How to Become (and Remain) a Great Agile Coach

We’re here to talk about agile, and we don’t mean your abilities on a sports field or in a yoga studio. If you’re new to agile as a methodology, there’s a lot to learn, but the basics are simple. Agile 101 begins with understanding that agile can be applied to anything. You can use agile practices to improve your personal task management, optimize workplace efficiency, or align software teams around product development.

No matter the application, the concepts remain the same: Agile creates a continuous improvement mindset that values flexibility, adaptability, collaboration, and efficiency.

In this post, we’ll cover agile 101 basics, the benefits of agile, popular agile methodologies, and common mistakes to avoid.

Agile 101: How it compares to traditional project management

The concept of Agile has evolved, but it really took off and became popularized in software development. In recent years, the methods and guiding principles of Agile have expanded into a variety of industries that want to emphasize continuous improvement and growth.

How does agile compare to traditional project management? In short: It doesn’t. Agile is just the opposite. One of our favorite ways to compare the agile approach to classical project management is to think of them as jazz vs. classical music.

In classical music, a conductor brings a previously composed and organized piece of music to an orchestra. Then, they dictate what happens and when. This is very much the same as traditional project management, where the project manager brings a plan they have conceived on their own to their team and then proceeds to tell the team how to carry it out. The project manager lays out the steps and expects the team to follow them to the letter (or note). 🎼

Jazz, on the other hand, is collaborative. Each band member feeds off of the other, creating music in a flexible and iterative process — just like the agile process. The band, like an agile team, experiments together and freely creates music in the moment. Each iteration is a little bit different, and hopefully better, than the one that preceded it. 🎷

Project management doesn’t allow for this kind of flexibility. It relies on following a strict sequential order. Each project element must be completed before moving on to the next. Just like a waterfall, the flow of work remains the same from project to project.

Agile is non-linear. It focuses on flexibility, collaboration between team members, and delivering consistent value to stakeholders. With each iteration comes new, actionable insights into what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. It’s a multidimensional way of working that removes the bottlenecks inherent in traditional project management.

Agile 101: The benefits of agile

There are many benefits to agile practices for software development projects, as well as many other industries. The general concepts of agile can be applied to all sorts of situations, and its versatility means it will evolve with the needs of your team.

Think of it as a methodology you can apply to any of your business processes for increased collaboration, optimized efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Agile helps teams and businesses:

• Work at optimal efficiency by eliminating waste
• Make more effective decisions
• Adjust as new information comes in or is discovered
• Continually meet stakeholder deliverable deadlines
• Focus on adding value for stakeholders and customers
• Understand the customer journey
• Build superior products
• Understand capacity to ensure no one over or under commits to work
• Identify roadblocks before they occur
• Spot bottlenecks that could delay work
• Collaborate and work better together
• Adapt with technological, economic, and cultural changes
• Prepare for the unexpected
• Establish processes tailored to your needs
• Improve morale and happiness
• Develop a continuous improvement mindset

Agile 101: Popular methodologies

Now that you have a better understanding of agile 101 basics and the benefits of agile, let’s discuss some of the most popular agile methodologies.

Scrum

Scrum is extremely popular in agile software development. It’s a fairly complicated process for those who are unfamiliar with it, but the basics revolve around recurring sprints that each focus on completing a set amount of work.

A Scrum is one sprint lasting 2-4 weeks. At the beginning of the sprint, the product owner decides which task will move from the main list (product backlog) to the sprint to-do list (sprint backlog). The development team, led by a Scrum Master who understands the Scrum process, works to complete the sprint backlog in the allocated time.

The Scrum team meets for daily Scrums or stand-ups that ensure everyone is on the page about possible roadblocks and what work is to be completed next. This process repeats until a product is complete or stakeholders are fully satisfied. At the end of the sprint, a retrospective is held to help the team understand what went well and what they can improve upon.

Kanban

Kanban is a fairly simple agile process that is often partially utilized within other agile methods, such as Scrum. It’s a task management tool designed to optimize efficiency by visualizing all of the required work and limiting works in progress. A Kanban workflow visually organizes tasks on Kanban boards so that work items can move forward smoothly, even as changes and adjustments are made along the way.

In its simplest form, a Kanban board is three columns (To-Do, Doing, and Done) that allow work to freely flow from one phase to the next. Trello is an example of an online Kanban board.

Kanban boards should be placed in an area of the office that’s visible to the entire team. For virtual teams, this may look like an online resource that everyone can access. This helps everyone from the top down get on the same page about action items. If anyone is wondering what’s the most important task of the day, they simply need to check the Kanban board.

Lean

Lean, along with the five lean principles, originally created by Toyota, is a guiding mindset that helps teams work more productively, efficiently, and effectively. It can be applied to various agile and software development methodologies.

Lean software development is all about improving efficiency by eliminating waste, such as reducing tasks and activities that don’t add value. It provides a clear way to scale agile practices across large or growing organizations.

Extreme programming

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile approach centered around improving software quality and responsiveness while evolving with customer requirements. The ultimate goal of extreme programming is producing high-quality results throughout every aspect of the work, not just the final product.

XP decision-making is based on five values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect. XP’s specifics won’t apply to all situations, but the general framework can provide value to any team.

Agile 101: Best practices and mistakes to avoid

To get you started, here are our list of best practices and common agile mistakes.

Basic agile 101 best practices:

✅ See failures as a learning opportunity.

✅ Embrace change and improve your adaptability skills.

✅ Improve efficiency by eliminating tasks and activities that don’t provide value.

✅ Continually improve upon your processes.

✅ Allow plans to live, breathe, and adapt.

✅ Use retrospectives to listen, learn, and improve.

✅ Prioritize the customer journey, and make decisions based on customer needs.

✅ Utilize agile tools and resources.

Common agile mistakes:

❌ Not adapting as new information is revealed or obtained.

❌ Not being on the same page as stakeholders.

❌ Not trusting the team to ideate and develop without supervision.

❌ Sitting down for sprint planning without enough information.

❌ Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session.

❌ Skipping a retrospective due to lack of time or resources.

❌ Too much testing, or not knowing when the project is actually “done.”

❌ Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach.

Agile made easy

Whether you apply agile principles to an agile task management system like a personal Kanban board or use agile to develop working software, the essence is the same. In basic terms, agile is about continuous improvement. It’s a methodology, mindset, and way of viewing the world. Agile is flexible, adaptive, collaborative, and value-driven.

Easy Agile helps teams work better with agile. We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

Book a 1:1 demo to learn more about our suite of Jira tools, or contact our team if you have additional questions. We offer a free, 30-day trial, so you can try out our products before making a commitment.

Agile is about empowering teams to take ownership, feel truly engaged, and foster a culture of collaboration. More than ever, teams are required to deliver with greater adaptability, speed, and engagement. The future is more ambiguous and complex, and Agile teams must know how best to respond to these changing conditions.

Agile experts John Walpole, Dean MacNeil, and Nick Muldoon share their success formula behind the high-functioning Agile teams at Lyft, Valiantys, and Easy Agile. You will learn:

• How to create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind
• How to empower your teams
• The qualities of high-performing Agile teams

WATCH NOW

Create a compelling 'why' that the whole team can get behind

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I think Agile is not a silver bullet. We have people who look at Agile and say, "Oh, well, this is going to solve all of our woes." And it's not; it's certainly not a turnkey thing.

Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO at Easy Agile

Agile is not a silver bullet. It is not a methodology that will solve leaders, teams and individuals' problems. Agile is a continuous improvement journey of "adaptability in evolutionary theory; it's about responding to either a new environment or changes in your environment to again, not just survive but to thrive," said Dean.

Set your Agile teams up for success by teaching them to thrive by empowering them to lead change, make mistakes, build a solid foundation, and be open to learning, changing, and communicating the meaningful 'why' behind their work. You will see an explosion in Agile team success when you have a "cohesive team aligned to a common mission with a growth mindset."

Motivate your Agile teams by connecting their work with a meaningful 'why.' Schedule a meeting to ensure you constantly discuss their work's more profound purpose. Bring up a real-life customer example. John shared, "At Lyft, we share stories in a fortnightly meeting. We offer free accessible rides to those in wheelchairs or those who struggle to pay for a ride but need access to transportation to get to work or school.

"Bring your personas to life with these real-life examples, so it's front and center in your employee's minds," said John.

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Empowering your teams

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Peter Drucker

Your employees need to lead the change. "If you look at great leaders in recent Agile transformations, you might want to look at a company like Porsche," said Dean. Dean shares how Porsche has inspired Valiantys because "every employee at Porsche is leading the change. So they're all bought into it; they all have that sense of leadership to drive it.". Porsche's employees are leading the change because their leadership communicates the 'why' well. "Fun is number one when their CIO lists off the top three reasons 'why' everyone is so fired up about the Agile transformation. Because you can have fun on the job, your job is not supposed to be a grim duty. It's supposed to be something you look forward to."

"Empower your teams to make mistakes," said John.

Empower your Agile teams to fail and make mistakes through powerful questions. Leaders have to change their tone from "oh no, who do I fire?" to "what's the challenge? What can I do to help?". Express to your team that you're on a journey to learn as much as they are. In doing so, the leader humanizes themselves and becomes more vulnerable.

Leadership sets the tone. As a company scales, the responsibility to create the culture and the risk appetite falls more on leadership.

Qualities of high-performing, Agile teams

1. Create a solid foundation

Set your Agile team up for success with a stable team unit. Don't keep moving teams around; create long-term Agile teams to allow individuals to get to know each other and humanize one another. "I think stability is key to having the tacit knowledge keeping together and this open mindset where they're willing to learn; I love that," said Nick.

2. Open to learning and adapting

For Agile teams to continuously improve, they must constantly be learning and adapting. "You can't get that learning and adaptation if you keep just stirring the pot. Because you're going to keep scattering that knowledge, you want to take hold, and then, of course, you want to spread the knowledge to the organization then," said Dean.

3. Share feedback and do the retrospective

Ensure your Agile teams are demonstrating working product on a regular occurrence. If you're practicing Scrum, make sure you are doing the weekly sprint review. This allows the team to receive feedback from stakeholders and keep iterating and moving forward, ensuring they stay in movement. "Do your retrospective," said Dean." We're looking at what we delivered, and now we're going to look at how we delivered it." It is imperative that Scrum teams gather at the end of each sprint to discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what can be improved on for next time. Otherwise, you invite complacency and stagnation into your Scrum process — the antithesis of Agile.

Using Easy Agile to set your Agile teams up for success

Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports your team's Agile practices in Jira. The user story map format in TeamRhythm transforms your flat product maps into a dynamic and flexible visual representation of work. Watch the highlights tour to see how Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes sprint planning, managing your backlog, and team retrospectives easier. Visit Atlassian Marketplace to start your free, 30-day trial today.

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We’re off to the races! 🏃🏃‍♀️ Sprints are a key component of agile methodology. A sprint is a predefined time period in which agile teams work together towards an agreed-upon sprint goal. There are four types of agile meetings that occur over the course of a sprint, and each is vital to ensuring the success of the agile process. It’s all about sprinting through a predetermined amount of work to get to the finish line, where you learn from your process and begin the race again (only better off because of what you learned during the previous sprint).

Agile meetings are used to get team members, leaders, and stakeholders on the same page, and they guide the process of an agile sprint or Scrum.

This post will cover the four key agile meetings, which include sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives. Plus, we’ll discuss a bonus agile meeting that’s utilized for backlog refinement.

Agile meetings vs. Scrum meetings

Scrum is an agile methodology that’s most commonly used in software development. Scrum meetings are technically a type of agile meeting, but they have more specific parameters designed to fit within the Scrum framework. The process revolves around a 2-4 week sprint involving a product owner, Scrum Master, and the entire Scrum team.

We covered Scrum meetings (ceremonies) in detail in another article. For the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the four main agile meeting types. These processes and best practices can be applied across multiple agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. This framework can also be applied across industries beyond software development and can adapt to the needs of most teams.

Simply put: Scrum has a more rigid framework that follows four ceremonies/meetings. The agile process is much the same, with four very similar meetings, but there’s more flexibility to adjust the time frame of the sprint and adapt the process when not following Scrum guidelines specifically. Okay, maybe that’s still not simply put, but it wouldn’t be agile if it was linear and straightforward.

The 4 types of agile meetings

There are four central agile meetings: sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospective meetings. A sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting. Each day, a daily standup meeting is held. Finally, at the end of the sprint, a sprint review and retrospective are held. The process repeats with new springs until the product, project, or work is complete.

1. Sprint planning meeting

The sprint planning meeting occurs at the beginning of a sprint and involves the entire team. In sprint planning, the entire team meets to discuss and agree upon which work tasks (backlog items) should be moved to the sprint backlog — the items that need to be completed by the end of the sprint. During the meeting, sprint goals are determined, and the team aligns on expectations.

Without a sprint planning meeting to outline the sprint backlog (tasks that need to be completed), the team will waste time during the sprint trying to determine which work takes precedent.

Sprint planning mistakes to avoid:

• Starting planning without a refined backlog
• Not being on the same page as your stakeholders
• Ignoring the customer and the customer journey when making plans
• Creating a rigid plan that doesn’t have room to grow or adapt
• Using bland, flat product maps that lack critical context
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the following planning session

Learn more about common agile planning mistakes and how your development team can avoid these pitfalls.

2. Daily standup meeting

The daily standup meeting occurs every day of the sprint. In the Scrum process, this meeting might also be called the daily Scrum meeting. It’s a chance for the team to connect about the work that was completed the previous day and what each person or team plans to complete over the course of the next 24 hours.

The meeting aims to answer three important questions:

• What work was completed since the last standup to help the team reach the sprint goal?
• What work do you plan to complete today?
• Is there anything currently in your way or hindering your progress?

This is a good time to address any bottlenecks. If work planned from the previous day wasn’t completed, what caused the delay, and how can the team work together to solve any problems keeping the work from moving forward?

A standup meeting is short and to the point so everyone can get back to the work they hope to complete. So short that it’s often recommended participants stand for the duration of the meeting. Hence the name daily standup. It includes all team members and ideally takes place at the same time every day to ensure everyone can always attend.

Daily standup mistakes to avoid:

• Not keeping track of the time during the meeting
• Continually going over the allotted meeting time
• Rambling participants who aren’t prepared to answer the meeting’s key questions
• Skipping the meeting due to lack of time
• Team members showing up late to the meeting or missing it altogether
• Allowing the loudest voices to overshadow the rest of the team
• Letting someone state the same task on multiple consecutive days
• Failing to address potential bottlenecks
• Assigning work beyond a person's capacity

3. Sprint review meeting

The sprint review is an opportunity for the team to showcase the work they accomplished during the sprint. This meeting might be an internal presentation or a more formal demo to stakeholders, depending on the needs of the project and how far along work is.

Sprint review mistakes to avoid:

• Not properly preparing for the meeting or demonstration
• Not bringing stakeholders in on your process
• Failing to demonstrate how the work brings value to the customer
• Exaggerating or embellishing successes
• Failing to address any problems and how they were solved
• Not incorporating sprint review feedback into the next sprint planning meeting

4. Sprint retrospective meeting

The retrospective is a crucial part of the agile process. The meeting comes at the end of the sprint, bringing the entire team together to assess their processes and discuss how they can improve next time.

Which aspects of the sprint went well, and what can you learn from that success? What didn’t go so well, and what bottlenecks did the team hit? What could be done better next time? Since agile is all about learning and iterating, there are lessons to be learned after each sprint. Everything from the good to the bad to the mediocre can be transformed into actionable improvements.

Retrospective mistakes to avoid:

• Blaming individual team members for bottlenecks
• Allowing only the loudest voices to provide insight
• Failing to empower the softer voices in the room
• Repeating the same questions over and over without changing things up
• Allowing the retrospective to run too long (aim for two hours for a two-week sprint)
• Skipping a retrospective due to a lack of time or resources
• Forgetting about or not including stakeholder insights or needs
• Failing to improve upon the sprint retrospective process (retrospective the retrospective!)
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the next sprint

Bonus: Backlog refinement meeting

It could be argued that there’s a fifth agile meeting, especially in the product development world. Before the sprint planning meeting, the product owner must create a product backlog, which comprises all of the tasks and items the team needs to complete in order to fully develop the end product or project. The items include user stories, bug fixes, features, and other tasks that must be addressed to achieve the end goal.

Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning by ordering items to deliver the most impact over the next sprint. During backlog refinement, a product owner ensures that product backlog items contain enough information, detail, and prioritization for the team to make smart decisions about what to tackle when.

A meeting to refine the backlog may occur before sprint planning begins, depending on the current state of the product backlog. Outside of the product development industry, the product backlog might be akin to a master project task list.

Backlog refinement meeting mistakes to avoid:

• Not completing backlog refinement in time for sprint planning
• Leaving too much backlog refinement for the planning meeting
• Failing to prioritize items that provide customer value
• Not incorporating new stakeholder feedback, questions, and concerns

Agile meetings: Final review

So there you have it! The four key agile meetings are sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives, with an honorable mention going out to backlog refinement.

Let’s review each meeting’s purpose:

• Sprint planning gets everyone on the same page about what needs to be accomplished over the course of the coming sprint.
• Daily standups ensure the team stays on track and helps them address and resolve any potential bottlenecks.
• Sprint reviews are an opportunity for the team to showcase the work accomplished during the sprint to stakeholders and receive critical feedback.
• Sprint retrospectives allow the team to come together to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well, and how they can improve next time.
• Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning in order to deliver the most impact over the next sprint.

Hold effective agile meetings with Easy Agile

Easy Agile is committed to helping teams work better with agile. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams work more efficiently and effectively.

We regularly publish lists of tools, advice articles, and how-to guides for agile teams. If you work with Jira, you’ll find our resources are especially helpful in navigating the ins and outs of product development and the Jira apps that will improve the way your team collaborates.