evolution, allowing the organization of processes to be done in a visual way. In its simplest form, you need to assemble a frame and divide it as follows:
- To Do — activities that need to be performed;
- Doing — activities being performed;
- Done — activities that have already been completed, evaluated and approved by the team.
Just as important as creating this to-do list is the flow management being done constantly by the team. Metrics such as number of tasks and execution time are common to be monitored in teams that use kanban.
How to do the agile transformation
Implementing the agile transformation is not just about starting to use Kanban, Scrum and the other methods. You need to do a thorough analysis of your company in order to identify the positives and negatives of the process as a whole.
To carry out this analysis, the most used method is the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), in Portuguese, SWOT (Strength, Opportunity, Weakness, Threats) . But what is this analysis for?
The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to draw a strategic plan for companies or new projects, carrying out a complete diagnosis that will identify opportunities for improvement and define action plans.
Process improvement
Agile transformation affects the entire company, it matters to analyze and see what the organization’s internal problems are, where the bottlenecks are and where the projects tend to fail. After all, this is the ultimate goal of agile transformation: to seek solutions.
Exchange of knowledge
In order to improve processes, it is necessary to encourage a culture of knowledge. Qualify your team and encourage the sharing of knowledge and communication.
For this, it is very important to always respect the differences and individualities of each person so that no space is invaded and can generate discomfort.
Communication
As stated above, it is important to improve internal communication.
Debating problems, finding solutions, qualifying, putting changes into practice, it’s all agile transformation being applied truthfully and correctly.
When there is a lack of internal information, the team is, in most cases, disunited and focused on the final product, and not on the process, so it is very difficult to see the problems.< /span>
Inside-out transformation
When you want to transform a company, you need to work in-house first. It’s something that takes work and patience, but gives great results in the end.
Some points for agile transformation to happen:
- Encourage short cycles with measurable deliveries;
- Promote effective communication between everyone involved in the development and delivery of the service or product;</li >
- Give visibility to team problems and actions;
- Deliver solutions with business value;
- Encourage the exchange of experience in the team, seeking a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
By setting small goals and fulfilling them, agile transformation takes place fully and in accordance with the organization’s values. You don’t have to want to change an entire company all of a sudden, it’s small steps that are taken towards transformation.
Use Agile to Deploy Agile
Deploying agility in an area or company so that it reaches high maturity is very complex. Therefore, this project itself must be done in an agile way. This is how we at Agile.Inc minimize risk and increase the chance of success, in your real transformation, so that it doesn’t just stop at level 1.
Scrum Day Brazil
If you’re still unsure how Agile Transformation works and how it works for you, we talked about it at Scrum Day Brazil 2020 and you can watch everything that happened there by clicking here.
Scrum Day Brazil 2021 has a date and tickets are now on sale at special prices, get yours hereand participate!
The agile transformation in Suzano’s HR
Hire more people or review the process?
Understand how to better organize your team for more efficiency and results
By Antonio Costa
During our consulting and coaching processes, we often come across a scenario in which phrases or questions arise such as: – I want to try to change something, but I don’t know what… – The way I’m doing it I’m not as effective, but what to change? – We already consume a lot of content, but is it enough? – I think I need more people on the team, but how can I convince the board to provide a budget? – What roles are necessary for me to have a suitable team? Basically, leaders want to deliver more results, have efficient and effective teams, and there is always the hypothesis that agile methods would help in this productivity. But they don’t know how or in what order: “First contract or do I arrange the process?”; “If I have to have people, what role do I have to hire?”; “Or do I revisit the process before?”; “What comes first?”So what to do?
There is no ready answer and I will talk in general, because each case is different. First point is that sometimes it’s pretty clear that there’s a skill missing. The problem is so big, so glaring, that it is not even necessary to review the process, but rather hire someone. See if you have any glaring cases! Otherwise, when the lack of a person is not so clear: First, we advise the company to analyze its current process – understand what is happening, if you can do more with the same people. And, only then, analyze the need to hire more people.Why is revisiting the way you work important?
Companies often do not have a well-defined process and this, in turn, has gaps, bottlenecks, blurriness and waste. Another very common question is: “What if I hire more people and continue to have delivery difficulties?” Well, if you don’t have the correct and well-defined process, there is a chance to put more people in and amplify or “mask” the problem, for example:- Mask the problem: you put 160h (1 person) more, but in the end you increase your real productivity by 40h. Since the other 120h turns out to be unproductive – this ends up masking the problem
- Amplified the problem: you put more people on the team and productivity drops in the end, as the team’s complexity increases and something that wasn’t good gets worse.
How does it normally work?
During the process review, the first point we try to answer is: “Today, is our process clear? Is it well defined?” In other words, it is necessary to be clear about the process and I’m not saying it has to be plastered, but yes, of course for everyone. Another question we ask is: “Is your process bureaucratic? Is it possible to be more Lean, that is, leaner?” With these questions, we begin the review itself in order to discover current efficiency with metrics and identify key bottlenecks. In our consultancy, we defined the AS IS model (how it works today) and the TO BE model (what a process should look like in the future, well defined and agile, with a flow more optimized). Key points during the review of a process that make a team produce more:- PRIORIZATION AND DEMAND MANAGEMENT
- REFINEMENT
- QUALITY
- ARCHITECTURE
- OPTIMIZATION
Then, look for a contract
Having more control over the process and it being optimized and agile, then the time comes for you to find out how to do more: – Hire more people, new skills During this analysis, you can identify that the team needs a non-existent competence to be more productive. For example, having a person QA Engineer or Devops. In this phase, you get to know what roles you need to have a productive multidisciplinary team, with skills that you can’t miss. – Putting in more people – even skill to gain more air It happens when you’ve optimized your process and come up with a scenario where the team manages to attack X things per month, but the Business need is more than X. In this case, you hire people with the same skills, to gain more flow.Team building is also important
Sometimes it is even necessary to change the organizational structure of the company or change the organization of teams… But this is done gradually. “Have a component team or a feature team?”; “Organize by value stream?”; “Join or separate skills?”; “Does it separate new developments from the support team?”… If your question is any of these (how to structure your team), you need to rethink the formation of your team.Conclusion
The decision to hire more people or review the process depends a lot from scenario to scenario, but first, we advise you to define your agile journey, revisit your process, and after this optimization, then you think about hiring people. If you want help with your agile journey, review the process or even have qualified people to have a more efficient team, we can help you! Read too:
Training or consulting? 8 Tips for Discovering the Journey to Implement Agile Methods
Learn the best solution for the scenario you are in and achieve the real benefits of being agile
By Antonio Costa Having more performance, more productivity and being more agile is one of the main goals of many people today, in any area, isn’t it? You know that you need to work differently, you want to have deliveries that really serve the customer and achieve the organization’s goals in the best possible way… But the point is: in order to get there, do you need consulting support? Do I need to train my team, and in which trainings? How do I put together this puzzle between training, consulting or hiring? And our answer is: it depends a lot on the stage you are in! In some moments it is possible to do some training and learn techniques and ways to solve these challenges. In others, it is necessary to have the support of an outside expert to help incorporate and put all this teaching into practice. To help you understand better, I’ll suggest below some very common scenarios for you to try to identify yourself in a situation and understand what step you’re in and how Agility can help you, either with training or consulting. Check out:1 – “I still don’t know about agile methods, I just heard about it.”
If you hear a lot about Agility but don’t understand it very well, there are some literatures that can help you, such as: “The art of doing double the work in half the time“, by Jeff Sutherland and “Scrum and XP straight from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. These two books are indispensable for anyone starting out in this universe! Now, if you need richer material, and have the support of a person who will teach you in practice, answering more specific questions, training such as Professional Scrum Foundations will give you this quick and applicable knowledge, plus you’ll earn a voucher to take the official Scrum.org PSMI exam.2 – “I researched it, I know a little bit, but I have doubts if it works in my reality.”
If agile methods and concepts are no longer a pain in the ass, but you still find it difficult to incorporate them into your daily life, you can unlock this opportunity with the help of an experienced professional. This is quite common to happen and can be easily resolved with a quick diagnosis. Get in touch with us, we’ve scheduled a free meeting to make this diagnosis. Another way to find out if it applies in your reality is to watch this video – we explain how to implement agile principles in any team, whether in the Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Legal, Operations areas, among others, especially outside IT. Click here and watch!3 – “I’ve read a lot, but I don’t know if I’m applying it in the best way.”
Have you reorganized your team to use Scrum and other agile concepts, read some books and learned some dynamics, but still realize that this hasn’t been the best way or that you have things to improve to make the team more effective? Calm down that you can improve and adjust the method much more to your daily life. It is ideal to seek this knowledge empirically, learning and improving daily, but if you need to accelerate this process to get better results, my tip is to invest in practical knowledge. And this can happen in two ways: with a Fundamentals course with practical and advanced techniques for your company, to train a group of people through trainings in company. Or have the support of a specialized consultancy to increase the agile maturity of those involved. discover the best way to implement agile methods in your day to day, having visible benefits in the short term.4 – “I want to learn more, but I have limited money.”
Okay, if the moment is not appropriate for a large investment in training people within your company, there are several options for individual training that can be done according to each person’s area of expertise. This is the time to choose some people from your team, or yourself, and seek their professionalization. In addition to the Scrum Foundations course – essential for anyone starting out in Agility, you can go a step further and specialize by taking the Product Owner or Scrum Master, for example, and replicate all this knowledge internally in your organization. If you are a leader in your organization, the PAL-E is a great way to learn more about how to make teams more agile.5 – “I know I can have benefits and that it applies in my reality, but I don’t know which ones, I don’t even know how…”
At this stage, in order to have these results more quickly and assertively, it is essential to bet on a good diagnosis in order to have a solution focused on your reality. For these new concepts to truly generate value, they must be deeply, professionally and customized to your needs. Don’t run the risk of deploying Agility in your area mechanically! In a free diagnosis and just 2 hours, we can help you understand the best agile process for your team to have more results and more productivity.Click here and get your quick diagnosis < /a>
6 – “I’ve tried using the practices, but I feel I still do wrong things and so I don’t get all the benefits.”
If this is your current challenge, it is important to have key people to qualify and provide training according to their area of expertise and take this knowledge to other layers of the company, such as leaders, managers and directors, so that the impact of this new knowledge be much larger and provide more results in several areas.Learn about Scrum training Master, Agile Leadership Essentials</ em> and Scaled Professional Scrum</a >.
But, if it’s still difficult for you to see how these methods help you to be more agile, have more productivity and better deliveries, look for a consultancy that will help you identify the best practices for your reality and remove ties from the system that you own today.7 – “I already do a lot of agile practices, but I feel that my company still has ties…”
That’s it! If you can already identify the impediments that hinder team performance and deliverables, but still cannot remove them, you need to work on the culture, practices, product and people, so that the whole mindset be transformed, be really agile.Understand how our Enterprise Consulting works</ a>
