Week Ending 10th February 2023

Create Leaders Not Followers

Got our skates on this week at anAgileMind. First off the press Damian Harries’ article about the importance of Leaders fostering new Leadership.

New and Improved Content

Pages focusing on Team Health have been expanded and improved. Draft content for more Values and Behaviours has been reviewed. A new practice about Giving Feedback has been added. Enjoy the new content and please give us feedback so we can get even better at have anAgileMind.

Team Autonomy

Each team is best placed to organise and perform its work without interference from management. Groups of teams that share dependencies are best placed to resolve potential conflicts in their work. We rely on the rigour and discipline of teams to ensure that commitments are consistently delivered.

Focus on Team Work

The idea behind gathering people together to work in teams is that we are stronger together - we are able to pool our combined strengths and are therefore likely to achieve more together than we would do apart. But that is not always the case as we sometimes produce better results working apart than together and, when we do come together, there are likely to be things that hold us back from functioning affectively as team.

Focus on Organisational Culture

The culture of the organisation is likely to affect the way teams operate and particularly the disciplines they adopt and the rigour to which these disciplines are followed. The organisational culture will either act for or against the adoption of agile ways of working. If it acts against, then the likelihood of teams being agile diminishes.

Focus On Shared Purpose

Teams work closely with their customers to deliver the customers’ needs as they relate to the specific product and its services. When the customers’ interests span several of our products we need to ensure that our mutual alignment remains intact. If there is a conflict in the way different products can meet the customers’ needs we must ensure that the conflicts are resolved. Resolution must meet the needs of the customer and be within the capabilities of the teams.

Giving Feedback

Frequent, effective feedback is central to the agile mindset - it is at the heart of how we inspect and adapt in order to get better at what we do. Personal feedback is one of the most valuable ways of improving our agile performance. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of anAgileMind. It is challenging both for those who give the feedback and for those receiving it too.