Advice, Engineering Manager

4 Easy & Proven Ways to Adopt Agile In Your Organisation Today

The need for agile project management becomes more important than ever as software development increases in complexity and teams are working remotely. From how decisions are made about a technical design of a feature to how teams respond to customers on an outage, and everything in between, having a structured approach helps you manage software delivery teams and deliver customer value with ease and efficiency.

The 4 easy & proven ways to adopt agile in your organisation today are:

1) Set up agile ceremonies and cadence

The foundational ones to start with are:
- Daily standup
- Fortnightly planning & estimation
- Fortnightly sprint review (demos)
- Fortnightly retrospective

2) Clarify roles & responsibilities

Answer these important questions below:
- Who’s responsible for the product roadmap?
- Who's responsible for the delivery?
- Who’s responsible for facilitating the sprint retro?

3) Document and track progress asynchronously

Create best practices and templates for the followings so everyone knows what’s expected in each situation:
- Decision-Making
- Meeting
- Solution Proposal
- Project Kickoff
- Stand-up
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Backlog
- Sprint Retro
- Feature Kickoff
- Feature Testing
- Feature Rollout
- Incident Post-mortem

Decision-Making
To ensure everyone is aligned and informed about the reasons on a decision, be it a technical design implementation approach, tooling.
Meeting
Never go into a meeting without an agenda and record the important and necessary information discussed at the meeting, especially decisions, next steps, and actions.
Solution Proposal
Seek input and encourage contribution from engineers when there is a better way of doing something.
Project Kickoff
When a project is ready to be started, it's important to make sure everyone is on the same page, understands the why of the project and the logistics behind the project.
Stand-up, Sprint Planning, Sprint Backlog, Sprint Retro
Seems pretty basic, but agile rituals and principles help teams to stay on track of progress and ship incrementally.
Feature Kickoff
How does a team ship a software project incrementally? One way this is done is by adopting a feature-driven development approach.
Feature Testing
The feature-driven development approach breaks down a project into multiple features.
Feature Rollout
These features may also be known as versions or minimal viable product (MVP). They are often released independently to get early feedback from customers.
Incident Post-mortem
At the end of the day, providing reliable software is a number one priority, so learn from past outages and continuously make your software better.

4) Ship value incrementally

At the end of the day, providing reliable software is a number one priority, so learn from past outages and continuously make your software better.

You can view this video on how to manage software development projects effectively using agile:

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