Waterfall (in) Agile

Last year was disastrous in most sense. However, our achieved a big milestone in 2020, of having all its associates Agile ready. It was vision was accomplished and it is a proud moment for all of us who have been part of it. The L&D department for enabling the associates to get trained in Agile. All the associates doing iEvolve courses, gaining expertise as Scrum masters or Agile coach.

Agile, first of all, is a mindset. We must imbibe that sense in our day to day work life. Doing certifications/courses will give us in-dept information of the different frameworks as such. However, the approach should come within. When I speak to people, sometimes I feel that the waterfall mentality is still there at the back of the mind while doing the project work. The handing over of tasks from one department to other, being dependent on a particular phase completion are examples where we can see the old methodology is still lingering. Are you able to relate? Now, the work might be getting done. However, when someone speak to clients or experts in the area, this shortcoming would be noticed.

The crux of Agile, as per me, lies in collaboration. Be it the PO with the development team, SM with the development team or PO and even developers with testers. All the roles have to collaborate as much as possible. Testers, rather than waiting for the dev work to be done and working in silos, should dive in with the developers right at the start of the work to prepare the test cases and may be even run some tests daily along with the developers. It might be unconformable at the start but trust me this would be much more effective. So is for other roles, SM may collaborate with PO on having the best method for prioritization or getting the best value out of the team.

I, for example, played BA role in my project and would collaborate with developers and testers, apart from Business, on getting details into the story. This way the development team knew and had a say on the work at the start rather than me doing the work and dumping it on them. This built a rapport among us and developers could plan / design their current work considering what the future holds.

Maturity comes with experience and experience comes with practice. So, lets instil this in our teams and move towards a more mature Agile workforce. Even if we are not involved with the team directly let’s try to share our knowledge for making an even stronger Agile workforce.

Note: I don’t claim to be an expert in Agile. I am trying to share my knowledge and see if things can be improved in some or the other way. Feel free to comment and we can, as I said, collaborate 😊