How to Foster a Shared Understanding of Agile for Your Teams
When organizations aren’t getting the results they want from agile, I often find that the missing ingredient is a shared understanding about what it means to be agile.
While agile frameworks like Scrum offer structure, they are deliberately incomplete to allow for flexibility. This same flexibility, however, can create ambiguity and lead to inconsistent interpretations across teams. And that inconsistency can become a significant barrier to achieving the full benefits of agile—but there are some things you can do.
Resist the Temptation to Standardize (Everything)
Commonly, organizations faced with multiple interpretations of agile mistakenly try to create consistency through strict, standardized rules across all teams.
On the surface, this seems like an effective approach. If everyone is following the same rules, surely everyone will be on the same page? Perhaps, but it’s rarely a good page.
A fundamental tenet of agile is inspect and adapt. This doesn’t apply just to products: it needs to be applied to the use of agile itself.
At the outset of an agile initiative, I think teams should stay very close to what is prescribed in their agile approach of choice, whether that’s Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, SAFe, or any of the others.
Each of these frameworks does a good job of placing guardrails (or constraints) on teams that will prevent them straying from important agile concepts. This matters because teams learning to be agile don’t necessarily have the knowledge or experience yet to decide which of a framework’s practices can be changed.
But as soon as teams gain experience, they need to be given freedom to inspect and adapt their process. When an organization locks down its definition of acceptable agile practices too rigidly or for too long into a team’s journey, teams lose their sense of empowerment.
A good example is iteration length: most likely, in any organization, you’ll have teams benefitting from iterations of different lengths. I’ve seen this mandated across the board too many times simply because someone wanted to receive status reports from all teams on the same dates.
Now, teams whose work is highly intertwined may absolutely benefit from agreeing on a common sprint length. But if so, the teams themselves would likely figure that out without it being dictated.
An organization shouldn’t dictate rules a team would choose for itself. That’s a little like a rule that I have to eat tacos once a week; I’ll do it anyway.
One game studio I worked with paid more attention to complying with the rules of Scrum than to innovating. Teams were told they must finish everything by the end of each sprint and must meet the sprint goal.
In the rush to meet a sprint deadline, one team developed characters who were too big to fit in the vehicles designed by another team. This had been noticed in the middle of the sprint but neither team felt they could make the needed changes and still achieve their sprint goal.
When teams are not given the freedom to adapt agile practices to fit their needs, they feel constrained and disengaged. These top-down rules strongly suggest to teams that management doesn’t trust them to make their own decisions, further eroding morale.
A Better Approach: 3 Strategies to Align Teams on Agile
The concept backing up these three tips is basically for everyone to respect the concepts backing up agile. But let's get specific:
1. Focus on Principles Behind the Practices
Agile isn’t about rigid adherence to practices; it’s about the principles that inspire them. While agile practices can be helpful, they are not the end goal. Instead, the principles that inspired these practices are what truly matter: they provide the flexibility needed to adapt and improve over time.
For example, the Agile Manifesto emphasizes principles such as:
- individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- responding to change over following a plan
These principles encourage teams to prioritize collaboration, communication, and adaptability. By focusing on agile intentions, teams can tailor their practices to better fit their unique context and challenges.
Once a team gains sufficient experience and fully understands the intent of each agile principle, they should experiment to find what works best.
It is a critical success factor that a team owns its process. I’m not opposed to an organization imposing some rules on teams. But these should be easily followed rules and not in opposition to agile principles. Standardizing company-wide use of a tool makes sense as does establishing a maximum iteration length.
Don’t forget that teams, as they gain experience, need to be empowered to explore variations that align with their goals and values. This is how they create a more effective and sustainable agile process that truly meets their needs.
2. Use Shared Language and Definitions
One of the biggest barriers to alignment is inconsistent terminology. When different teams use different terms for the same practices, you get confusion and miscommunication.
For example, sprint and iteration mean the same thing. A team using one of these terms won’t usually have any problem communicating with a team using the other. But one team I worked with used sprint to mean an iteration in which team members had to work overtime to achieve their goals.
No one on other teams knew this until someone casually asked, “Why do you use both terms?”
There are a few things you can do to reduce misunderstandings.
- Standardize Terminology: Create a glossary of terms that are commonly used in Scrum and agile practices. This glossary should be accessible to everyone and regularly updated to reflect any changes or new terms introduced.
- Training and Workshops: Conduct regular training sessions and workshops to educate team members on Scrum principles and practices. Run onboarding sessions for new team members and refresher courses for existing ones.
- Use Communication Tools: Leverage tools such as wikis, intranets, and big visible charts to disseminate information and provide a centralized location for shared knowledge. Employ several methods to ensure that everyone has access to the same information and definitions.
- Facilitate Open Communication: Encourage easy, transparent communication during daily standups, reviews, and retrospectives. Team members should feel comfortable discussing their progress, challenges, and any discrepancies in understanding, without fear.
- Don’t Fight Your Tool’s Vocabulary: If you are using a tool to manage a team’s work, don’t fight its terminology. As much as I disagree with how Jira misuses epic, I go along with it when working with Jira.
- Establish Communities of Practice: These are groups of like-minded or like-skilled individuals who voluntarily come together due to their shared passion and commitment around a technology, approach, or vision. They help bridge the gaps between different teams, facilitating the spread of good practices, consistency, and knowledge across an organization.
In one company, the executive driving the agile initiative insisted on a definition of what it meant to be agile. He did this because in a prior organization, he’d witnessed teams applying the agile label to their very non-agile approaches. When these inevitably failed, agile developed a bad reputation.
In his new organization, he insisted a team could only call itself agile if it compiled with rules like the following:
- Deliver working code into production at least every two weeks
- Have a single person guiding the vision and work of the team (i.e., a product owner or manager)
- Conduct daily standups
- Hold a retrospective at least once a month
3. Understand How Leaders Help Agile Teams Succeed
Leadership plays a critical role in aligning teams on agile principles. When agile leaders model the behaviors they want to see, they send a clear message that agility is not just a set of rules but a mindset and culture to embody. Leaders should embrace agile values like adaptability, collaboration, and transparency. Showing that they prioritize these values, leaders create an environment where teams feel empowered to live out agile principles and experiment with agile practices.
Some specific actions leaders can take:
- Empowerment and Autonomy: Leaders should allow teams to self-organize and make decisions. Step back and let teams work without interference. Teams develop a sense of ownership and accountability for the results they deliver this way.
- Active Listening: Just like TV character Frasier Crane’s famous line, I'm listening, leaders should practice active listening. Truly hear what team members are saying, understand their challenges, and provide support without dictating solutions. This approach fosters a culture of trust and openness.
- Encouraging Experimentation: The best teams are those willing to try new things. Leaders should foster a mindset of experimentation, where teams are motivated to reflect on their processes and implement potential improvements in each iteration. This continuous improvement is at the heart of agile success. To encourage experimentation, leaders cannot become angry when an experiment doesn’t work out.
- Balancing Priorities: Leaders must recognize that every yes has a cost. By understanding the trade-offs involved when selecting one goal over another, leaders can help teams focus on what truly matters, avoiding the pitfalls of overcommitment and burnout.
- Letting Go of Personal Ideas: It's important for leaders to be open to the ideas of others and not overly attached to their own. Flexibility creates an environment where diverse perspectives are valued, leading to more innovative solutions.
- Modeling Agile Values: Leaders should embody the core values of agile, such as collaboration, transparency, and adaptability. “Walk the talk” to set a standard for the team to follow, reinforcing the agile mindset throughout the organization.
- Supporting Continuous Learning: Encouraging teams to learn from both successes and failures is crucial. Leaders facilitate this by providing opportunities for training, workshops, and retrospectives, where teams can reflect on their experiences and identify areas for growth.
Training Passes That Make it Easier to Align Teams
Training and workshops are useful for building a common knowledge of principles and practices. But trying to coordinate the training schedules for multiple teams can be difficult.
That’s one of the reasons we designed our Flex and Select Passes.
Flex and Select passes offer discounted training seats that can be prepaid without knowing yet which classes or dates you will need. This makes it easier to plan and scale training sessions across the organizations.
Team members get the same quality of training and understanding of agile, and you can choose to train employees individually, or send groups to train together in a class. For more information, visit the Flex and Select Pass page.
