As the Agile Manifesto celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, I thought it would be fitting to follow up on my recent Scrum Product Owner certification on the day of my birthday with my first true LinkedIn post to reflect on what Agile has meant for me and other leaders within my company, client ecosystem as well as many more businesses around the world.

Agile Transformation is nothing new. It is a long-running product of leaders striving to shape their businesses into a leaner, nimbler organization capable of fulfilling increasingly demanding customer needs and expectations, whilst being cost effective. Amongst the myriad of choices to make - selecting the right technology stack fit for their organization being one of them - comes how to adopt Agile in a valuable manner. In their efforts to thoroughly understand the Agile principles, values, frameworks and methodologies and how appropriate each of these may be for the way they would like their company to perform, leaders risk distracting themselves from fundamental soft skills that nurture operational success.

Scrum shapes these soft skills into five values upon which a team’s success depends. I will provide some high priority pain points that leaders tend to face in their professional environments and will illustrate why it is instrumental that leaders promote these scrum values to work around the challenges and ensure business agility.

Courage:

It is unfortunately more common that we would like for teams to get lost into busy work; to confuse high volumes of tasks completed with high performance. Leaders have a duty to intervene in these instances and to educate their teams on how important it is for them to bias their work towards output and outcome-focused activities. It will more than likely take courage to break these habits - people don’t like being told what they have been doing adds no value - and to do so, leaders need to have a clear vision in which they firmly believe. As a Scrum Product Owner, I frequently refer to the Evidenced Based Management (EBM) Guide to shape this vision and ensure my team’s endeavors are strategic. It has been extremely helpful in identifying what we should focus on as a team and what is not worth our time.

Commitment:

I see a lot of practices wrongly claim that they adhere to Scrum. One of the most common examples of this is teams skipping one of the formal Scrum meetings (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective). Each of these events is designed to make the process and work transparent, which in turn enables inspection and identification of opportunities to improve and adapt in a timely and iterative manner. Should you fail to respect these events, you are not following Scrum, as you are deviating from the Agile benefits the framework intends to implement. It is crucial for leaders to understand the implications of the Scrum Guide and should they decide it is the ideal framework to adopt, given their market pressures and scope of work, to commit to the Scrum rules.

Focus:

As part of their strategic planning, leaders can overstretch at times and set challenges for their teams that unrealistically go beyond the team’s current capabilities. When designing the roadmap towards strategic goals, leaders should not overlook focusing on the present and setting intermediate objectives in incremental steps, based on what is empirically known and achievable. This will build confidence and excitement within the team as they gradually complete the objectives and progress towards the strategic goal and as they upskill and become more capable along the way. The Scrum Guide can help teams shape their work into progressive sprints and EBM is a useful guide for strategic planning.

Openness:

Another recurring struggle is openness to change. Change that benefits stakeholders, whether customers, users or employees, should be embraced and implemented quickly to ensure competitive advantage. However, as it may conflict with the feasibility of ingrained plans, it is tempting for leaders to stick with original aspirations - with potentially damaging consequences. Agile has multiple frameworks that help you shift from Project Management or Waterfall-biased approaches to methodologies that cultivate change acceptance. More importantly, the Agile principles nurture change-savvy mentalities, as responding to change is a core priority of the Agile Manifesto.

Respect:

It is important for leaders to respect the essence of Agile frameworks and be self aware in terms of where they can foster Agile work or where their management intervention may hinder it. In Scrum, the product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the solution being developed, whereas the developers are accountable for how this solution will be brought to life. Leaders should respect these roles and accountabilities. They should not attempt to dictate the direction or approach the potential solution should take, as this will diffuse clarity in terms of who ultimately is responsible for the project. This is not to say that leaders will be excluded from the process - they could be invited as stakeholders to collaborate with the scrum team and provide guidance on the potential market value, usability or functionality of the product so that the scrum team can take this feedback into acount.