From the course: Hybrid Project Management: Combining Agile and Predictive Methods

High-impact agile practices for predictive environments

- You are intrigued by Agile and interested in adopting it, but you are not in a situation where you can. Maybe you're at an organization whose leadership is not interested in changing the way of working. Or your area of the organization has not yet embraced Agile. You don't have the support, empowerment, or budget to transition to Agile. Are you wondering if there is anything you can do? Well, first and foremost, you can embrace the Agile mindset. You can champion the change in thinking, which paves the way for a change in action. You can find ways to promote fast feedback and validation, collaboration, and being a team versus a group of individuals working on a scope of work. In most situations, you can explore and adopt Agile practices that augment a predictive approach that will not cause process conflicts, governance issues, or increase risk, quite the opposite. The first hybrid noted by the green arrow on the spectrum is a common scenario. A predictive approach is utilized, and the project manager or team members want to incorporate practices and techniques from Agile approaches. Creating this type of hybrid enables the project manager, team members, stakeholders, and others to gain an awareness of Agile practices and approaches and the potential benefits of moving further along the right on the spectrum. The outcomes of adopting Agile aspects raise awareness of realized improvements and help increase buy-in from leadership for continuing experimentation of options to reduce or eliminate impediments, pain points, or drag in the process that would've otherwise never changed. Not all the practices and techniques are the same. Some are high-impact, leading to an improvement that can be built on. Some require one or more practices to be put into action before they can be adopted. There are thousands of Agile and Lean practices that can be explored. Almost any team can adopt a few Agile practices and benefit from augmenting a mostly predictive approach. I call these the high-impact practices. This list is my top 10 for this hybrid scenario: Kanban board, daily coordination meeting, team norms, frequent retrospectives, definition of ready, definition of done, pairing, focus on finishing, removing handbacks, and removing delays. I'll briefly take you through the first five. In a downloadable PDF, I will go into deeper depth about them, plus the other five on the list. First: Kanban board. No matter the approach, a Kanban board can provide tremendous benefits. Kanban is the Japanese word for cards you can see. Toyota used the term Kanban for the visual and physical signaling system that ties together the whole Lean production system. A Kanban board visualizes the team's work, which provides many benefits, such as: bottlenecks become clearly visible in real time, the team collaborates to optimize the whole flow rather than just their part, it brings focus to the flow and where work is delayed, easily see what is being worked on, what is waiting, and what has not yet started, and what is done. Second technique: daily coordination meeting. This is a daily meeting also known as the standup or daily Scrum. Its purpose is to inspect progress. It is short, usually no more than 15 minutes long. The high frequency, which is typically daily, enables everyone to be on the same page. The work in process is discussed, any blockers or impediments surface so that there are no surprises, and appropriate action can be taken. Combining the daily coordination meeting with a Kanban board enables the team to focus on a visual representation of the real-time state of their project. Third: team norms. Team norms are rules that a team identifies and agrees to follow. Teams benefit significantly from establishing an agreement on how they intend to work. Rules in team norms govern individual behavior, facilitate the work of the team, or state an approach that's agreed upon. We may see norms for each phase and for the entire team or project. Fourth: frequent retrospectives. This is a technique performed on a regular frequency throughout the project lifecycle. It is an opportunity for the team to reflect or look back on their way of working to identify what is working well, what could be improved, and what is not working. And finally: definition of ready. How does the team know that something is ready to be worked on with little chance of misconceptions or interpretations? That is what this practice addresses. Establishing an agreement on what ready-to-work or implement means for them. In almost every organization, teams can implement these practices regardless of the process they use. Based on the outcomes, they can all be adopted with minimal effort and then augmented as needed. You can start with these or explore others that will solve a problem, reduce drag, improve collaboration, et cetera. You can create a hybrid that is the best fit for you, combine it with an Agile mindset, and see results.

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