When I think about Agile Consulting, I often find that it’s a term that can leave people scratching their heads. What does it really mean? Over the years, I’ve developed my own approach to Agile Consulting, and I’d like to share some insights from my experiences that might help clarify this nebulous concept.
Understanding Agile Consulting
At its core, Agile Consulting is about conversation and connection. It’s about helping organisations understand that there are multiple pathways to success, rather than being locked into a single framework like Scrum or Kanban. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Diverse Options: Many teams get so entrenched in one methodology that they forget there are other strategies available. My role is to help them see the broader landscape of options that can lead to successful product delivery.
Bridging the Gap: Agile isn’t just a tool for delivering projects; it’s a mindset that can transform the entire organisation. I often find myself filling the gap between the ideal world presented in training sessions and the realities of the workplace.
Focusing on Value: Ultimately, the goal for most organisations is to maximise revenue for the effort they invest. By fostering tighter feedback loops and encouraging more frequent customer interactions, we can help teams deliver greater value.
Engaging at All Levels
One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is engaging with people at various levels within an organisation. Whether I’m working directly with teams or collaborating with leadership, the focus remains the same: improving the way they work together. Here’s how I approach this:
Workshops: I run workshops that serve dual purposes. Not only do we aim to achieve specific outcomes, but I also strive to ensure participants leave with new skills. This could be anything from learning how to facilitate better discussions to navigating the often tricky dynamics of team disagreements.
Empowering Change: A key takeaway from my experience is that change must come from within the organisation. As a consultant, I can’t dictate how a business should operate. Instead, my role is to provoke thought and inspire the people within the organisation to identify and implement the necessary changes.
Assessing the Current State
Before diving into solutions, it’s crucial to understand where an organisation currently stands. I often conduct state-of-Agile reports, which involve:
Interviews: I speak with individuals at all levels to gauge the current state of agility within the organisation. This helps identify opportunities for improvement.
Identifying Challenges: From these discussions, I compile a report that highlights the top three challenges the organisation faces. This serves as a foundation for future conversations about potential support and training.
The Journey of Continuous Learning
Agile Consulting is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires a diverse toolkit and a commitment to continuous learning. I’m always on the lookout for new methods, theories, and tools that can enhance my practice. Here’s what I focus on:
Knowledge Sharing: I aim to provide organisations with the information they need to move forward. This could be insights from my experiences or new methodologies that I’ve discovered.
Building Relationships: Ultimately, it’s about fostering relationships and creating an environment where teams feel empowered to experiment and grow.
In conclusion, Agile Consulting is a multifaceted journey that involves understanding, engaging, and empowering organisations to embrace change. If you’re interested in exploring this further or have any questions about Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, I invite you to connect with me. Let’s grab a coffee and discuss how we can navigate this exciting landscape together.
Foreign. Consulting, that is a very nebulous term that people often have difficulty articulating what the heck that thing is. I have my approach to Agile Consulting. I have, there’s a number of different parts to it. Probably the main part again is talking to people, helping people understand that there are other options to the way they do things. People kind of get a lot, quite often people get locked into one framework like Scrum or Kanban, and they don’t realise that there’s not really anything making them do that one thing. There’s actually lots of choices in that story. What are the strategies that you need in order to be successful at building products, at delivering whatever it is that you’re delivering as an organisation?
And there’s often quite a loose connection. People focus on delivery and they forget about the business as well, right? So a lot of Agile Consulting is helping them understand that this is not a tool for delivering stuff. Agile’s just an idea that is a different way of working for your whole organisation, and how they can start bringing in some of those ideas into their organisation. So it’s kind of filling that gap between that ideal world that training talks about and the realities of the organisation and where does the organisation currently sit on those Agile scales, and how do we start moving that needle so that they gain more ability, right? They get more, faster at being able to deliver stuff, tighter feedback loops, talking to their customers more, delivering more value, and ultimately making more revenue, right? That’s the ultimate goal of most companies is to maximise the revenue for the effort that they put in. So being able to increase that.
So having conversations at different levels in the organisations, whether I’m dealing with teams, right, and helping teams get better at building the product that they’re building, or talking to people in middle or leadership teams who are orchestrating that across a much wider audience, either their whole organisation or in the professional services environment. So there’s a lot of engaging in talking with people, running workshops, right? Helping them not just, there’s almost two, there’s two things that workshops are good for, right? Well-run workshops. One is that you get the outcome of the workshop, right? That’s one, that’s only one of the outcomes, but that’s quite important. But the other outcome is, do the people that came to the workshop, did they learn anything that can make their work better, right? Did they learn how to run workshops better, how to engage with people better, how to converse with people better, and navigate that minefield that that’s often called the grown zone, that battleground of people not agreeing, right? Which is very common. And how do you navigate that? So building up those skills in people that I work with, and that’s a lot of Agile Consulting, is finding people in your organisation who are the people that need to be the ones that are doing the work, right? Because I can’t do it. I’m outside of your company. I can’t make changes to your company. That’s not possible. It’s not possible for a consultant to come and say, “Here, here’s how you should run your business. Go do it,” right? That’s not how it works. The people in your organisation need to be the ones that make the changes, that understand the ideas, and the job of the consultant is to come in and effectively provoke change, help people think differently so they see what it is they need to do next. That’s the hard part, right?
But also, you know, a state of Agile reports, I’ve done those as well. Like, where’s our organisation currently, right? Lots of organisations are quite large, and perhaps instead of just bringing somebody in to help them, they need to have a conversation first about what is the help we think we need, where are we right now, and where do we want to get to, right? That’s an initial conversation. So I’ve done reports for organisations where I come in and I interview people at all levels in the organisation, create a report that talks about the current state of agility within your organisation, what are the opportunities for improvement, and what are the top three things that I see as the biggest problem.
And then it’s up to the organisation to have a conversation about whether they need more help or they think they can do all of that themselves, right? And quite often they do come back, but it can take a longer period of time, right? Because they go try things, they’re trying to build momentum inside the organisation, and then a year later they come back around and say, “Can you come and help us with additional stuff or provide some training in a particular context?” Right?
And telling those stories inside the organisation. So I think that’s what I would quantify as Agile Consulting. You need lots of tools in your toolbox. I try and have as many tools as I can. I’m always learning and figuring out new tools and new ways of doing things, and then bringing that to the customer engagement, knowledge, experience, methods, theory, right, as well as tools and capability. What is it that what information is your organisation missing that I can provide you to help you move forward?
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