24

Sharing agile

In its original form, agile was developed as an approach for teams: a way for software development teams to work together to deliver solutions in uncertain and unpredictable working environments.

Agile is a simple way to visualise and structure work and get everyone involved on the same page. The same techniques, tools and exercises for individual adoption of agile work very well across teams and organisations.

Sharing tips

• Use sticky notes to facilitate and capture key points in meetings.
• Create an ideas cloud in the office where the team can write suggestions.
• Introduce colleagues to your board as a way of knowing what you are doing.
• Facilitate an agile tool in team meetings: estimation game, MoSCoW, DONE, five retrospective questions.
• Create an agile board as a snapshot in time for a specific project or workflow with colleagues to help gain understanding.

By using agile in your normal day-to-day activities, there will be a natural introduction as you use these tools to communicate with your colleagues about mutually relevant work. Agile tools are a useful communication aid when you are discussing joint activities or ones that impact upon others in some way. If you are working with others on a particular project, the agile method can be used to work specifically on that project.

The agile and lean boards are a good visual introduction to agile: invite colleagues to stand-up meetings at your board when you need their input so that they can contribute.

Introduce the retrospective five questions format (see Section 22) into a review meeting to gain feedback and identify actions going forward.

Use the retrospective five questions in meetings:

• What has gone well?
• What can we do better?
• What is stopping us?
• What has changed?
• What is next?

Mapping work onto a board with cards/notes and tracking its progress by holding daily stand-ups and weekly review meetings helps others immediately to see work in progress and the benefits of visualising work. Once this has been established, further tools, such as estimation games, the structure of sprints and tactics such as MVP and metrics to analyse performance, can be introduced and used to help improve and refine the team’s performance.

Agile is a set of building blocks that can be adapted and formed in a variety of ways to support a team. By providing a team with the agile foundations and structures, a team can easily adapt and evolve boards and communication channels that suit their particular functions and needs.

A key reason that agile tools and materials are great for teams is because they are tactile and visual. This means they are on display and not hidden away in spreadsheets and planning documents. Agile dashboards provide simple, real-time visual methods that inform both you and those with whom you work.

Adoption lifecycles

If you are planning to introduce agile across a team or an organisation, the theory of the adoption lifecycle is valuable in raising awareness of how new solutions are adopted, and how this may impact on the adoption of agile within your team or business (see Figure 24.1).

INNOVATORS

When a new solution is introduced, innovators are the first to adopt. This small first segment are strong change agents. They like to be the first to adopt new things and their driver for adoption is mostly emotional.

These adopters will provide great feedback and engage fully and they will accept solutions that are imperfect, enjoying the experimental nature of being the first to adopt the solution. Beware, however, as these adopters will be looking for the next new innovation before too long!

Figure 24.1 Adoption lifecycle

Source: Rogers (1995)

EARLY ADOPTERS

If innovators are the ‘me first’ category of adopters, then early adopters are the ‘me too’ category. Again, easy to convince, these adopters are keen to engage and adopt new solutions. They provide useful feedback and can help to scale, hone and refine solutions, as often they are keen to improve and develop ideas further.

EARLY MAJORITY

The early majority are a very different type to the innovators and early adopters. These adopters expect a solution that has been proven and the effects to be visible and tangible. It is likely that you will have to sell the solution to these adopters to encourage them to engage. They expect to receive a solution that is fit for purpose, and will not be so forgiving of bugs and glitches. The early majority are a good test of whether a solution is scalable and how it needs to adapt to work effectively on a larger scale.

LATE MAJORITY

The late majority are the followers. They adopt because it is perceived that everyone else has, and so they do not want to be left out. These adopters have high expectations. Based on the positive feedback that encouraged them to engage, they expect the solution to be proven and for it to be refined and perfected.

At this stage of implementation and adoption, the solution will be at maturity. Learning should be invested in identifying the next version or model of the solution that will inspire the innovators and early adopters to upgrade and sustain their engagement, ensuring that the solution does not lose traction as a preferred solution.

LAGGARDS

The final stage of adoption are the laggards: those that lag behind and are late to adopt. They are highly adverse to change and will be very difficult to convert without forced change, which can be stressful. The positive side of attracting laggards is that, by this stage, the change of solution should be well embedded with others and so become normalised, which means that laggards may inadvertently adopt the solution as it has become a familiar feature of their external environment.

Agile is a combination of tools that can be used and adopted in a variety of ways. As agile practices are established, these tools can be evolved and adapted so they are continuously tailored to suit the needs of the individual, teams and business as they grow and evolve themselves.

As well as serving as a guide to how agile may be adopted more widely, this lifecycle of adoption applies in many different situations where there is change and new solutions are emerging. It can be used to guide adoption of the solutions you develop using agile and as a guide to how you personally adopt new solutions and, more widely, how others adopting new solutions may impact upon you.