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Today’s teams need to think and act fast. To get to market quickly they must adopt agile habits, an engineering mindset and collaborate in smaller units with more diverse skillsets.
These are 12 characteristics of successful agile teams:
1. Recognizing that always-on customers need always-on systems
People expect to access the services they want immediately, whenever it suits them. Opening hours are a relic.
2. Working in small, multi-disciplinary teams—not traditional departments
Teams can thrive only when the organization is able to break down silos. Silos lead to departmental fiefdoms conditioned to avoid productive collaboration.
3. Using data to improve and personalize a customer’s experience
The essence of digital natives is that each customer interaction generates data that can be used to refine their user profile and better target the propositions they are presented with next time.
4. Cutting time to market for new products and services—listening, testing, learning and iterating in real time
Feedback from customer interactions not only allows teams to provide more personalized experiences, it also allows them to get their product into the market quickly and refine as they go.
5. Working in an agile way, with workflows managed to reduce waste and delays
Smaller teams use agile practices to ensure everyone focuses on solving the right problems as quickly as possible, using a competitive collaboration model to focus everyone on the same goal.
6. Ensuring quality assurance is built in at every stage of every process
Products must get to market quickly so quality cannot be left to the end of the process.
7. Knowing that business objectives are also IT objectives; they share a common goal
Having metrics that cut across traditional structures is a powerful way to make collaboration a reality and focus different departments on delivering the business’ overall objectives – not just their individual responsibilities. IT is no longer confined to a department—it is everywhere.
8. Clearly defining results and metrics, and being fully accountable and rewarded for delivering them
Agile teams ensure every member focuses on a shared goal, but recognize and reward individual achievements as well as the team’s successes.
9. Learning from each other and implementing what they’ve learned
Start-ups use small teams, with a core of agile coaches, engineers, creative designers, strategists, business analysts and other champions. These “master craftspeople” liaise across the individual teams, sharing knowledge and spreading best practices.
10. Building innovation into daily life and roadmaps
These teams use hackathons to accelerate innovation and tackle problems fast. They exhibit a strong test-and-learn culture and they regard every service as a beta. Nothing is ever finished if constant innovation is your goal.
11. Redistributing what they can’t do to highly skilled partners and negotiating based on business outcomes
Trying to solve every problem internally can slow down your progress. Agile teams recognize when they need back-up in the form of specialized skills and services and they secure it quickly. In fact, they build out an ecosystem of partners whom they can rely upon at short notice.
12. Starting small and dreaming big
The size of your teams is no barrier to creating a big impact when you have the instant scalability that cloud-based infrastructure delivers.
How successful engineering cultures are able to foster autonomy and shared consciousness. So your business can be both big and nimble.
Digital natives don’t have the corner on agility. With the benefits that come with size, established businesses can beat digital natives at their own game. Here’s how.
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