Agile Transformation — how to get more DONE in teams and in your personal life while having fun giving people credit.

Agile is a bit like aikido, judo or other martial arts where through regular trainings and practise you improve your technique, overcome impediments, solve problems and move forward. Agile practitioners leverage each others experience in both work and personal life.

Agile is a mindset that shapes our attitude to how we work, how we treat people around us and how serious we are about what we do.

In agile there is no hierarchy. Instead there are teams. The teams are autonomous, self-organising and equal. There are leaders and servant-leaders in every team and both forms of leadership are being encouraged and rewarded. Everyone is equally involved and responsible.

Where do we start the transformation?

To start the transformation, start your Monday with a morning cup of tea or coffee with your work colleagues and ask them how they are doing and what they would do if they were you.

Meet your team each morning for a 20min standup. Around 8:40am is a good time.

Focus on Communication, Simplicity, Feedback & Courage.

Each day for the first couple of weeks we will be defining KPIs across every department in the company and then we keep on tweaking them.

Each day we repeat the definition of agility:

agility (n) capability to continuously deliver value to our customers

By doing so we will learn that by helping your peers we are not only growing the company and keeping our awesome jobs but also developing ourselves and becoming better at what we do.

This attitude lays foundations to something we call agile culture.

Let’s start with communication and simplicity. Here are a couple of simple cultural best practices:

• it’s ok to drop off from internal calls for a couple of minutes when your colleague calls you
• if you need input from your colleagues — call them — they will answer — it’s part of the job!
• you don’t have to attend full meetings. Be present when you know you are needed. Ask if there is anything else you are needed for and jump into your next meeting
• there’s nothing wrong with swapping calls when someone dials you in. Give them some of your time if you can.
• no more hiding behind the profile picture. Having your camera on is respectful to other people and is also good for their mental health. But most importantly it shows that you embrace agile culture and you have the right attitude to work with us.
• meetings should be 15–25mins with max 6–8 people in the call. If anything needs more attention we do it in chat, JIRA + Confluence.
• do retrospectives — question and discuss what we could do better next time —retro is a safe place — no question is a bad question.
• ask for feedback and give it to others — that’s the only way to stimulate personal development and develop leadership skills
• show respect by always accepting, ignoring or delegating meeting invites
• etc…

End so on — this list never ends. There is always space for more agility.

Just like in martial arts follow your path with courage until your goals have been achieved. Then set new goals and never stop as the only constant thing in life and in business is change.

To become truly agile and to build agile teams we need to practise it everyday. As we go along we will introduce new things, frameworks and tools. Agile teams based on trust, openness, respect, commitment and courage are destined to achieve synergy and success.