With the agile approach, teams start projects from a 30,000-foot view that ultimately leads to opportunities for responding quickly to change, collecting customer feedback throughout development, and prioritizing collaboration over processes. 🤩
Whether you’re seasoned or brand new to agile, the most common dilemmas are shared between both groups. There’s a lot that goes into understanding Agile project management: what it is, how it’s structured, and the benefits.
Perhaps the biggest question is: how can agile work for your team? 🤔
We’ve gathered a handful of the best tips from professionals with agile experience to help answer this question.
Continuous improvement throughout a project lifecycle
These days, you can use modern project management software to manage and automate all of your agile processes. That way, you can execute Agile tasks at lightning speed!
When you should (and shouldn’t) use Agile project management
In today’s growing digital environment, organizations across all industries can benefit from Agile project management.
When approached correctly, agile working gives teams creative freedom and transparency to share ideas and improvements throughout the project’s development.
Done wrong:
Done right:
However, it’s important to know which projects are appropriate for agile. After all, using the agile method defeats the purpose if it overcomplicates and confuses the project process. 🤷🏻♀️
Project characteristics suitable for agile:
Stakeholder involvement
Appetite for transformation
Customer feedback is integral during the development phases
The dedicated team has some practical experience with Agile
Project characteristics not suitable for agile:
Fixed requirements and deadlines
Cannot be reasonably allocated in short time frames
Customer requirements are satisfied the first time with no future improvement needed
With this in mind, it’s time to hear from other professionals and their experiences with agile project management. 🎙
Tips for Agile project management
It’s important for a product manager to explain the business value that’s needed to satisfy the customer and meet company objectives.
When I can, I share Lean canvas work, customer survey and interview results, so the development team can also get the real flavor of what customers are saying.
On the company objectives side, I explain how solving this customer problem will help us increase revenue, customer loyalty, or market share, again based on the market and competitive data I have available.
Colleen O’Rourke, The 280 Group Principal Consultant & Trainer of Product Management Certifications: Agile Certified Product Manager
The best advice I can give to someone working on agile project management is to focus on outcomes rather than the rules.
With Agile it’s really easy to spend a lot of time and energy debating what is and isn’t Agile and to lose track of the goals you’ve set for using agile which is improved outcomes.
When bringing in the process it’s best to make sure that you embrace the spirit, values, and philosophies of Agile while avoiding focusing on rigid processes.
Do your best to get everybody on board and believing in the agile workflow.
In order for it to be most effective, team members and leadership have to understand why they’re working in an agile environment, and really believe in the benefits it has.
Only then will they embrace it and you’ll be able to fully reap those benefits that agile offers. If your people don’t have the mindset, you’re never going to get the most out of your agile workflow.
Derek Harrington, Entrision Founder, Lead Engineer
Organization is key for successful agile project management. Everyone needs to know all the steps to complete each sprint’s tasks.
And so everyone needs easy access to the company’s Standard Operating Procedures so they can complete their work efficiently and reliably.
As one of your team’s SOPs, you should create a communication process so that everyone knows where to chat about issues or risks the team is facing – are you doing this in Slack or a productivity tool like ClickUp?
The more organized the team is, the easier it will be for the team to complete their work each sprint.
Meagan Beltekoglu, New Leaf Digital Certified Director of Operations
Get buy-in from product management and the executive team for incremental delivery and the need to support a tight feedback loop. Driving a culture of continuous improvement and also allowing a team to ‘stop the production line’ to focus on bottlenecks has allowed us to reduce unplanned work, which ultimately allows for better estimates and higher quality deliverables.
Don’t micromanage. While daily scrums provide a good opportunity to get quick updates and stay abreast of the project’s progress, don’t give into the urge to turn them into interrogation sessions.
Team collaboration is key. A good working relationship between the product owner, scrum master, and product manager ensures successful agile project management.
In this trio, each member has a very crucial role to play for a successful implementation of agile methodologies within the organization.
The scrum master ties the teams together and plays an essential part to enforce the agile scrum practices within the team.
Team leaders and members should completely trust each other.
Agile teams are cross-functional and self-organizing, where members are often working on different components of the same usable deliverable.
Without trust, an Agile team will not be able to manage their own work as a cohesive unit, transparency will be lost, and the Agile processes will be difficult to maintain.
Not only is this a part of one of the agile four core values, “Responding to Change Over Following a Plan”, but it also should be your guiding mantra while traversing a project with a lot of risk or unknowns.
Don’t plan all of your work upfront – plan and respond throughout the entire project until it is done.
William Chin-Fook, TELUS Digital Senior Product Manager
Don’t invent your custom agile processes. Follow the agile manifesto, carefully implement all necessary ceremonies and give it time to roll out.
If you feel that Agile methodology doesn’t help solve your problems, you need to research a bit more.
For example, some branching techniques like the Scaled Agile Framework help scale and adopt Agile for more giant corporations.
Anton Yarkov, Access Softek Inc Senior Software Engineer, Chief of Staff
Start doing the Agile method for a pilot project and, later on, let the same individuals become agile ambassadors within the organization to spread the method.
Agile requires daily and constant communication between all stakeholders – the development team, business owners, and users – so starting with a pilot project with committed members that honor key interfaces prove that Agile can be cascaded to an entire company.
You want goal-oriented people so that you can be confident that every action and decision they make is directed toward the achievement of a specific goal.
Furthermore, you want team members who are adaptable, as new technologies emerge all the time, and your team should not be afraid to embrace these changes.
This will ensure that your team reduces redundancies and eliminates errors that are common when using outdated methodologies.
Only schedule meetings if you can make every minute count. Overstuffed and non-critical meetings are the enemy of successful Agile implementation.
They kill employee motivation, interfere with sprints, and often distract participants with non-essential tasks and discussions.
My rule of thumb is that if I can’t make every minute of a meeting critical, I don’t hold a meeting.
New Agile PMs often want to prove themselves, and they hold a lot of meetings as a demonstration that they are on-task.
I would recommend the opposite: show you’re on-task by only holding meetings when something needs to be addressed in order for the pace of work to continue.
Accurate and adequate planning will bring far-reaching consequences: it impacts the speed and quality of features you are going to present to your customers.
Sometimes, it will pay off more to step aside from the original plan and show flexibility to change tasks or their priority, or both.
The key objective is to deliver an outstanding experience to customers.
While deciding on the best agile workflow (e.g., Scrum, Kanban), don’t forget to also set up a communication workflow with other teams, e.g., customer success and sales.
Get a Scrum master to help you and your team set up a workflow. It’s going to save your time and allow your team to focus on what’s really important—tackling essential issues.
Make sure that you have the right piece of software to help you track your projects. Agile has helped us immensely.
In all honesty, we probably wouldn’t be functional without it at this stage. It helps to manage expectations of project completion across the board.
Being able to reassess our position at the end of sprints is also extremely helpful, because it means we can often find more efficient ways of doing things and can better prioritize where to channel our efforts.
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