Align Your Agile Teams To Accomplish Your Important Initiatives
By Ryan Fullmer
June 4, 2022
You Need Alignment
Bold initiatives expand what’s possible and provide your organization with new capabilities. Capabilities you need to achieve your most important strategic objectives and outcomes. For these initiatives to succeed, you need to unify and align your agile teams. This is no small task and is often not done well.
Alignment Requires Clarity
It is hard to communicate the big picture in a way that it is tangible and clear. You need to provide enough clarity to inspire everyone to get on board and move in the right direction.
It’s tempting to put together a set of documents defining the initiative and present it to the teams. This can come across as directive and get in the way of feedback and input. When this happens, the teams are less likely to have the clarity and buy-in they need to be successful.
Create Clarity Through Engagement
Try this instead. When you launch an initiative, engage your teams in open and meaningful conversations. Lead with dialogue and visual documentation. Provide them with opportunities to ask questions and share their thoughts and insights.
With this kind of engagement, you increase their buy-in and you gain valuable insights. You set your teams up for success by providing clarity on what you are trying to achieve and why. Most importantly, your agile teams will be aligned, unified and prepared to accomplish the initiative.
Use Collaborative Discovery Sessions
One way you can do this is through a collaborative Discovery session. A Discovery session is a simple, yet highly effective approach to get clear on:
- Why - the context for the initiative and why it is important
- Who - the primary customers and stakeholders
- Outcomes - the end result and how you will measure success
- Challenges: the issues the team will need to be aware of as they solve the problem
Get Started
To learn how to lead a discovery session, download the free guide “How to Use Discovery to Focus Your Agile Teams on Solving the Right Problems”.
This guide will provide you the approach for facilitating a collaborative discovery meeting and a tool to use during the meeting to get clear on the why, who, outcomes and challenges.
