Agility: Rhymes with stability

Back in 2006, when I was working with a reputed Media House. Our Editor-in-Chief built a team of 12 members from various departments like content, editorial, marketing, sales, design and technology. The team was named, 'The Total Football team.' It was a peer to peer setup where each and every member's role was interchangeable. The main aim of the team was suitability and scalability to current products and to create new products.

Mission of the team was to ideate, innovate and introduce new products around traditional media, digital media, media research, and news production. The team’s focus was to understand user’s requirements on the different products, create user experiences, research and development. Understand the user perspective towards the product and re-design them. Within a single year, our total football team launched four unique media products which still have a benchmark in the Indian media industry with multiple add-ons for existing products. This is my first introduction to the effectiveness of an agile team.

A year back when we were planning to build the team for OKAS, we were very much excited about an agile team. Agility is the freedom of doing work, building culture, creating independent thoughts, flexibility to take challenges and interchange roles. An agile team continuously helps in delivering ideal design with emerging technologies.

If we consider Agile team as a game theory, then it has its own rules, and that rules create discipline. Inside total football is the most acceptable game worldwide. Becoming an agile organisation is an increasingly urgent necessity for companies in today's digital economy. Agility strides happiness in overall organisation, and creates a diverse culture across the organisation. Agile is the mantra of happiness.

Most importantly, total football agile time is not dependent on organisation chart. Its more on collaboration, continuity and flexibility.

Agile Manifesto/ Total football team = Mission + Guiding Principles/Rules

"None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful."

Mother Teresa

It's about generating more value in less time; Agile management is about working smarter rather than harder.

Principles

Teams should be responsible to ideate on new products with end-users, understand their requirements and problem statements.

Principle > Practice Value delivery > Plan fulfilment
Ideate → Create → Sustain and Scale
Trust > Control

One of the significant building factors for an agile team is its mission. Some of the principles of agile team are:

• Play for a common goal

• Play for yourself and other team members

• Continuously improve game, reassign position whenever needed

• Integrative development of game

• Minimise dependency

• Minimise control

• Exchange velocity

• Understand value of coach, mentorship and leadership

Ideation of Team

Ideation means when you're crafting job distribution for your total football team, every team member should be unique and confident to play within group. Fluidity in the system is must, so now its new generation of the system will be more fluid and optimised for resources.

For example, a position like product manager, scrum master, product owner, and development team must have the flexibility to interchange their positions. Agility is flexibility, so when we define every stakeholder in the value chain, they will be in for winning the seat.

It’s all about connecting all dots and building a structure, which is flexible and dynamic.

• Job-description should be very clear

• Every team member is able to work on multiple positions

• Team player flexible to play in any position – goal keeping to front line

• Every team member is comfortable to interchange team positions

Selection of an Agile Team

Creating an agile team is a dynamic process. It requires understanding human value, Commitment and Trust, Communication, Diversity of Capabilities, Adaptability, and more than that Creative Freedom. Define team position and understand their strengths.

Scale with Team

Scaling is an exciting and continuous process, it involves ideation and creation. Try to ensure that the goals of each employee aligns with the company, make sure you communicate the company’s mandate to all staff and reiterate during the goal-setting season to ensure that it stays at the top of the game.

• Team must learn from failures, and fail fast to achieve fast.

• Roadmaps

• Team Visibility

• Unified work tree

• Team meetings

• Kanban

• Dependencies

• Forecasting

• Story Maps

Agile, is a culture, which helps to develop the most significant creative human-centric products and services.