🕒10 min read
Every organization has its own way of handling agile workflow processes. Depending on the organization's size, geographical location, and business type, there is no single "right" way to do things.
Agile workflow is a project management methodology that helps teams to be more flexible and adaptable, allowing them to respond quickly to changes and deliver high-quality products. However, agile can be difficult to implement, and many businesses struggle to see the benefits
In this article, we are going to show how you can boost your agile workflow process and see real benefits for your business.
Agile Workflows
Agile workflows lay the management foundations which allows you to visualize the development cycle from the beginning to the end; as it displays all the stages of the work process and assignments, you can easily identify the value-adding tasks and eliminate the wasteful ones that make for an efficient workflow.
Features of a high performing Agile Team
Simply implementing an agile workflow does not guarantee success. While 80% of software companies practice agile development, 96% of agile transformation projects end up in failure. Thus, here are five elements of exceptional agile teams to do more, quicker, and better.
- Effective Communication
- Collaborative
- Self-Organizing and Self-Sufficient
- Cross-Functional
- Customer and Results Oriented
Why Rolljak is the perfect partner for the Agile Methodology
Rolljak enhances your agile workflow process by utilizing Effective Communication, Collaboration, and Metrics during meetings.
Here are a few reasons why Rolljak can be the perfect partner for you:
Effective Communication and Collaboration
Stand out and speak up! Rolljak provides an outlet for teams to participate in the agile processes with equal and effective communication. Introduce gamified practices and produce engaging sessions with Rolljak’s unique variety of activities.
Use Rolljak to design the flow of each session which allows everyone to communicate about their tasks and the priority they would like them to get done.
Share your opinions and thoughts effectively with the new Sprint Retrospective template on Rolljak. Provide unique insights through writing-based activities such as Open Ended or maybe unleash your creativity with Sketch It Out. Elaborate on your opinions after each activity review to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
While conducting your review session, ask heavy-hitting questions which allow session organizers to identify mistakes and what went wrong during each Sprint. With an adaptive user interface, Scrum Masters can now keep everyone on the same page and easily oversee the entire process through an easy-to-understand results page.
Drive synergy within your team with fun team-based activities. Break the information barrier and improve individual communication through a competitive environment. The more you share during sessions, the more your team grows. Now, you can measure the health of your agile team after each sprint.
Solution Ideation
Whilst successful agile teams need to be metrics and customer-needs-driven, they also have to be consistently committed to identifying, understanding, and proactively ideating in order to achieve customer requirements.
There are plenty of tools in the Rolljak arsenal which can be used in order to ideate effective solutions. Utilize a wide variety of ideation activities in the Innovation & Design Thinking tab to perform mass brainstorming and idea converging.
For example, by utilizing the Brainwriting activity with your teammates, agile teams can now proactively anticipate, identify and deal with the underlying risks by planning for contingencies for unexpected challenges. This is done by getting the team to list out a large number of ideas related to solving a problem or challenges that they foresee coming up.
By enabling peer evaluation features, teams can also validate achieved results based on a measurable criterion that they set themselves. Through collaboration and ideation integration on Rolljak, teams can also improve on each others’ ideas to output higher quality results aimed to solve problems and please the customer.
Rolljak is powerful in providing solution ideation as it creates a “safe to fail” environment. When ideas fall through, collaboration and communication within teams will always provide feedback and evaluation in a way where participants always come out of each session knowing that they have learned something.
Help To Simplify Project Management
Rolljak is a versatile platform that greatly simplifies project management in an agile workflow. With its interactive activities, teams can brianstorm, prioritize tasks, and coordinate effectively in real-time. Rolljak's flexibility allows teams to adapt quickly to changing requirements and customer feedback, ensuring the project stays on track and aligned with evolving priorities. Additionally, the platform's built-in feedback and survey capabilities foster continuous improvement, empowering teams to iterate and deliver higher-quality outcomes. Rolljak serves as a collaborative and efficient solution, enabling project managers to navigate the complexities of agile methodologies seamlessly and drive success throughout the project's lifecycle.
How to incorporate Rolljak in your Agile Workflow
1. Gamify your Sprint Retrospective
Sprint Retrospective can be a powerful opportunity to highlight catalysts for change, generate meaningful improvements to your workflow process and speed up the velocity of your team; while avoiding the commonly occurring traps in each sprint.
However, running retrospectives poorly turns an agile meeting to a game of pointing fingers with everyone screaming out “No, it is your fault!” Well then, how can we run effective retrospectives and prevent such occurrences from happening?
Through Rolljak you can gamify your retrospectives to focus on excellent communication and collaboration by providing an avenue to accept the sprint challenges and give engagements to the whole team with our Retrospective template!
Tricks you can utilize to master retrospectives on Rolljak:
- Keep your prompts a safe space for open discussion. Your prompts should be inclusive and not directed towards a specific person in the team.
- Review all the responses for your retrospective ideas! The goal of each retrospective is to facilitate improvements. Enable the Peer Evaluation setting for each prompt to find out what each person feels other each other’s ideas. Give them ample opportunity to elaborate on their ideas for open communication.
- Change the format up a little. Like every meeting, sprint retrospectives can get predictable. Play around and explore on the different activities in Rolljak! For example, instead of listing down what they’ve learned each sprint, ask participants to sketch their pain points and type out how they overcame them with the Sketch It Out activity.
Try Rolljak session template to gamify your Sprint Retrospective!
2. Run A Virtual Micro Design Sprint
Excellent agile processes may not only be the only case to success, Rolljak as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is versatile, adaptive, and intuitive enough to implement Design Sprint processes through its variety of activities which heavily benefits the entire agile workflow.
While integrating design sprints to your current agile workflow may not be unheard of, you can now introduce a micro design sprint that takes up 30 minutes using Rolljak!
Leveraging Design Sprint Processes in Agile Workflows provides clear results
While being able to ship changes in fast cycles is beneficial; it is not enough. The agile workflow can and have to be more design-centric. Most agile frameworks, including Scrum, are short of specific practices to systematically integrate the design activities into the development process.
The question of the why, for who, and how must be included to provide a down-to-earth, “Human-centered” product. In order to please customers, agile teams now have to master a good User Experience (UX) as it becomes one of the key success factors in an overcrowded market.
Agile teams have to be more design-driven to design solutions to the correct problems systematically.
Hence, Design Sprints are incredibly beneficial as agile teams can refocus to be more design and customer-centric, as most customers become unwilling to accept products they do not understand or find hard to use.
If you are already in a team that does the agile, Scrum routine, we recommend incorporating key Design Thinking activities into what you will be working on in the next Scrum Sprint by populating building blocks into the Backlog and Sprint Planning. This process can be repeated over and over again for your next sprint.
For example, if the user testing results has changed the requirements and functionalities of your app features, consider taking a pause and going through a quick round of iteration of Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.
Implementing Design Sprint Processes into your agile workflow will define the problem and allow the team to ideate solutions that is grounded in deep understanding of user behaviour and data.
Here is how you can engage your team and run a quick iteration in 30 minutes:
1. Create a Session
Plan ahead! Create your ideal session by including the suitable activities you would like to have in your design sprint. Or, you can use our ready-to-use template for Micro Design Sprints which includes your Design Sprint must-haves.
2. Pose more questions
Not enough questions in our sessions? Add a variety of activities to pose interactive questions for your team. We recommend selecting activities from the Innovation & Design Thinking tab as they include innovative activities from Stakeholder Analysis to Storyboarding to keep your team on their toes.
3. Create Teams and Gather Responses
Enable Team Mode and be sure to include the right people on your team! When it is time to participate, get everyone to submit their responses to the questions; whether through typing or drawing. Having the Rolljak Storyboarding Activity in your roster of activities allows participants to break the challenge into phases so you can review all their ideas in one place.
4. Collaborate and Evaluate
By enabling the collaboration feature, develop anonymous peer collaboration from a different point of view. As the responses are anonymous, collect participants’ unbiased perspectives which helps avoid groupthink and allow them to evaluate responses based on your criteria.
5. Discuss & Plan
Evaluate the ideas that stand out on the leaderboard and make that the sprint focus. Discuss with your team if any of the ideas can be merged or evaluate on what the team dislikes about each idea. During the review, communication is vital as they will be given a chance to elaborate on their concepts.
By simplifying processes for every stage of the design sprint, from defining the problem statement, to determining what and how you execute ideas, we can shorten the design sprint operation from a week to a matter of minutes.
Try the new Micro Design Template here on Rolljak for yourself!
Conclusion
While Design Sprints and agile methodologies can be applied on their own, the two frameworks are better together as they both place a heavy emphasis on customer needs.
Rolljak provides a common ground for both frameworks to be integrated seamlessly, through easy implementation within your agile workflow. Try the new templates now to have a head start in streamlining your agile workflow process.