Chris On The Bridge: Are You Agile?

During the pandemic I shared a short series of videos about some of the software development and teamwork topics that Lab Zero was facing. Here's one about REAL Agility...

Teams new to Agile get hung up on story-writing, daily standup drills, velocity calculations. At Lab Zero, Agile is none of these things. But it's the result of all of these things. True Agility means your whole business is able to respond to something that you didn't plan for.

Real agility comes from all of the practices that your scrum-masters and coaches bring to your team.

Hey, this is Chris at Lab Zero. I hope you are well, I hope all of your teams are well. I am really amazed daily about how the Lab Zero team has flexed to adapt to these new situations that we're all facing. Everybody's safe, and everybody's good and everybody's slightly freaked out, but not in a way that we won't work through.

And the topic at hand that always comes to mind in this situation is agility: are you agile? Have you undergone the agile transformation? Are you performing in an agile way? Well we've worked with a lot of clients through their agile transformation. And a lot of people get really stuck, and hung up on things like story writing, the new rituals of stand-up meetings, and sprints, and calculating velocity...

And they lose touch with the thing that's really important -- which is the ability to handle things you never plan for. The ability to take advantage of things you learn along the way.

"Agility" with the Lab Zero team is none of those rituals. It is the result of all of those rituals -- which should allow leaders to reprioritize their portfolio (and for it to make sense), and to jettison those things that aren't business critical when you really need to focus all of your effort on the projects that matter. And it's the practice of the teams to take advantage of those changes and deliver consistently through it. And maybe even self-organized in a way that takes advantage of the trust, and tooling documentation etc, so as your personnel changes you've got consistent performance

And it really boils down to this the question I ask myself almost hourly nowadays: "Are you agile?

Let me know! Let me know how agile you are and and what's working for you and let's talk about this

This is Chris form Lab Zero

Be safe!

More from this "Chris On The Bridge" series:

• Build To Learn
• Self-Healing Teams
• Embrace Risk
• Are You Agile?
• What Is Essential?
• Trust From Home