By means of Bryan StallingsChief Evangelist, Lucid Software
To keep up with today’s pace of technology innovation, leaders must develop their skills at navigating change and adapting the way they work to make progress faster than ever before.
Agile is a product management methodology inspired by a group of software developers looking for an alternative to more limited linear approaches. An Agile mindset is a belief system that embraces adaptability, collaboration and continuous improvement – core principles necessary for leaders to successfully facilitate transformation. It fits naturally with the Agile values, which determine how teams adapt to modern ways of working and how they deal with change. Whether or not you use formal Agile practices, leaders can draw inspiration from these values to foster a culture of flexibility, innovation, and growth.
Let’s look at some Agile values and how leaders can help their teams adapt to these values through tangible tools and resources:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
This value emphasizes the importance of people and their relationships in driving innovation and solving problems. The true power of agility lies in fostering strong, collaborative connections among team members, and leaders must ensure their tools and processes help with that.
To reach the end goal faster, teams within Lucid Software can create dedicated virtual spaces to organize their most important resources, such as charters, work agreements, and other crucial artifacts. In those spaces, teams have a single, shared space to connect with each other. A team room in Lucid creates a virtual room that replicates many of the benefits of the physical team rooms, bays, or war rooms they had before.
Promoting strong collaboration during meetings starts with effectively facilitating meetings. Lucid offers customizable templates to help facilitators lead more collaborative daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. When useful, Lucid’s new private mode allows teams to submit their ideas and input anonymously, making meetings more inclusive and allowing all voices to be heard and prioritized equally.
Working software over extensive documentation
Agile prioritizes delivering functional solutions that provide immediate value over creating extensive planning documents. Leaders can advance this approach by encouraging iterative progress, focusing on what works, and using feedback from the field to guide continuous improvement.
To achieve this, Agile involves team members in the planning process to understand their vision for the work and how to approach it. Lucid’s new estimating capabilities make this easy by facilitating interactive team estimating sessions where teams work together to determine the effort, complexity, and risk of their backlog items so that all perspectives are considered to achieve alignment. When planning is a collaborative effort, teams can better prioritize and focus their efforts on the best results.
Another way teams can stay agile and deliver immediate value is through tools that streamline their planning processes. According to data from Smartsheet, more than 40 percent of workers surveyed spend at least a quarter of their workweek on manual, repetitive tasks such as data collection. But solutions like Lucid can reduce that effort. For example, Lucid’s two-way integration with Jira and Azure DevOps (ADO) enables seamless data synchronization between Lucid and teams’ systems of record. This integration eliminates the need for manual data entry before or after planning sessions, significantly speeding up the process and improving data accuracy, while also eliminating the need for extensive documentation.
As teams move through their planning process, they can also organize and interact with their system of record through seamless integration into Lucid through Dynamic Tables. Teams can import backlog items directly into Lucid and display them in a customizable table format with custom attributes derived from the imported cards. For example, during sprint planning, backlog items can start as cards in an “Unassigned” column, and as team members select them, they can drag and drop the cards into columns or rows associated with their names. This action automatically updates the integrated task management system, such as Jira, without users having to switch tools.
Responding to change over following a plan
Agility means seeing plans as flexible guidelines and embracing change as an opportunity for improvement. This value promotes resilience and the willingness to adjust course when necessary to achieve the best results.
To maximize results, leaders can build in tools that help them visualize how different teams are connected and where they rely on each other to advance their work. For example, Lucid’s dynamic roadmap features provide interactive visual timelines that help teams stay aligned with changing priorities. Lucid’s latest dependency mapping capabilities allow teams to visualize and manage dependencies directly from Jira and ADO so that potential risks are not only identified early in the planning process, but also mitigated. Dependency mapping helps teams avoid costly delays, keeping projects on track and aligned with key objectives.
Agile values, rooted in an Agile mindset, serve as the foundation for strong collaboration, allowing teams to work together seamlessly toward common goals. By promoting continuous learning and alignment, teams can remain flexible and adapt to change, improving both their products and their collaboration across departments. When teams embrace this agile approach, they gain the confidence to navigate collaboration and deliver value faster, shaping the future of work.
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Bryan Stallings is the Chief Evangelist at Lucid Software, the leaders in visual collaboration. With 25 years of experience in manufacturing, financial services, IT, management consulting and SaaS, Bryan helps organizations see and build the future.
