To build an Agile enterprise, the team has to first go through the phases of Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing processes!
When a Team Leader joins a new team or a new organization for the first time, the basic approach is to follow Kanban principles:
- Start with what the team is doing at the time;
- Trust members’ talents;
- Respect the current process;
- Gradually introduce limited Work In Progress (WIP);
- Form the team’s Best Practices Feedback System.
Once introduced to the team, we collaboratively (with team members) started analyzing team progress, setting the rules of engagement, and building the processes.
Within the first week of engagement, we set up the Kanban board, analyzed the highest values to produce, and introduced tools and techniques to realize and commit to the tasks, along with a system of feedback. We also started building a simple visual board to track our progress of tasks and deliverables.
Our engagement with the organization set a 3-hours hands-on workshop at the end of each week, inviting members of the management to attend when/if they could do so! At each workshop, we introduced principles of different Agile frameworks relevant to the team’s work.
In the third week of engagement, we measured a 10% increase in team deliverables (compared to the month before)!
At the end of the first quarter of operation, the team became a symbol of Agile transformation, where the organization set its progress as the Agile transformation template.