Now that we understand the importance of a clear strategy, vision and mission - which means we know how to kick things off successfully - we can move on to taking a look at the different ways of working that are essential if your business wants to execute Agile projects successfully.

What we’re aiming for here is to ‘think big’, and then ‘start small’ and ‘scale fast’. We need big, bold ideas to begin with, and a clear goal to aim for. Teams need to be set up for success from the start - which should be achieved with a clear strategy, vision and mission. After that we can start small, learning through continuous testing and experimentation. And we can scale fast, capitalizing on early learning to build value quickly, and empowering teams to constantly learn to help them stay adaptive.

So, how can we achieve this? How can we start small, and then scale fast? Well, first of all, let’s talk about user feedback. User feedback and a focus on the benefit to the end user are both incredibly important in Agile ways of working. It’s significant because it drives the direction of the team’s work - without feedback the team won’t know what they should be developing or how to improve on what they’ve already developed! Feedback can help the team do two things: [1] prioritize the backlog and [2] solve user problems.

First - the backlog. This is the list of tasks an Agile team needs to work on. It’s the thing that’s reprioritized before teams begin any work and helps give them direction and a clear focus. User feedback is the thing that helps the team assess which task on the backlog has value and, therefore, what should be worked on.

Next - solving user problems. Feedback helps inform the team how they can meet user needs in the best possible way and it also helps them understand how those needs might change over time. An Agile team can get feedback from users in all sorts of ways - and it comes in lots of different shapes and sizes…

An Agile team might look at web analytics data for example, to observe how users are interacting with products, services or prototypes to identify opportunities for improvement. They might conduct surveys or research to gain better insight into user attitudes. They might even use other information, like reviews, as a way to gauge what people really think of a product or to identify potential areas for improvement and innovation.

The key thing with user feedback is to make sure that the team is acting on it. It’s no good conducting a load of research only to ignore it and continue developing new products and services in exactly the same way! Agile teams need to think of feedback as a continuous learning loop, where they gather feedback, analyze it, interpret and understand it, and work on what’s most helpful to users - before releasing outputs and seeking more feedback.

Next on our list: sprints and demos. Many Agile teams work in sprints to deliver value to users and to the business. A sprint is a short period of time - normally about 1 to 4 weeks long - where a team completes a set of tasks with the intention of delivering working outputs at the end of each sprint. These outputs can then be shown to stakeholders in a review or demo session.

Showing these outputs to stakeholders in this way helps the team to be transparent about what they’re achieving, and gives stakeholders the chance to provide input. Gaining this feedback helps keep the development process inclusive, and also means that executives and business leaders remain confident that the team is making good progress. Regularly showing working outputs to stakeholders is an effective way to include them on the development journey and can help avoid the misalignment that can sometimes occur between stakeholder expectations and what the team actually produces.

Ways of Working