Starting an Agile Leadership Team

This is the fifth post in the November Agile Leadership and Management Series.

So, now the time has come to look into a number of setups and activities that you can use to help get your Agile Leadership Team up and running and, continuously use for effectiveness and smoothness in their daily work.

Create ONE Backlog

One backlog is key to get focus and move forward. As leaders with a different focus, you can also benefit from creating a more holistic picture of what needs to be done to improve. This enables you to prioritize and create focus and flow. Visualize your backlog and make sure to keep a fast lane for small impediments coming from the part of the organization you are supporting, those you should act on immediately to enable flow in the teams.

Have Daily Standups

A 15 min standup every day often saves many hours in meetings, freeing up time for real work to be done. The Agile LT talk about what the goal for the days is, what hinders might have emerged from the organization (after their standups) that they need to support with, and who will pair up on what.

When choosing your daily standup time it might be wise to have a time that is after the teams standup so that they might first have their standup, and after that, they might bring the impediments they can’t solve themselves to your board.

Pair up to deliver

It is a great rule to increase effective work in complexity to always pair up. Two people are so much better than one. Having it, as a rule, means you also can not take on too much work making the work flow at a much higher pace than if you would work by yourself. Also, much of the rework needed to be done by the Agile leadership team usually means creating new structures where facilitation and experimentation are needed and that type of work is much easier to do well in pairs.

Reflect, inspect and adapt

As always the retrospective is the most important part as this is where we improve the process and collaboration, which will always improve the result we deliver. So if you only have time for one thing, you should start with this. When running a retrospective with your leadership team it might be a good idea to invite a Scrum Master or Agile Coach from another team so everyone can contribute in a good way.