
- #AGILE PROJECT PLANNER HOW TO#
- #AGILE PROJECT PLANNER FREE#
#AGILE PROJECT PLANNER HOW TO#
Stakeholders need to be educated about why project delivery may be slower (due to time taken to learn), so your team’s performance won’t be judged by the same criteria as before.ĭuring this stage, your team learns how to work with each other. Team leaders and project managers are now able to take the time to implement these improvements to their team. Their teething problems are gone, and they have the time to learn and improve their work, processes and skillsets. In the learning stage, teams are one step ahead of those in survival mode. You need buy in from the stakeholders in your business – if they’re not on board with your team learning and increasing efficiencies, then you will struggle to increase this slack time. Transitioning from survival mode to the learning stage is the most difficult part of becoming a fully agile team, as you also need to be able to overcome resistance to change.
Use more efficient practices, such as wall boards, work logs, improved development workflows and the application of scrum methodology. A greater ratio of senior to junior team members will decrease the time required to upskill juniors. Increase the level of seniority in your team. Implement new processes to increase efficiency. Adequately observe and manage your team. #AGILE PROJECT PLANNER FREE#
You may not have the budget or resources to hire additional team members to help free up time, so, how do you create this slack time? Things can be frantic in this stage, and if you don’t have the time to begin learning, your team can get stuck in survival mode indefinitely.
Empower your team members with greater responsibilities, giving them the motivation to learn and improve in their own time. If a lack of skill is hurting the team, they will take it as a personal challenge to improve. Set challenges for growth in the areas you know they need help in. If you have enough slack time, use it to improve your team. However, there is risk involved.Īllocating too much time for learning can reduce the speed of project delivery (at least in the short term). By freeing up small pockets of time for your team and giving them new skills (both technical and non-technical) to learn, your team will begin to transition. These help to identify and improve upon problematic areas within your project, identify team members strengths and weaknesses, and plan slack time accordingly.Ĭreating slack time is important to transition your team from survival mode to the learning stage. These act as a snapshot of how your team are tracking in their projects at any time and will include: what was achieved and next steps, general concerns and positive outcomes, hours used, leave schedules and sprint burndown charts. Have your team contribute to weekly status reports.
Remove interruptions (such as asking your team for the location of login information) from your team’s work and eliminate multitasking. Ensure your team are aware of your client’s long term business goals and values. Try to plan all resources needed for projects three months in advance to prevent over-scheduling your team. This helps your team to prepare themselves both psychologically and practically. Give your team members visibility on their current and future tasks. Evaluate future tasks and identify the required resources by selecting people who will work the best together on that particular task. Keep your team’s pipeline organised to enable them to focus on what’s important. Your team will learn from experience, however, with proper planning and structure, this learning process can be sped up. Are they meeting their short-term goals? If not, are their failures repetitive?. Do your team members live your company values? If not, which ones are missing?. Are their impediments to do with their interpersonal skills, or technical capabilities?. What impediments are they encountering?. Observe your team as a whole and each individual during standups and planning meetings to determine what improvements are needed. Focused purely on ‘surviving’, getting work done and following new processes, there isn’t much time for innovation or proactivity. They’re trying to get projects up and running, fix bugs and deliver some form of solution. All teams, whether agile or not, start off here. The first stage in becoming an agile team is survival mode. We’ve defined the three stages of agile teams with practical tips on how you can get your team to the ultimate goal – being cross-functional, self-sufficient, innovative and proactively improving. What’s the difference between these teams? And how can you evolve your team to hit these targets? Some miss deadlines and focus purely on their own survival, while others achieve amazing things, are self-sufficient and continuously improving their processes and capabilities.