The benefits of Agile project management

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To describe how agile project management encourages team growth, we’re hypothetically putting together a fresh batch of people in this article. But putting people together doesn’t make them a team. Sure, they can have common interests which allows some interaction on a more than haphazard subject range, but progress towards becoming a team with a clear-cut common goal needs more than that.

Let’s find out the key powers that are at work when we stimulate our fresh-of-the-bat project team to go agile.

The power of reoccurring events

Sharing an event together can instigate a common (group) denominator. However, this is not guaranteed to occur. By repeatedly sharing an event together, the chance to achieve a first point of recognition increases drastically. By introducing a common goal into these events, we can get cohesion and a learning experience that can lay the first foundation of a team experience.  

Kelly(1995) did an experiment in a conference room, where an audience of 5000 people were given a wand with a red and green side. In this experiment, the lefthand side and righthand side of the audience were made responsible for the roll and pitch of an airplane respectively. An online camera registered the number of red and green signals given off by the audience continuously. These numbers were interpreted real-time into piloting a big on-screen airplane simulation into going left, right, up and down respectively.

No need to say that the tension rose as the experiment started by showing the live picture of the airplane on it’s final approach to the runway. The airplane being “radio-controlled” by the input given by the colors that people that were holding up. As expected, the first few approaches ended up not so well. But each time the experiment was repeated, the result was getting better. Finally these 5000 people were able to safely land their plane in a couple more attempts.

A bit similar to the experiment above, agile project management allows for the reoccurring Daily event that similarly plays an important role in the transformation of loosely grouped people into a solid team. It creates a moment where individual people learn from each other, learn to trust each other, express themselves more freely amongst themselves. The event of getting together becomes a habit that feels good. Thus, the Daily turns into a team ritual where there is time to openly discuss matters in a safe environment.

The exact subjects that need to be touched in the Daily are the things where progress is hampered in any shape, size or form. It allows quick probing of potential solutions from within the team. Solutions that require expertise and/or input from external sources are flagged to be taken up elsewhere.

The power to self-determine pace

Under Agile project management, the team is allowed to set its own pace. Because of the innate differences in Kanban and Scrum, this boils down to a somewhat different approach when working under these regimes.

In Kanban the issue-size and complexity are often similar for all issues, which leads to a more number-of-tickets-processed approach when it comes to determining pace. All team members are allowed to scoop up issues from the top of the backlog. The maximum number of active issues is governed by the work in progress limits on each of the columns (statuses) on the board. The team commits to keeping the board as clean as possible by focusing on getting each issue to the Done status as quickly as possible.

In Scrum, issue-size and complexity can differ profoundly across tickets. This is why the team is allowed to express these differences into an arbitrary quantity of story points. The pace of the team is then measured as story points per time (sprint) period. Story points are team-specific and cannot/should not be mixed across multiple teams.

Customer guided re-focus in the Review

During the agile cycle of reoccurring events there is also time for the team to present the achievements of the latest work-period to the customer. This interaction allows for direct customer feedback and a re-alignment of customer priorities that might have shifted due to external circumstances. Presenting their work also knits the fabric of trust between the team and the customer.

Typical sittings reoccur every 2 to 3 weeks, which allow for relatively small, incremental changes instead of dramatic alterations in the desired end product. It allows for the team to re-focus along the thinking lines of the customer within their bandwidth of expertise.

Critical internal review of the last agile cycle in the Retrospective

The agile cycle of reoccurring events ends with a team retrospective that has focus on how this latest cycle output could be enhanced in terms of efficiency and quality delivered. Key is learning from past mistakes in the safe environment of the team, adopting processes that can improve the execution of the next increment delivery to the customer. The team is coached into being self-aware in all of their aspects. Modifications in the execution of the work for the upcoming increment come from within the team and are therefore more prone to really succeed. Teams are allowed to take ownership of the project and its results. This empowers the team by being more in-charge and being allowed to be proud of their own accomplishments.

The power of transparency

Agile project management introduces transparency into what everyone is doing and what status has been reached in a project at a certain moment in time. Each time a team finishes an increment cycle, they get a better insight into how they can organize better for future increments. This could span from pinpointing potential pitfalls, to finding better approaches to obtaining the increments that are valuable  for the customer.

As a side-benefit, transparency also globally reveals how much work a team can shift in a certain period of time. This is key for product managers that plan upcoming work and negotiate new work with future customers.

Conclusion

All these powers combined make working under agile management a win-win solution for both the team and management. The team gets to determine a manageable workload and is focused on improving the output, whereas management gets a measure of predictability of the total work output by the team.

Reference

Kelly, Kevin. 1995. Out of Control : The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. 1st pbk. print. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley