5 Tips to Make Your Agile Team Efficient

It is crucial to teach Agile teams to work. Agile is working in short and repetitive cycles so that the wishes and requirements of a market clarify sooner. As a result, companies become more agile and flexible, they can anticipate market changes faster, and innovative concepts and products are realized quicker.

How do you put Agile principles into practice?

We give you five useful tips, zero annoying and hip buzz words so that your Agile team can work.

# Taking change into account

Agile involves breaking up large projects into smaller projects, which take around two to four weeks. In doing so, changes are taken into account, for example in the market, the wishes of the (end) customer or society. That is an important difference with traditional project management, which wants to avoid changes as much as possible.

This distinction makes Agile working attractive for the logistics sector. We expect that many traditional parties will be challenged and even disrupted by technology-driven challengers. Working agile is one of the ways you can protect yourself against it.

At Moqod, we are huge believers in Agile principles on practices and we have been applying them to our work as a nearshoring team for 10+ years.

# No buzz words, but practical tips

In our opinion, Agile should not be missing in any project management book. However, we are not fans of all the buzz words, countless gurus, and the Agile hype. We do not base the tips below on slick management books but on our own experiences.

Five tips

Tip 1: Repetitions

You can subdivide a project into different repetitions, each of which forms experiments. Each repetition must offer its own scope of outcomes. For example, by testing a number of times how an intended target group reacts to different propositions, it becomes clear which concept does and which concept does not work in the market.

Tip 2: Divisible code

A product must be delivered at the end of each repetition (experiment). Make sure that the code with which this product is composed is (programmable) divisible and editable. This means that you can tinker with the product after a new experiment so that you ultimately arrive at an optimal product.

Tip 3: Self-managing teams

We believe that the best teams consist of colleagues who take the initiative themselves. This makes it possible to develop so-called self-managing teams. They do not wait for an order from above, but go to work themselves. Be (or become) proactive. Know what your goals are. Be able to take the initiative yourself, identify problems and propose solutions. And expect that from your (new) colleagues.

Tip 4: Choose a “scrum of scrums”

Scrumming (one of the ways to implement Agile work) is usually done in teams of up to nine people. Sometimes too many people are involved in a project to put together such a small team of only nine people. Then choose a scrum or scrums: the top layer of management is then composed according to the scrum principles. See also the image below of Scrum-guide.nl, which provides clarification.

Tip 5: Looking back

How do you know for sure whether what you have done contributes to the result, or is purely coincidental? That is why it is important, together with the rest of the team, to look back on projects. Discuss and analyze the good and bad experiences from the project. This is what makes (continuous) improvement possible! With our team at MOQOD we do this constantly, and therefore, keep improving.