Understand now how the application of agile methodologies works in practice to have a more efficient and agile team

Much is said about the benefits of using agile methodologies, not only in the technology area, but in several others such as Marketing, HR, Sales, Finance, etc… However, one of the most frequent questions related to this subject is “as a process organized agile does it really work in practice?”. Questions like, “Okay, I want to be more agile, but how can this work for me?” Before answering this question, it is worth mentioning that, if you do not have a well-structured and well-implemented work process, your team is likely to be using waste or being very unproductive on a day-to-day basis. And this happens for several reasons:

• Lack of clear purpose and purpose
• Lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities
• Uncertainties in the organization
• A lot of rework and waste

In other words, it is no use having an organized work process, stored in a document within a network, and not implemented, that people do not live on a daily basis.

Benefits of an agile team

Furthermore, if you have a well-defined process and it is not traditional, if it has agile concepts incorporated, and it is practiced by each person, in the team’s daily routine, the benefits are immense. When implementing agile concepts and methodologies in a team, he starts to:

• Have chances to produce much more
• Be more assertive in tasks
• Enter continuous improvement cycles
• Avoid waste and rework
• Be more coordinated and give more visibility to the leadership
• Improve communication between everyone involved
• Be more effective and efficient as a whole

How to implement these changes in practice

Everything looks beautiful in theory, but what about in practice? To make your team more agile and with a better structured process, it is first necessary to understand that each team and company will have a different solution. That is, there is no right or wrong, but an organized method to meet YOUR needs and help you achieve YOUR goals. This is our model for implementing an agile process for a marketing area, in this case. It’s not necessarily what will work for you, but it can already serve as a basis and help you discover your ideal format.

To help you in this process, we selected the main points of an agile process implementation:

Set goals clearly 

It’s no use wanting to use new work concepts within a team if it doesn’t have a clear vision of the purpose of the initiatives. OKR techniques are ideal for defining objectives and key results to achieve goals  and get clear on what is happening in your day-to-day work. “If you don’t know where to go, your team will probably always be losing.”

Structuring the to-do list 

When we define the project or product vision, we start a backlog structuring, that is, we create an ordered list of tasks to be performed to achieve a certain goal. We used several dynamics and techniques to select these items (Design Sprint, Lean Inception, etc) and so created the Product Backlog. Next, it is very important to make the correct prioritization and ordering of this backlog, starting the work with the most important tasks, or those that have more dependency, identifying and removing the impediments, etc.

Starting Sprints

After refining the items and defining the Sprint Backlog we started working on the Sprints – which are constant cycles with pre-defined periods to develop the deliverables. In this example of the marketing campaign, as the team was very volatile, we did one-week Sprints, because in addition to the still uncertain scenario, everything was adaptation and people were being trained and working in this new format, to Same time. In this first cycle, the team must work focused on the Sprint Goal (goal for that period) and, at the end of each Sprint, we call a series of stakeholders to talk about the deliverables, the results, have the moment of feedbacks and adjust any item for the next work cycle. It is noteworthy here that transparency and visual management are essential in this new work format. We use several techniques and concepts from Scrum, Kanban, Management 3.0, among others.

Enter a continuous improvement process

At the end of this new work cycle, stop and think: if we could go back in the past and do it all over again, would we do everything the same? Or would we have done something different? In this retrospectiva, it is possible to identify and select a point of improvement, and have a plan of action to work on it, along with the other backlog items, in the next Sprint … Thus initiating a process of continuous improvement.

Train people

One of the most important phases of implementing agile methodologies is acculturation. This is the moment when people go through a series of trainings, aiming not only to learn new concepts, but to really change the paradigm and reach the goals. We apply several official trainings (with certification) to raise people’s level of knowledge and practical experience.

Have metrics and data 

This new work format is useless if it is not possible to measure! Have data and metrics, both result (outcome) and task (output) metrics. They serve to understand how this initiative is being positive or needs adjustments. It’s these indicators that help guide the team to be better every Sprint! Remembering that, if you don’t have the right people to help you, this whole initiative to have an agile, more organized and structured process may fail. If you still have any questions about this transformation, speak with one of our consultantsif you request a diagnosis to find out if the methodologies Agile will work for your team.

Want your team to work in a more agile and structured way?