| Eye on the Prize: Best Practices for Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals |
Guy Beaver, of Agile, writes of his team building experience at Team Concepts and shows how he has taken that experience back to his organization to achieve new excellence and empowerment for the entire team.Eye on the Prize: Best Practices for Aligning Agile Efforts with Business GoalsWritten by Guy BeaverA phrase heard often in Agile discussions is "let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an Agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Traditional engineering practices that focus on process often divert a technology team's energy away from quick delivery of business value, and toward design of infrastructure and architecture. Deep focus on technology decisions breaks the line-of-sight with business goals, creates opportunities for over-engineering, and requires complex tracing activities which ultimately slow the process. By focusing on implementing working software quickly, Agile methodologies provide feedback loops to constrain the end result so that no effort is wasted on unneeded features or over-engineered architectures and frameworks. By quickly delivering working software, the Agile approach makes line-of-sight with overall business goals achievable and visible. This article will spotlight best practices which result in an Agile team keeping its "eye on the prize" where the prize is a pleased customer, receiving high-quality capabilities delivered quickly in prioritized small increments.
I was fortunate enough to attend a great team-building course led by Dan Lyons, World Gold Medalist in rowing. This creative and entertaining class used experiences from successful 8-person rowing teams to get across several key attributes of high performing teams. The class broke down eight fundamental behaviors that were common to winning teams. Not surprisingly, all eight behaviors are characteristics found in a well-formed Agile team, however "DEFINE THE PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVE" speaks to Agile's ability to tie line-of-sight between daily activities and business goals. The illuminating example of leading with vision was a rowing team creating a place to put its medals for which it was training. This ensured that the team was focused every day on what had to take place for the visibly empty trophy case to some day be filled with gold. Having implemented Agile in both large corporations and start-ups, I've found that vision and visibility of goals are critical to ensuring that every task worked provides optimal business value. |