Ideas on Implementing Agile Development

November 26th 2014

Do you need Agile Methodologies?

The first question to ask yourself is, "do you need to change your current project management processes?"

Don't change something that is already working efficiently just because Agile development is what everyone is doing. Implement Agile (or any project management process for that matter) as a response to solve a problem that you and your team are facing. If your companies backlog or task tracker is feeling something like the image above, maybe keep reading...

At a high level, possible reasons to implement Agile development methodologies could be:

• To improve team efficiency.
• To reduce developer distraction and frustration.
• To improve team focus and operational efficiency.
• Improve team moral.
• Provide better visibility of priorities to your team and wider business.
• Encourage team ownership and accountability for features they develop, test and release.

Get your team's buy in

The number 1 most important thing to do before you implement an Agile development environment is to get your teams support. Without your teams buy in, you are destined for failure. Demonstrate to your team the benefits of Agile methodologies:

• Run some informal training sessions with your team.
• Demonstrate how it can solve problems your team is facing
• Reduces changing priorities.
• Can reduce stress within the team.
• Can deliver a more focused development environment.

It is also just as important to get the wider business to support the changing processes. They need to understand how it will affect them, but more so the benefits they will gain as part of this implementation.

• Reduction on changing business priorities and more focused efforts.
• ROI drives priorities which drives development effort.
• Encourages forward planning.
• Less important features will be de-prioritised and most likely not built.
• There are shorter more manageable timeframes that are consistently met by the development team.

Start small but aim big

Agile is a massive suite of project management methodologies that can be implemented in so many different ways. It's not advisable (or possible) to implement every single aspect of Agile development in one go - you are really setting yourself up for failure if you do this.

Agile is about creating the most efficient ways to run projects for your team - and remember every team is completely different. What works in one team may not work for your team. So it is crucial that you start with the basics and constantly iterate and improve the processes to create the greatest efficiency - remove what's not working, and add new processes that do work.

Some advice a very experienced Agile coach told me was, "If your offline process for running projects don't work, then how can you expect your online processes to work?".

What he was driving at, is that you really need to get your Agile processes working offline first before you start implementing any online technologies or project management tools. A gradual roll-out plan I have successfully implemented is loosely documented below:

1. Spend a few weeks training up your team on Agile methodologies (what it is, how it will help).
2. Document all of the projects/tasks in a single backlog for your business.
3. Prioritise all of these projects/tasks with your executive or management team (all department heads need to be on the same page).
4. Work with your team to estimate the work effort for each priority.
5. Get the most important projects/tasks and setup a basic Agile task board (Swim lanes can include "TODO",  "In Progress", "Done"). Do this on a physical wall or whiteboard.
6. Start with a 2 week sprint (try really hard to not change priorities).
7. Run morning stand-ups each day (no more than 15 minutes a day).
8. Have a single row up the top of the board that is 'unplanned tasks'. This will demonstrate distractions your team is facing that is limiting them from delivering on the sprint.
9. Run a retrospective at the end of the 2 week sprint (last day, Friday).
10. Run sprint planning on the next Monday.

Start with a physical task board, create user stories on cards and sub-tasks on post-it notes. After a few sprints, once you have adapted the processes so that they are working, you can move some of these processes to an online project management suite. Atlassian has some great project management tools for managing Agile teams including JIRA and Confluence.

Continuously improve

Agile isn't about putting in place a process and leaving it. It's about constantly improving the processes every single sprint, week or feature release. Perhaps the most important part of the Agile methodologies are running retrospectives frequently and determining what has worked and what needs improving in the next sprint.

Retrospectives

Retrospectives should include everyone that was part of the sprint (developers, designers, QA, product managers). It should be a constructive and quick meeting at the end of each sprint (usually 30 minutes is enough). If you are running the retrospectives you need to ensure the team focuses on constructive feedback and are not negative in their responses.

Get the team to identify:

• What went well that the team should continue to do.
• What needs to be improved next sprint.
• Each improvement recommendation should come a potential solution to the issue (this encourages your team members to always be thinking about solutions, not just problems). 

As a team you can then vote on which areas should be improved within the next sprint. Assign action points and owners to ensure improvement actually occurs (create tasks for your next sprint if you really need to allocate time).

Summary and learnings about Agile

• It should create visibility for your team and wider business about priorities to focus on.
• Allows your team to focus on the priorities at hand and reduce changing priorities.
• Define priorities based off ROI, operations efficiency or other company goals.
• Run sprint planning throughout the sprint, not just at the start of the next - this way you are constantly planning.
• Get your team to estimate task work effort, don't estimate as a manager.
• Assign ownership for each user story so your team develops ownership and accountability for the work they are delivering.
• Agile should create an environment that your team can flourish in.
• Allow your team to release quality features, often! Always be delivering.
• Always improve - your Agile development processes are never finalised, you should always be looking for and promoting improvement.
• Always run retrospectives at the end of each sprint.