An agile business strives to break down silos between business units such as IT, sales and marketing. This even extends to aligning their KPIs, so they’re not inadvertently working against each other in the pursuit of their own narrow goals.
Working in unison requires empathy on all sides, walking in the others’ proverbial shoes in order to appreciate what they require to deliver efficiently and effectively.
The Agile Manifesto lays out how to approach this. Keep in mind it’s a guiding principle, rather than a hard and fast set of rules and regulations. Every business approaches agile a bit differently, but one of the key tenets is to minimise work in progress.
You can see this in action in the Toyota Production System (TPS) and Kanban just-intime (JIT) manufacturing, but you’ll also see it on television every night if you tune into home renovation shows like The Block.
Their weekly workflows are built around agile sprints, aiming to complete one room at a time rather than have a house full of half-finished projects. The traditional waterfall approach would see them finish all the flooring throughout the house, move on to all the plastering, then all the painting and so forth until the entire house was complete.
A builder may tell you that constructing one room at a time is a bad way to build a house from scratch, but it’s actually a very good way to build IT projects.
Partly, it’s because you’re looking to minimise work in progress. The aim is to complete core features and get a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) up and running so that you can start delivering benefits to the business while iterating based on feedback.
This approach also lets you remain nimble, evolving the project to meet demand rather than committing to a long journey when there’s every chance the landscape could change along the way and you’ll be passed by more agile competitors.
So how do you embrace agile? Start small, rather than trying to boil the ocean.
Focus on tasks that fulfil the business strategy, weeding out areas where you’re spinning the wheels. You’re looking to remove constraints in your processes and align with customer expectations.
Agile is all about alignment and it starts from the top. Ask the executive team about their top three priorities and, if these don’t align with the business goals, then straight away you can see a problem.
The agile mindset needs to permeate throughout the business, such as ensuring stand-up meetings focus on sharing information rather than getting bogged down in trying to solve all the world’s problems in one meeting.
So how do you get started with Agile? The most practical advice I can offer is not to start with tools and technology – they come later. Start out old school, with Post-it notes and a blank wall. As soon as you start putting a million notes into the ‘work in progress’ column, that’s a good sign that you’ve got too much going on and your priorities are probably out of alignment. Use the agile way of working to begin to align your priorities, and change your culture to ensure that the business is working in unison toward a common goal.