Often as an Agile Project Manager or an Agile Scrum Master, your very first challenge is to improve the agility of teams. Before we try to go to the core topic, we will try to define what is Agility?
Wikipedia defines Agility as
"Agility or nimbleness is the ability to change the body's position efficiently, and requires the integration of isolated movement skills using a combination of balance, coordination, speed, reflexes, strength, and endurance"
From the definition, it is quite clear that Agility is a function of lot of factors such as Balance, Coordination, Speed, Reflexes, Strength and Endurance.
So in this article, I will try to post my thoughts on how to improve Agility of a Team in my own words of course and out of my experience.
1. Change their mindset
Agile is a lot about mindset. Once someone is into that mindset, obviously he/she will contribute the best to the team's cause and thereby it will increase the speed and also the agility of the team.
2. Change your mindset
Acknowledge the fact that you need a mental conditioning as much as the team. First of all, try to understand what Agile is all about and how it benefits the different stakeholders in the teams. Try to understand that Agile is not a miracle game and it takes time, proper execution, support from every team member and support from team as a whole to reap its benefits.
3. Improve collaboration
Agile is lot about team working together to complete challenging tasks rather than several team members working in silos. Emphasize the fact that Agile is a team game. So Improve the collaboration among the team members, ask them to pair up for some problems and encourage good collaborative team work and make collaboration a habit.
