Agile project management and organisational agility development

What do we mean by agility?

The accelerating environment and expectations increasingly require organisations to be able to respond quickly and effectively to needs, demands and problems.

The fundamental pillar of this is a more direct, faster communication, and the rethinking traditional autocratic ways of working. Successful agile organisations are able to innovate, change and, perhaps most importantly, to learn from mistakes, so you can keep improving.

Highly agile organisations are characterised by value focus and efficiency, so organisations thus strive to carry out only those tasks that are of real value to the organisation or customer for. The agile approach, which is more of a mindset than a methodology, can appear projects, or even day-to-day tasks as well.

Agile projects

However, before we can talk about an agile organisation, it is also worth looking at the projects delivered by the organisation.

Given that projects (product development, IT systems development, internal process development, custom solutions delivered to customers, etc.) are now common in all organisations, the question often arises as to whether when to implement a project in an agile way?

In our experience there is no single, one-size-fits-all solution for managing projects, so it is not necessarily a good direction to implement all projects on an agile basis. We are convinced that some projects are with a traditional approach and there are others that can be more effective if implemented according to agile guidelines.

Experience shows that the projects with the following characteristics may be suitable on an agile basis for delivery to:

novelty, less known solution direction (not series projects),
well-defined increments, product components,
the need for a high degree of creativity,
willingness on the part of the client to maintain contact and work together,
the volatile environment, the uncertainty of specific requirements and expectations,
the right task culture.

Did you know?

Agility is a mindset, a mindset behind which different methodologies have emerged, such as Lean, Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Kanban, Scrum. The optimal solution is typically to combine the techniques preferred by each of these trends through experience, with the team tailoring their application to its own needs.

When is it useful to develop agility?

There are some symptoms where it is advisable to consider improving organisational agility, most commonly:

inefficient operation, unnecessary processes,
excessive administrative burdens,
loss of product and value focus,
unused results,
customer dissatisfaction,
the difficulty of coordinating agile teams.

Of course, the above symptoms can also occur within day-to-day tasks (e.g. BAU, operations, etc.) and project frameworks, where the elements of the agile toolkit can be applied.

Tangible results

By properly applying the Agile guidelines, the organisation becomes empowered:

respond faster to business needs,
to minimise unused features,
faster, closer communication with the customer,
avoid unnecessary processes and resource tie-ups that do not add direct value,
to deliver the results you need,
and to implement change faster and more effectively.

In our experience, implementing certain types of projects according to Agile guidelines can deliver tangible, quantifiable results for organisations.

Internationally, more than 70% of projects already use agile elements

Proposed solution, development sheet

In order to achieve the above results, in all cases we propose a tailor-made solution, the top-level content of which may be as follows:

Defining objectives, expectations, success criteria and KPIs
Situation mapping, identifying barriers to change and supporting elements
Designing the process and content of change, defining roles, setting quick deliverables
Leadership coaching and development
Training change agents, developing pilot teams
Creating a common language, shaping attitudes through workshops and training
Role-based development (e.g. teams, product owners, scrum masters, coaches, chapter leads, RTEs, etc.) and agile coaching
Introducing changes to infrastructure, organisational structure and ways of working
Change support, fixing
Supporting continuous development

Why might you need to bring in an external expert?

Although the Agile guidelines are extremely simple, they into organisational operations is not a simple task. Most often, these developments are "mindset" and organisational culture change request.

Our experts monitored the agile development of a range of organisations, either as employees, consultants or trainers, where we can use our experience to make an otherwise not easy process less painful.

Every day we meet organisational leaders who think they are agile because they do daily stand-ups. Unfortunately, this in itself does not make an operation agile, it is just a tool that can be used to help, but these tools not for their own sake, but in the interests of value and efficiency it is advisable to apply.

With international certifications our dedicated colleagues work with stakeholders to develop a solution that fits the organisation and its participants, and we can cover the implementation and support, even on a day-to-day basis.

Challenges in development from the management side

Our task as consultants and trainers during the development process is to answer the following challenges and questions, which most often arise at the management level:

What are the responsibilities and competences of the roles? How can truly autonomous teams be formed?
How can agile projects fit into the existing portfolio of projects with traditional trends?
How do we manage and plan organisational resources for agile projects?
Do we still need a project leader? What can they do to help?
How can the team become a self-developing team, how can we train our own agile coaches, scrum masters?
What controls should I apply to the teams, what can I help them with?
What do I need to do differently as an agile leader?
Which approach should I take, I've heard of SAFE, Spotify model and Nexus, which is the best direction?
How do we tailor our own organisation to what others are doing, how do we develop our own model?
How can I motivate teams and avoid high turnover?

Can't do it without leadership support

Agile development can be most effective with a bottom-up initiative and strong leadership support. Without leadership support and commitment, the whole process is doomed to fail from the start.

Challenges in development from the team side

At the implementation, operational level, we often encounter the following questions, to which we make suggestions as consultants and change managers, with the involvement of stakeholders:

What support tools should we use?
What tools to use and what not to use?
How to "use" Scrum Masters well?
How can POs live and work effectively with the team?
How do we estimate, plan and monitor work?
How can we make retrospectives really useful ceremonies?
How do we manage conflicts at work?
What can we do to make progress transparent for managers?
How do we change to take advantage of greater empowerment?