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3 key ingredients for success of Agile

For a team to be successful  at using Agile, following three things are key ingredients

  1. Transparency
  2. Inspection
  3. Adaptation

Transparency...

All things within the Scrum team should be open and visible. Every task and story should be visible not only to Scrum team but also to people outside the team. Kanban board is one example which can be used to show the team progress to everyone. Openness should be highly encouraged with the team. Openness gives the team the courage to highlight any potential issues.Another example is a common definition of 'Done' which is accepted by those performing the work and those accepting the working product.

Inspection...

A team should be able to inspect all scrum artefacts to keep a check on what is working and what is not. Inspection should be performed at regular intervals but not so often that it gets in the way of actual work to accomplish the goal. Ideally inspection should be performed by an external inspector. A good example of inspection would be retrospective performed by a Scrum master from another team. You can perform inspection at sprint planning, daily stand up or at sprint reviews.

Adaptation...

Transparency and inspection helps to identify key things that are going well and more often things that are not going well. If things are not working to teams benefit, the scrum team together decide on how to make it better. Often these could be recorded as lessons learnt at sprint retrospective. The lesson learnt log should be reviewed at each sprint retrospective to make sure mistakes are not being repeated. One example could be task being carried forward to next sprints. A lesson learnt would be to finish all the task in one story before stating next story. 

Adapting is the key to success of Agile. Things change and often they are beyond our control. For example, team members leave or are off sick or the business requirement changed because of a change in market condition which is beyond our control. In such cases, the whole team collectively make a decision on how to adapt to this sudden change and keep the focus on delivering business value.

Hope this short article has given you enough ingredients to implement a successful Agile process in your team. Pleas drop a comment if you have any queries or concerns.


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