Agile Marketing Development: Build Extraordinary Teams, Not Just Software
Designing and delivering software in a true agile environment not only produces high quality product in rapid releases, it also builds extraordinary teams. I have been part of numerous agile implementation teams at CSG Quaero and have witnessed several positive traits emerge from within the team.
At the surface, agile development clearly helps to motivate, engage, and enhance accountability across the entire team. Looking deeper, I witnessed some interesting and positive team transformations not necessarily apparent to a project outsider.
- Empowerment: Team members are more empowered due to the high level of collaboration and deliberation when making key project decisions. This is in contrast to the traditional approach where a single project decision maker makes the majority of decisions on the team's behalf. Team members are also granted the responsibility to estimate, commit, and ultimately deliver on their work items. This leads to a better sense of accomplishment and provides motivation to tackle the next challenge.
- Self Organizing: Team members become much more organized and focused on a day to day and iteration to iteration cycle. Daily standing meetings allow the team to organize around their daily tasks and help each other brainstorm challenges and resolve road blocks. Weekly retrospective sessions then give the team an opportunity to discuss and adjust the ongoing project delivery cycle. All of these items help keep the team focused and ultimately elevate the overall development throughput.
- Leadership: One of the key attributes of a great project team is great leadership. On an agile team, everyone has the ability to be a leader versus placing the leadership influence on a single team member. While an agile team may have a formal technical lead or scrum master, each individual is expected to lead and champion their individual commitments. Formal leadership roles within the team are primarily set to enable the team and provide support when necessary. Leadership is therefore dynamic and constantly evolving within the team. In addition, this experience helps team members grow their careers and be better prepared for their next challenge.
Shifting to a true agile implementation methodology has greatly improved my team's delivery and job satisfaction. Happy and successful teams ultimately deliver higher quality work at a greater and more sustainable pace. Additionally, an agile team mindset does not just apply to software development. Naras Eechambadi recently shared his thoughts on how marketers can learn from agile principles in his post: Agile thinking will help marketers be more flexible.
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