Agile beyond the development team

The roots of Agile are in software development teams but that doesn’t mean that Agile principles and values can’t offer significant business benefits to every department in a company. 

I recently worked with the Training and Development group within the HR Department of a Fortune 500 company. They create learning offerings for the company’s employees. As their Agile coach, I brought some key principles and values to their way of working that helped them deliver greater value to their learners (end users).

For example, in the past they built their training programs with little input from the learners beyond the initial scoping phase. Working together to implement Agile’s focus on customer collaboration, we brought in beta learners every two weeks. With this high-quality and fast feedback loop, these iterations led to a much better training program.  

The Agile focus on business value impacted both their process and the final training program. They are bumping up the frequency of quizzes on the delivered training program to better evaluate the learning by the participants. They also are reworking their metrics from a typical Net Promoter Score survey to ones that will focus on business benefits including long-term retention and on-boarding time. 

Finally, end-to-end visibility for both the core group of 10 and the extended group of 25 team members allows all of them to see the big picture and ‘the why’ in their efforts. Doubling the frequency of team meetings, showing everyone’s tasks on the taskboard and providing context for those tasks has helped everyone to make better decisions. It also allowed them to eliminate the time-intensive Project Status Reports as responsibility has been pushed down in the organization. 

Could your team benefit from the adoption of these (or other) Agile principles and values? An Agile coach can help your team to deliver more impact on a faster cycle.