Why Agile Coaches Dream in Post-Its

By nature, us techies are agile. We live and breathe it into all our work, use it in different forms, for different teams, at different speeds and to suit different clients and budgets. I dream in Trello boards, value maps and post it notes.

The feedback from our clients over the years and our blatant dedication to agile, led us to a simple question – why not expand what we already do internally and share this capability with clients?

This is when we decided to ‘package’ our expertise to offer Agile, Lean and Kanban Services in two forms: to build in-house capability and training for clients and, to help recover, or supercharge (!!) a project.

Applications of agile

The wonderful thing we have really learned working so closely with agile, is that this way of working can be applied and easily personalised for many different teams and projects. What is especially of interest to me, is that unlike many agile projects, the deliverable doesn’t always have to be working software.

The deliverable could be business-as-usual tasks that are required to support other projects, or it could be used to help rollout training or communications. It could even be used to optimise workflows for scientists – in fact, any profession that works with other people to transform inputs into value.

Recently, we were able to apply our knowledge to the research community at University of Melbourne. Our agile services both helped set up a team of 20 PhD students for project management success, and also acted as professional development training for the research community’s manager.

This was an especially fulfilling outcome, as we worked very closely, and to see the community adopt agile and lean practices with such rigour was a very proud moment.

The University of Melbourne work was one of our first fully fledged Agile, Lean and Kanban Services engagements. We’ve had the opportunity to work on more since, which has not only shown us more ways agile can be applied but that we were right to trust our instinct to share our internal methods.