A mid-sized company tried Scrum once, failed, still thought it was a good idea, hired an Agile coach, and tried again. This is the story of .id’s (called “id”, without pronouncing the dot) 2nd Agile journey (ups and downs) and their experience with

• team structure for the whole organisation
• experiments to drive change
• enhanced communication
• relationship between business and teams

“Actually, we don’t think of ourselves as an IT company…” At .id, demographic data is transformed into knowledge to enable customers to make smart decisions. Where to open the next store. Where to build the next school. These things.

Not being a technology company by nature (most of their 45 employees are demographic data experts), this is a case study of Agile beyond IT.

How to develop habits in an Agile environment to perform better with less energy

Blame in the retro? Threats when work is not finished? Complaints rather than acting? You might have developed some bad habits here.

Are stand-ups taking forever? Are team members not updating the story board? Are retrospective actions not followed up upon? You might want to develop some good habits here.

Habits are regularly repeated routines, most often done subconsciously. Developing (the right) habits is crucial for individuals and teams to minimize the energy needed to perform at a high level. By developing a habit, more effort can be spent on the actual work rather than on the support functions.

Developing habits is not about working harder, but smarter. Habits enable you to:

• get rid of bad behavior and establish good behavior
• save time during meetings
• boost reliability and, ultimately, trust

Research and new findings within the last years have shown enormous potential for habit development having a huge impact on personal and business behavior. Applying this to Agile seems very promising.

Stephanie BySouth | Director, Authentika

We often expect ourselves to lead people like mythical legends with the mystical abilities to influence others. Expectations and judgements are thrown at leaders without consideration that they are also people. We aren’t afforded the same learning courtesy as Agile teams expect for themselves. That’s OK, because we know; no matter how safe, it’s not nice or easy to fail people. Especially those we are accountable for.

With this level of accountability and the need to support senior management to cross ‘the Agile team to Agile leadership chasm’ with clients, it was time for a leadership agility framework that serves us, the business and our teams simply and sustainably.