Kanban for Agile in 2021

Agile Business Transformation right now? The Scrum values are at the heart of Scrum: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage. Without these values, Scrum will not come to life. The reason why many teams are not showing this behaviour is because they are situated in an often political environment where these values are missing. You cannot expect a Scrum team to act according these values if you do not set the right example yourself. As a leader you need to create a safe environment where these values can flourish and where you continuously set the right example. To give the right example, leaders should play an active part in an Agile transformation (monitoring, guiding and regular evaluations).

Starmark, one of the leading digital marketing agencies in South Florida for many years, went fully agile. They use this methodology as the way to run their business and service their clients. Brett Circe, chief digital officer at Starmark, led the transformation, which was featured in the Wall Street Journal. One of our core values here at BizHack is to learn by doing. A case study is a great example of this core value to understand in real detail how to apply this manufacturing and software mindset, approach and methodology in the marketing world and how you can use that to more effectively market your business.

When looking to create any learning culture, including an agile learning culture, leaders need to be on board and help create a vision. A Human Capital Institute survey from 2015 found that 74% of companies wanted to create a learning culture. Those who succeeded at doing that did so by incorporated learning, growth, challenge, agility, risk-taking, and mistake-making as a positive aspect of the culture they envisioned. This vision and these qualities need to be incorporated into how the company communicates and interacts with outside organizations, employees, and potential employees. Agile learning needs to have a place in all areas of the organization and at all levels of the organization. See additional details at Agile Business Transformation.

There can be other meetings for the day or within the week. Keep the flagging of problems restricted to the 15 minute time box and the solutions to the 16th minute or other meetings. When the team sees the need to talk more, this is just part of their self-management. The little bits of motivation and rewards through appreciation during Daily Scrum when everyone is there can boost everyone’s morale. It makes the other members realize they can depend on each other and gives recognition to the person who tries to help out.

Many Scrum teams are focused on velocity, which is an amount of work a development team handles during a sprint. Lots of Scrum teams use story points to measure velocity. Though velocity is, undoubtedly, the most important metric in Scrum, it shouldn’t become a goal for your team. The Agile Manifesto clearly states that working software is more important than comprehensive documentation. This means that team members should do their best to deliver value instead of chasing after story points. Story points are merely informal agreements on how much effort each task requires, whereas working software is an objective value. Also, development teams shouldn’t neglect code quality. If there’s a choice: more story points per sprint versus better code quality, the priority should be given to code quality. Read additional details at https://agileeducation.ro/.