Improving your organisation’s agility

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You can adopt agile methodologies without putting undue stress on your organisation through implementing a few simple organisational processes

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• agree and share a set of agile principles with your team. This could be simply assigning specific roles to individuals when working on agile projects to shifting focus on exhibiting prototypes over design documentation and putting customer collaboration at the heart of the project;   

• be sure to maintain your existing framework of good governance and control. You do not want people to use agile to shy away from following key protocol and keeping your wider stakeholder community satisfied;

• invest in agile training and development for your staff, initially for those who have the knowledge and experience to understand where and when agile will work and where it won’t. They can then apply the methods in a practical manner and share learnings with other colleagues;

• let people just run with it. This means allowing teams to learn and not be criticised for making mistakes. This can eventually lead to formation of expert teams who can share good practice with colleagues across your organisation; and

• set specific improvement objectives so that you can assess how your agile practices are taking shape and whether they are adding value to your customers. Measure and review the improvement objectives regularly

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Use agile approaches – don’t just follow them

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What agile should not be is a polar opposite of your current management processes that already work. Using agile can be highly effective but it does bring certain challenges to management, for example:

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• it can be expensive, you might have ‘time - boxed’ sprints and think you have control over costs but you might also need a full range of stakeholders available at the same time during your sprints. This could be a bad use of time or simply impossible to manage in complex stakeholder environments – particularly in the public sector;

• the project’s overall scope can remain unclear for a long time whilst certain ‘features’ are being developed in piecemeal. This means you’ve got limited predictability of your project and are therefore carrying innate risk; and

• people, at all levels of the organisation, can use agile to hide away from providing key project progress information in a clear, concise and timely manner. This means your project board might not know what’s going until it’s too late to intervene.

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Understand your capability and focus on those improvements that get the best results

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Organisations have to deliver in highly dynamic environments with complex stakeholder groups and ever- changing customer needs. The key to success is to keep doing what you do well and focusing on the application of practical tools, techniques and processes to develop deeper customer relationships. This will enable you to respond quicker and provide greater value to your customers by getting the most out of your project teams.

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