Creating Agile Teams

Centralized planning and decentralized execution.
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Did you know agile organizations grow revenue 37% faster and generate 30% higher profits than non-agile, yet most companies admit they are not flexible enough to compete successfully?

In order to succeed in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, your team needs to be agile. Agile teams are cross-functional groups that are focused on adapting to organizational change. Agile teams take advantage of new resources and mitigate new threats. They seek to rapidly adapt to their changing environment by regularly reviewing their progress and adjusting their plans to address the inevitable changes occurring around them.

The secret to building an agile team is creating a cycle of continuous improvement through incremental wins and adjustments. The result is centralized planning and decentralized execution, which is fundamental to succeeding in a complex, rapidly changing environment.

The term ‘Agile’ stems from the 2001 Agile Manifesto of a group that included the creators of Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), and Crystal Clear. These processes were co-developed by a fighter pilot, Jeff Sutherland, who is now also the CEO of Scrum Inc.

Their manifesto sets out four core values for enabling high-performing teams, and Flex embodies all of these values.

Flex is agile in the purest sense. Here’s why.

Out of the agile processes, Flex and Scrum are the most streamlined. They have a smaller number of core practices, roles, and artifacts that together form a solid base to build from. Other approaches – SAFe, Rage Less DAD, DSDM, and Crystal Clear, have a large portfolio of possible practices and roles from which you pick and choose.

While Flex and Scrum are both powerful approaches for getting things done, they can be used together as they emphasize different aspects of the challenge. Most importantly, Flex offers tighter alignment with an organization’s ultimate objectives, a greater focus on team culture and development, and more ways to keep a team and each individual in it on track.

While Scrum and other Agile approaches are effective in completing short-term sprints as part of long-term projects, they are not designed to answer what those sprints and projects should be. This matters more when firms struggle to align their IT efforts with business outcomes and objectives, particularly where they’ve invested in methods, frameworks, processes, and services.

Organisations require something simple and intuitive to draw these elements together. They require something that aligns them with business objectives and allows them to respond quickly to external threats and opportunities. Something that sits lightly on the organization, without displacing its existing processes. Flex serves this role well.

Solutions:

Agile Team Development

An Afterburner team building program will inspire and equip your team with the tools to stay competitive in a game where the arena and the rules change every day. Our programs are experiential, fast-paced and will challenge the way your people think and operate.

Led by our team of elite military aviators, your team will participate in a high-energy Mission Planning exercise to inspire action and highlight the skills required to be agile.

Business Planning Day

Our Business Planning Day (“BPD”) is a highly focused, experiential planning workshop. It’s not a lesson or theoretical exercise – it’s a real-world planning exercise designed to develop clear, actionable and measurable business strategies and plans. The program is facilitated by a fighter pilot and builds upon your team’s introductory Flex knowledge and skills.

Enquire:

“Thank you to you and the team for a very successful day. My team and I have already started talking about how do we make debriefing a daily practice.”

Sonny Westpac

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