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The Best Advice for Using Agile Techniques

Posted by Marbenz Antonio on August 2, 2022

“This is working well because…[what are you praising/celebrating?]”

Business agility is rarely an easy goal to achieve.

The Best Advice for Using Agile Techniques

Agile is a word that signifies movement forward. It’s a simplified way of saying how businesses desire to run. It is now so pervasive that having an agile mindset and the ability to implement agile methodologies are becoming more and more common in job descriptions and interview questions. Though experience differs:

• Agile and agility have many distinct meanings and applications.
• Many of us work in agile contexts, yet this usually entails applying specific techniques rather than developing a real agile attitude.
• With all the uncertainties going on, we think an agile strategy will work better, but we’re not sure where to begin.

In this article, we focus on the top 10 agile practices and strategies that we may use in our daily work to achieve higher levels of productivity. We’ve used each of these helpful tips more than once. They are simple in concept but emotionally taxing because they call for a change in habits and behavior.

These useful suggestions are appropriate for everyone, regardless of how much you already know about Agile techniques or how unclear you are about the term.

You can build and improve these behaviors by using each of the following advice and methods. Each one supports some behaviors by ensuring that you use agile concepts in your job, which leads to your behavior being agile — a very beneficial cycle.

1. Start developing your acceptance criteria

We are delivering tiny waves of change because we are giving a dynamic solution, with frequent results throughout the life of the initiative. Since we have never before created any of these changes, they are all challenging to predict. This means that we must adopt a “scientific mindset” and conduct quick tests to determine what is effective.

Any agile project must begin and end with the question of whether the experiment was successful. If so, then we can expand on that. If not, we try again until we find something that works. We must decide on the success and failure criteria before we begin, just like with any experiment. Make a list of positive and negative adjectives to help you get started on this:

• Good: easy; intuitive; reduced duplication and repetition; saved time.
• Bad: It took longer; it was more complicated, and it was confusing.

Imagine positive and negative situations and how we would respond to each of them to find these criteria quickly:

• Good: “This is working well because…[what are your praising/celebrating?]”
• Bad: “This is useless because…[what are you annoyed about, what is irritating you?]”.

2. Success, not busyness

We must adopt a new focus if we want to be agile. We must concentrate on our successes rather than our tasks. Start each day visualizing what you will have accomplished and how it will make you, your coworkers, and your customers happy.

Use the following checklist to help visualize your accomplishments:

• Which choices were made today?
• What agreements were made?
  • What activities have your stakeholders decided to take part in?
  • What projects have your stakeholders approved?
• What have you produced that wasn’t there yesterday?
• What have you completed today?

3. Finish the most important tasks first

To quickly decide where your time will be most productively used, make a mental checklist. To cut through your emotion and concentrate on commercial value, use a checklist. Ask a range of inquiries:

• What project has the closest deadline?
• If I don’t do this, who will be most annoyed or inconvenienced?
• What kind of work is a component of other work?
• What project will address my major concern, issue, or challenge?

You should be able to use this to choose the most important job, but just to be sure, make sure you have chosen your priorities based on these two criteria:

• What task needs a resource that isn’t currently available?
• What task would you prefer to complete first?

4. Break the circular argument

Delivering an improving solution is not a linear process, which is a big difficulty of agility. All too usually, everything is interconnected; a typical network. We rely on contributions from other efforts and must produce our results so that they can finish their work.

To be creative with what you deliver and break the deadlock of lacking the inputs you require or being late for other efforts, divide the job up into smaller, stand-alone parts.

5. Create new options

You need to be creative and have unique ideas you can switch to develop an evolving answer. Asking yourself how other people or situations may use what you are working on might help you quickly achieve a new viewpoint:

• How might this be used differently by current clients versus possible new clients?
• How might various workplaces utilize this differently?
• What applications could users with high, medium, and low digital skills make of this?
• How would clients use this if they preferred high, medium, or low degrees of self-service?

6. Stay motivated 

Agile demands that we maintain our motivation over numerous iterations of change. We need to focus on what we have accomplished rather than what needs to be done. Break the job up into manageable chunks to assist us in accomplishing this and help us establish a track record of successes that will improve our motivation.

• Reduce your workload by reducing time commitments, reliances, and effort.
• Use visuals to attract attention to successes.

7. Deliver on time

Apply the rule of three for each assignment: DRAFT > UPDATED > FINAL.

• To think over, study, plan, and develop your first piece of work, you need time to write your first draft.
• To develop an updated version, you need time for this to be examined by others and for them to provide input.
• Before releasing a final version, you need time to consider any feedback on your modified version.
• The time it takes to complete all of this is far longer than you initially anticipated.

8. Invite feedback, not criticism!

Not what you didn’t have time to do, but what you have created. To get input you may use to improve the next edition, ask specific questions:

• What helpful skills should I work on developing more?
• What is acceptable but may be strengthened by changes?
• What improvements are those?
• What more would you like to say?
• What are you removing because it is not relevant?

9. Don’t lose your way!

It is easy to become interested in all the things you are developing with so many small victories making up the evolving answer. It is important to constantly assess whether you are still on track to achieve the greater picture and not just a string of small successes.

To accomplish this, adopt a macro perspective and consider the endpoint and the greater picture of capacity that you are helping to create. Tell us how your work adds to this; if you are unable to do so, are you straying off-topic?

10. Quality Collaboration

Agile involves adaptability and creativity, which call for new viewpoints and new information sources. Increasing the breadth and depth of your network will provide you with additional options for potential collaborators, which will stimulate you and feed your creativity:

• To add depth, find subject-matter experts.
• Connect with thought leaders in relevant fields and identify complementary abilities and knowledge.
• Develop your credibility to get cooperation from others:
  • Share updates about your activities so that people can learn from your expertise.
  • Share your past professional experiences and lessons learned so that people may see your track record in those fields.

Summary

By utilizing the strategies in this feature, you may invest in your agile capability.

For the majority of us, the volume and rate of change in our businesses will only continue to rise. We will be better able to manage if we embrace, adopt, and improve these nimble behaviors, attitudes, and habits.