3 Signs You Should Invest in Agile Training
“You’re doing Agile wrong!”
If you hear this statement from an “expert”, that person is probably not completely familiar with your organization, your team, or your individual projects.
You see, Agile provides a framework that is flexible enough to be effectively applied to seemingly countless applications and situations. So beware of blanket, hard and fast rules about what’s “right” and “wrong” in your own Agile journey.
That being said, there are some healthy guidelines and warnings you’ll want to keep in mind as you carry out an Agile transformation. These may seem basic if you’re experienced, but it never hurts to get a quick reminder of the areas where Agile can go wrong, if only to reinforce that you’re actually doing it right!
1. Your teams aren’t working well together
Whether in the daily standup, during sprint retrospectives, or throughout the entire development process, if team members are consistently getting hung up on personality issues, being overly critical or unwilling to adjust as needed, these issues are going to slow you down and potentially threaten the success of the project.
Professional Agile training can attack these issues at their core, helping team members understand all member roles and properly fulfill their own for the benefit of the team. In addition, training and coaching can help Scrum Masters and product owners identify and fix team problems that creep up in the future as well.
2. Your projects are stagnating
One of the biggest benefits of the Agile methodology is the speed with which a project can proceed to release stage and quickly incorporate user feedback to adjust the original parameters and develop a better product.
But that value is lost if your project scope is creeping up and up, extending the length of sprints and pushing release dates further into the future. Especially, if the increase in scope isn’t benefiting from user feedback.
Project stagnation is a sure sign that something is off, either in the way your team is working together or in the way it is being led. Professional Agile training and coaching can help identify and resolve this issue quickly and get you back into the sweet spot where Agile methods give you faster quality.
3. Your work bottlenecks at the QA process
If you’re finding that your entire process is running smooth until QA, then it suddenly slows to a crawl and takes forever to ship out, there’s an issue with fear.
Fear of sending out an imperfect product is rational and understandable, but it’s not Agile.
While infusing QA throughout the development process can help mitigate huge embarrassing errors early on, the real magic of the Agile methodology is when an imperfect product makes it to the user and the user can participate in making it better.
Not only does this mean you’re reaching the audience sooner with a viable product, but you’re also giving them the power and privilege of helping you make something they’ll like even more than what you could make on your own.
Fear is a difficult obstacle to overcome because it goes so against the grain of anyone who has learned their craft under traditional development methodologies. Professional Agile training and coaching can help ease this fear and get you shipping and iterating more quickly and effectively.
To learn more about what professional Agile training can do for your team, take a look at the library of resources available through cPrime, the world’s leading Agile training organization.
