Top 5 ways teams fail to be Agile and how to fix it

#5 – Not visualising the work

“There are so many things to do I don’t know where to start.”

Imagine trying to manage a busy weekend with kids’ soccer, party planning, and unexpected tech support for your mother-in-law. Now, envision that level of chaos on a team, multiple teams, or even an entire organization.

You need a way to see what’s on the team’s plate so the team can decide what to focus on. Agility is achieved by deciding what not to do, and prioritization is key. To prioritize effectively, the team needs to visualize their work and discuss it.

Jira is an excellent visual management tool, but if it gets overloaded, it becomes difficult to visualize the work. An EPiC Agile consultant can help streamline this process, ensuring your team maintains clarity and focus.

The Fix: Use visual management boards to limit the WIP, physical if possible is even better.

Creative team of people visualising the work with sticky notes

#4 – Working in Silos

Two common issues can hinder a team’s effectiveness: the old school departmental setup where everyone has the same skills, preventing true collaboration, or a cross-functional team where work is handed out in a task-heavy manner, like tokens at a party.

Reforming the traditional departmental setup into multiple squads that share capabilities can significantly enhance teamwork. This approach isn’t limited to Developers and QA but extends to any Business Agility foundation for teams, enabling them to deliver outcomes effectively across the business.

The Fix: Reform into cross-functional teams or restructure the way the work is defined so it’s more team focused.

#3 – Focused on Output rather than Outcomes

Doing many things fast does not automatically mean Agility. The main benefit of being

 Agile is to deliver high-value items frequently. Teams that are focused on getting through as many tasks as possible may not be taking the time to ensure the work they’re doing is actually valuable. 

They may be delivering stuff but what is that stuff delivering? 

It’s much better for teams to “do” less but achieve more.

Before a team pulls work into a Scrum Sprint or a Kanban board, define a Goal and then pull in the work that achieves that goal rather than the other way around. Otherwise, your goal just ends up being “do all the stuff”.

Sprint Goals can be chicken and egg, tweaking the sprint goals once you’ve brought in the work is common and healthy to even just validate the goal.

The Fix: Go up a level in planning and refer to strategic goals.

#2 – Unempowered Product Owners

The Product Owner and Scrum Master are roles that need to be in balance. Like law or government, healthy debate achieves a balanced outcome. The Product Owner key role is to make decisions on what is best for the business but if they need approvals or counselling to make those decisions, it slows everything down. 

This is particularly important when the work is underway to avoid any impediments. The follow-on impact of this is when the team is blocked waiting for a decision, they then start working on something else and then we’ve introduced context switching and the potential for an incomplete sprint. 

The Fix: Empower your Product Owner to make decisions rather than just relaying them.

#1 – Trying to do too many things at once

It’s an oldie but a goodie, coming back to the core principles of agility, focusing on the most valuable outcomes now. 

There is no doubt the context switching is disruptive, the time it takes to get back up to speed when switching between different pieces of work and then the extra effort required to get the work through to Done. 

However, it’s also a big source of frustration and while short term it can be tolerated, long term it will start to affect morale and motivation.

Good direction from leadership helps teams set achievable goals and doing this on a regular cadence, is a great foundation for long term performance.

Fix: Clear goals and direction and disciplined sprints

Takeaway

While these are key symptoms we see affecting teams, there is often an underlying cause that needs to be resolved to enable agility within the organization.

Teams are most effective when they are in an environment that supports an agile way of working so when we’re looking at why a team might be struggling to get to market, most often the cause is actually outside of their control.