Furthermore, the teams’ structure created the perfect environment for trust and healthy communication to flourish. Each team has a dedicated Product Owner and Assistant Product Owner with very distinct responsibilities to the team’s forward progress. This means POs and APOs don’t have to juggle doing their roles part time and working on something else on the side of the desk. They are fully dedicated to their teams and are accountable for their roles. 

Across the board, team members are also dedicated to persistent teams. This means there are few instances of divided loyalties, where a single team member sits on multiple teams and needs to juggle between different backlogs, visual boards and team meetings. This allows team members to be focused on their own team and their objectives. 

Access to Experts 

Due to the different types of work the squads were focusing on as well as the different stakeholders that were being served, each was dealing with very different hurdles at the outset of their journey.

For Kaizen, a newly formed team of experts in varying disciplines, working as a collective was initially challenging. Team members had relatively long tenures and were used to existing processes. Joining the squad structure meant that the workload was now shared and there was more visibility on everyone’s daily activities. For those team members who had refined their existing processes over the years, changing everything up seemed like overhead. It felt like taking a step back and exploring the benefits of behaving as a team was taking them away from their productivity. 

For Synergy, who often have occasion to work closely with the organization’s external partners, who offer our insurance to their employees, customers and alumni, there was an entirely different challenge on the horizon. They had to educate their external partners about this new way of work as they were getting used to it themselves.

In the case of both teams, access to professional coaches from AgileSherpas to help them navigate these obstacles was key. In Kaizen’s case, it meant working with professional coaches to emphasize the benefits of working in a team and helping the APO and PO navigate tough conversations with team members about the changes everyone was undergoing. In Synergy’s case, professional coaches ran workshops on stakeholder management, asking powerful questions and building the tools for educating external partners.

Agile in Practice Among Teams

All four teams subscribe to a slightly different flavor of the Agile process because they have been given the latitude to adapt their processes based on the team’s ability to share work, the types of projects they are receiving and the feedback collected during their retrospectives. However, there are Agile practices that have proved compelling for all four teams.

Most Popular Agile Practices

All four teams have been extremely consistent and successful in their use of the following Agile practices:

• Kanban boards for workflow visualization
• Retrospectives 
• Demos
• Estimation & Burndown 

All teams use the workflow visualization tool SmartSheet in order to track their incoming requests and keep an eye on the process flow. Moving away from Excel spreadsheets has allowed the teams to benefit from the visual medium and use it in their core teams as well as with their stakeholders as a tool for communication.

While all of the typical Scrum ceremonies are regularly scheduled for all four teams, retrospectives and sprint demos have been extremely impactful and are often referenced as being game-changing. Retrospectives happen at the end of every two week sprint and represent a moment for reflection and improvement for the teams. Demos happen every other Wednesday and invite all members of adjacent teams and stakeholders to take a peek into each team’s progress and upcoming plans.

Estimating work using the Fibonacci sequence during Sprint Planning and tracking estimated velocity and actual velocity at the end of the sprint has been a powerful tool for teams to understand their capacity. As a result, teams now recognize when to limit their commitments for a given sprint and distribute incoming work across several sprints to prevent overburdening team members. 

Recommended reading: Getting Started With Estimation

Tracking Story Points and Velocity

Another commonality between the teams is their use of tools for measuring their process efficiency. Synergy and Kaizen teams both consistently use burndown charts to track their velocity sprint over sprint.

Example of a Kaizen Burndown Chart tracked per sprint

Recommended reading: Everything Your Need to Know about Agile Velocity

While the goal of tracking velocity is not necessarily to continually increase it infinitely, teams like Synergy have actually seen their velocity increase over time as they implemented different process changes. Continuous improvement has helped them make the most of their resources by alleviating process waste and allowing value to rise from the entire system.

Synergy’s trend report on velocity over time between Sprints 17-33

Three out of four teams also sent their Product Owners to AgileSherpas’ 8-week certification course on Leading with Agility (ICP-LEA). This course is specifically designed to provide leaders with the tools to support their Agile team(s) on the road to continuous improvement and is certified by the International Consortium of Agile. 

This investment in effective Agile leadership has ensured that:

• POs feel confident, equipped and capable to lead their teams in changing environments and help them navigate the new Agile reality with grace
• POs speak the same language in that they were trained in the same methods
• POs are able to field questions about Agile and leadership methods from their teams, instead of always having to escalate them up to other leaders

Zoom in on Kaizen Squad

For the Kaizen squad, the most recent team to be launched, several Agile practices, introduced by AgileSherpas, have become the focal point of their implementation. 

The Kaizen team APO calls out that, “establishing a team charter at the outset really guides the way we work. As a result of documenting certain principles in our charter, it helps us be open and honest with each other and willing to take feedback and willing to work on that. Had we not set that out in the team charter, maybe it would have happened anyways, but I'm not convinced.”

Building on the team charter, using tools like SmartSheet and Miro helped keep track of the team’s brainstorming sessions, retrospective outcomes as well as day-to-day activities. 

The feeling that SmartSheet is a great help is shared by everyone on the team, including the Kaizen team’s PO. “Smartsheet is not just a Kanban board, but also serves the strong purpose of sharing a sprint backlog with our peers and with our leadership team. So the SmartSheet that we set up is actually a three-in-one sheet where we have eliminated any redundancy with One Note or Excel. We’ve consolidated the processes and it is saving us tons and tons of time,” he says.

Example of a Kanban board visualization in SmartSheet, the tool of choice at the organization

He goes on to say that, beyond visual work management during the execution process, making sure the team has a feedback loop at the end of every sprint during the retrospective is essential to keeping his team engaged with the process as a whole.

Retrospective template often used by the Kaizen team, hosted in Miro

In terms of role development, AgileSherpas has been instrumental in establishing regular 1-1 coaching sessions with each PO and APO separately in order to help them develop the aptitudes that can most support their team’s progress. 

“Meeting with the APO to prepare them for the role and help them become a complement to the PO, a true partner, was a wonderful way to set the relationship up. As a PO, the coaching sessions helped me develop my team relationships. On the APO front, I feel like it has helped provide the tools for solving core problems as a unit,” concludes the Kaizen team PO. 

These changes in the processes of the Kaizen team have not gone unnoticed by stakeholders that interact with them.

Unlike the Kaizen squad, which was a newly formed team, Synergy was already an existing team when they moved to Agile ways of working. The Synergy squad was in the second wave of Agile marketing squads to kick off. They have had more time than Kaizen to continually improve their approach, but they also dealt with their own share of hurdles starting out. 

From the process perspective, several other shifts transpired that led to benefits for this team:

• Retrospectives, which were previously run by the PO, were led by a different, rotating facilitator each sprint. This meant the retrospective templates being used were more varied and engagement during the retrospectives soared. The team felt complicit in the retrospective process and the facilitator felt ownership over this meeting.
• Coaching introduced new methods for facilitating conversations across the team. The “Asking Powerful Questions” workshop is a standout event from the team’s Agile journey that unlocked new modes of communication across team members and their stakeholders.

The biggest changes in terms of team touchpoints were focused on the Backlog Refinement and Sprint Planning ceremonies, which were taking a lot of productive time away from the Synergy team over the course of the sprint. Based on the recommendation of their AgileSherpas coach, these ceremonies became more streamlined and their time slots in the calendar became shorter. 

Now, instead of frontloading the sprint with multiple hours of planning, brainstorming sessions and idea generation, these activities are represented as work items, with effort levels assigned to them, on the Kanban board.

In support of the more refined planning moment, the intake process of briefs was also clarified and socialized to the wider team in order to make it explicit.

Sample overview of a much more detailed intake process for briefs 

Dealing with many stakeholders and having to prioritize against many different types of requirements, meant that Synergy needed to be very selective about what they bring into a sprint and how they communicate their sprint plan to those who are waiting on deliverables. A solid, consistent intake process sets a strong foundation for a streamlined planning and a stress-free execution.

As one of the more tenured teams within the organization’s marketing department, Synergy has also invested time in checking in with the core team members to assess their Agile marketing maturity. With the intention of taking a pulse check approximately every 4-6 months, the maturity survey outcomes provide important guidance about actionable next steps the APO & PO can take in order to move the team ever closer to Agile mastery and even higher performance.

Recommended activity: Take the Agile Marketing Maturity Assessment with your team

Keeping Multiple Agile Teams in Sync

Sprint Demos

Within this organization’s marketing department, regular biweekly sprint demos to stakeholders has become like a religion. Every other Wednesday is known as “demo day” as all four teams host sprint demos of approximately 30 mins during this day. 

Each Agile marketing team prepares a short presentation or Miro board to showcase their ongoing projects, progress they are making, plans for the future or considerations they have. 

Stakeholders have begun to look forward to these Wednesdays, when they are able to hear from all of the teams and get a glimpse into their process and progress. 

For example, the Kaizen team has experienced consistent turnout at their Sprint Demos, as illustrated by the data captured below. From this, we can conclude that stakeholders are getting the most out of sprint demos and continually returning to get updates from the team.

APO-PO Forum

On each cross-functional Agile team, there are two distinct roles, as you would typically see on a Scrum team. The Product Owner (PO), who is responsible for prioritization and the intake of new briefs and the Assistant Product Owner (APO) who oversees day-to-day operations and supports the team’s development. 

We discovered that, with four active teams, it was imperative that the POs and APOs have a forum to connect. The main goals of this forum are to drive cross-squad initiatives forward and synchronize operations between the four groups. 

For example, most recently, we decided to prioritize the developments of dashboards for process metrics in our process management tool. We had communicated with the team on the vendor side to build custom dashboards for us, however, we needed to gather the requirements for these on our side. Therefore, we needed input from both APO and PO groups across teams to ensure the dashboards would be useful to all. The APO and PO forum was a great help in bringing us together on this topic and helping us reach consensus through face-to-face communication.

At the moment, our APO & PO touch points occur biweekly. The outcomes of each touchpoint are documented on a dedicated Kanban board of initiatives.

Cultural Impact on Marketing

Beyond their own teams, both Kaizen and Synergy are seeing their application of Agile result in ripple effects across the entire marketing organization.

She is referring to the ongoing efforts of all of the teams to transform their ways of work and mindset in order to see the full benefits of agility. By sowing the seeds during their training and coaching and being committed to iterating on the existing process to make it even better, they are now reaping the benefits.