Agile Teams

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.

If you’re like most companies, you probably already have user personas that you use in your software development teams.

Or customer personas that you use in your marketing and sales teams. Personas are used for understanding the user, creating user stories, prioritizing issues, and creating targeted marketing collateral.

But most teams still aren’t using personas to their fullest extent. So, we’ve put together our top 10 tips to help you get maximum value from your personas 👇

1. Know how you’ll use them

Before you create your personas, it’s a good idea to get clear on why they’re so important and how you’re going to use them. Otherwise, some team members (not you, of course) might be tempted to skim through the process so they can get back to the real work.

User personas aren’t just a sales or marketing thing - everyone should know who the customer is so they can do a better job of serving them.

Your personas will give you key demographic and psychographic information, how users behave, and what their pain points/goals/objectives are. Plus other factors that influence how they use your product, whether they’re ready to buy (or not), and what will make them sign up (and stick around).

👀 Oh and if you’re part of a cross-functional, agile team, you’ll get even more value from your user personas. Your dev team can use them to identify what customers need and want (so they can prioritize and deliver these solutions). Plus, agile user personas create a face for your user stories so your team can more easily understand who your customers are and empathize with them.

It’s much easier to create something for Johnny Biggles who is a 38yo farmer in East Ireland than it is to create something for an undefined user with equally undefined needs.

Read more in our previous blog about why you need customer personas in agile software development.

2. User, not buyer focused

Your marketing team might’ve created customer personas in the past to talk about user roles (aka job titles) or market segments (aka buyer demographics)… but these aren’t necessarily the same tools as user personas.

And in fact, they probably shouldn’t be “owned” by your marketing team, but by your product owner - although it’s ideal if your whole team can collaborate on them.

Your personas are made-up profiles that describe current and future users of your product (who aren’t necessarily the buyers or decision makers).

Your user personas should have names (that feel like they fit the person), ages (not an age range), and locations (not a general area).

You should have a persona for each category of users that you’d want to uniquely experience the product. In other words, each of your user personas should have specific preferences, goals, and expectations.

3. Do your research

If you haven’t already, do some research on your audience and market using stakeholder interviews, surveys, industry reports, and analytics tools so you know who your users are.

Ask questions to determine demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behaviours. You should start to see patterns emerge which will help you create 3-5 personas that represent the majority of your users.

4. Use a template

Don’t be tempted to get all creative with your user personas.

In this previous blog, we share an example user persona template if you want some inspiration. ✨

5. Keep it relevant

Once you get started with writing your user personas, you might find yourself filling up pages and pages of information, especially if you discover lots of interesting things about your users. But try to rein yourself in a bit and keep your personas to 1 page or less so they’re quick and easy to read.

Focus on attributes that are relevant to understanding how your users interact with your product, and not necessarily every aspect of their daily lives.

That’s why you’ll rarely see things like “Betty likes to eat porridge for breakfast” and “John enjoys long sunset walks at the beach”. Although these could be relevant insights for your product - no judgement!

If in doubt, remember the purpose of your user personas: they should help you back up your decisions with a legitimate, specific need and scenario.

You should have just enough relevant information to be able to answer “what would [user persona name] do?”

6. Keep it real

Your user personas are made up, but they should still feel like real people. Here are some tips to keep them real:

• Cut out any stereotypes and jargon
• Don’t overdo the demography details
• Focus on details that are most relevant to using your product
• Don’t use images that look like stock images
• Base the info on what you know about real people
• Try to resist telling a story that fits the products and features YOU want to build and instead focus on real goals and challenges

7. Focus on your best customers

You can’t target everyone, so don’t try to. So, limit yourself to writing anywhere from 3-5 user personas. These personas should represent your best customers and key user groups.

They won’t include everyone and they shouldn’t. That’s because if you have too many user personas, your team will find it much harder to prioritize user stories and target their marketing efforts 🎯

Less is more (effective).

8. Incorporate them into your processes

Many organizations invest time in creating user personas only to have them collect virtual cobwebs in a Google Drive somewhere 🕸️But user personas work best when used regularly and incorporated into daily/weekly processes.

For example, your marketing team might pick a persona to focus their content efforts on for the week. Your sales team might glance at the objections listed on each of your key personas to help guide calls with potential customers.

Or your agile team might bring out the user personas to help with user story mapping so they can write more realistic user stories 👌

9. Give access to your whole team

User personas are useful for all your team members - from marketing and sales to design and development. So, make sure everyone knows they exist and where to find them.

If your team is partly remote/distributed, make sure your personas are accessible in the cloud. Or better yet...

10. Link them to your project management tool

If you’re using a project management tool like Jira, you should take a look at Easy Agile Personas for Jira. This tool allows you to capture your user persona details in the same place as your user stories, backlog, and tasks.

Which means your team enjoys:

• Better alignment on who the users are and what they need
• Extra context for each task
• The ability to prioritize the backlog and deliver on what’s most valuable to users
• A tailored view of the current issues and stories linked to each of your user personas
• All the info they need, all in one place

Bonus tip: let your user personas evolve

Just like Pokemon, your personas need to level up and evolve, too 🔥 That way, you’ll be better equipped for battle… or to deliver a well-loved product and marketing that hits the mark every time. Either way 🤷

But times change, technology changes, and so do your users. That means your user personas need to change, too. So, if you’ve already got some customer/user personas, take this chance to review them, update them, and make sure they’re being used effectively by your team. And if your team uses Jira, make sure you sign up for a free trial of Easy Agile Personas to add them to your Jira board.

Got questions about user personas or just wanna hang out with us? We’d love to hear from you over on Twitter or LinkedIn.

PI planning is a powerful event that helps teams align around goals, business objectives, and customer needs. Traditionally, this quarterly gathering brought together large teams of more than 100 people, including software developers and stakeholders, to complete essential planning.

However, in our new world of work, virtual PI planning has become necessary. This shift presents its own set of challenges, such as implementing virtual tools, overcoming time zone differences, and coordinating employees who are accustomed to working on their own schedules. Not to mention the occasional tech glitches that may arise.

In this blog, we will explore the information technology industry as an example and delve into how they can benefit from PI planning. Discover the critical benefits of PI planning and provide strategies for successfully conducting hybrid PI planning. Whether you're a newcomer or an experienced master in agile practices, there's always room for improvement in optimizing your systems.

What is PI planning?

PI planning, or Big Room Planning planning, is typically a two-day event that brings together all of the teams on an agile release train, including product owners, facilitators, developers, and outside stakeholders. It’s traditionally a face-to-face planning session that, for some teams, puts more than 100 people in the same room to align on goals, business objectives, and an overall direction moving forward.

It’s part of a scaled agile framework that implements agile practices for enterprises. Agile teams use repeated workflows for informed planning, efficient execution, and continual delivery of stakeholder value.

Although PI planning events often take place in person, the increased number of remote teams has forced businesses to find hybrid solutions for this large-scale event.

Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

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The benefits PI planning

Whether PI planning occurs in-person, online, or hybrid, this two-day gathering provides a number of critical benefits. It’s an integral part of SAFe that keeps businesses aligned on common goals and objectives, and it sets various teams on a strong path for upcoming sprints.

The PI planning event can bring numerous benefits. Here's 5 potential advantages for the information technology (IT) industry:

• Collaborative Environment: The PI Planning event provides a space where IT professionals from various teams and departments can come together to collaborate, brainstorm, and share ideas in a face-to-face setting.
• Cross-Functional Communication: IT often involves multiple departments (development, operations, support, etc.). The PI Planning event facilitates better communication and alignment between these departments, leading to more cohesive strategies.
• Focused Decision-Making: A dedicated event allows for focused discussions and decisions, reducing distractions that might arise in regular office settings.
• Rapid Problem Resolution: Complex IT challenges can be addressed more efficiently when all relevant stakeholders are physically present to discuss issues and propose solutions.
• Knowledge Sharing: Experts from different IT domains can share their expertise, leading to increased learning and skill development across the organization.

8 PI planning strategies

In order to ensure a successful PI Planning event you need to have some strategies in place to help teams effectively collaborate and align their efforts, whether they are co-located or working remotely. Here are some strategies to consider:

1. Set the date and agenda early

It is imperative to schedule the session well in advance, allowing team members to allocate the necessary time and prioritize their participation amidst their busy schedules. It is of utmost importance to encourage widespread participation in this planning session.

Providing a comprehensive agenda for the event is crucial for ensuring effective collaboration and alignment within teams. The agenda serves as a roadmap, guiding participants through the planning session and helping them prioritize their contributions.

By setting a clear agenda, teams can establish a shared understanding of the objectives, topics, and activities to be covered during the PI Planning session.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Before the PI Planning event, establish clear objectives and goals that you want to achieve. Communicate these objectives to all participants so that everyone is aligned and understands what needs to be accomplished during the event. This will help keep the focus on the desired outcomes and ensure a successful planning session.

3. Choose stellar tools that aid collaboration

Utilise visual tools to encourage active participation and facilitate visual representation of ideas and plans. Choosing the right tools can make a significant difference in enhancing productivity and promoting effective teamwork. The chosen tools should aid in organizing and structuring information, making it easier for team members to comprehend the work and dependencies, allowing the teams to collaborate in real time. It is essential to choose visual collaboration tools that are user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible to all team members.

Virtual whiteboards, such as Miro, are also a huge asset, as well as tools designed for PI Planning. If your team uses Jira, we recommend Easy Agile Programs. It’s a complete solution designed for distributed, remote, or face-to-face PI Planning.

4. Go in with a refined backlog

Do as much advance planning as you can so you can make the most of this planning event. Ensure the backlog is thoroughly refined and ready to go so no time is wasted during PI planning.

It’s a big commitment for so many people available at once, and it uses up a lot of working hours. Plus, your stakeholders are setting aside time for this meeting. A refined backlog that’s organized with appropriate details will keep everything running as smoothly as possible.

5. Don’t have people waiting around

Do all you can to ensure there’s a clear schedule that doesn’t leave anyone hanging around. That last thing you want is to waste people’s time. Ensure people know “where” they need to be and when. Triple-check that the appropriate people are assigned to virtual meetings, breakouts, and tasks. Advance planning and transparency will help ensure no one is left waiting or underutilized.

6. Utilize team breakouts

It’s unrealistic to have 100+ people working together in the same room or virtual space for two days straight. Can you imagine? 🤯

Breakout meetings composed of smaller groups are essential to a productive and effective planning event. Once again, it all comes down to advance planning. Your game plan doesn’t need to be completely rigid, but you do need a clear schedule, and leaders need to effectively organize breakout groups in whatever way makes the most sense for your team and desired planning outcomes.

TIP: Your tools can come in handy here, set up dedicated team planning boards to help facilitate conversations and capture the work. Below is an example of a Team Planning Board in Easy Agile Programs. What you are seeing is an example of how a team can create issues on their board and create any dependencies they might have in their team and between teams.

7. Expect the unexpected and roll with the punches (aka tech issues)

As with any large-scale meeting, nothing is going to run perfectly. You are bound to run into hiccups and tech issues. Rolling with the punches is the best you can do.

Test technology in advance — schedule time when your main speakers can do a test call with you. Go over requirements, and have them silence notifications and devices in advance.

Make sure everyone has the information they need to operate their tools and tech effectively, and as the leader of the event or a breakout session, have tech contingencies in place. What happens if your conferencing tool stops working? Do you have a backup? What if their Wi-Fi slows or goes down? Can they switch to a hotspot or can someone else take over?

8. Hold a retrospective so you can improve the next time around

Retrospectives ensure your processes continually improve. They provide an opportunity for feedback that will help make the next big planning meeting better.

Make sure you collect feedback and hear people out after the session. Ask people what they thought went well, what didn’t go so well, and what could be improved for next time. Use this information to improve the process for your next big room planning meeting.

Explore Easy Agile TeamRhythm

By following these strategies, you can facilitate effective collaboration and alignment within your teams during the PI Planning event.

PI planning with Easy Agile

No matter the size of your team, effective planning begins with using the right tools. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams plan efficiently and effectively.

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Easy Agile Programs for Jira is ideal for helping remote or distributed teams effectively manage programs with streamlined visibility to deliver alignment at scale. Set PI objectives, visualize dependencies, and align the entire team with a simple-to-use and virtually accessible tool.

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