Top 5 Things Agile Coaches Should Look for in a Planning Tool

Every organization is unique in the way they operate and so are their teams. But one thing which is common in high performing teams and in organizations - at large - which value consistent innovation and learning culture is their humility to acknowledge the need for relentless improvement. They always find reasons to be inspired by the “best” - even if the numbers are insignificant compared to the “rest”. This attitude is an integral part of their ways of working. Agile coaches play a vital role in shaping this attitude in the group of people they have influence on.

Over time, the role and expectations from an agile coach have changed to the extent where they are no longer on the original mission of helping teams, at different levels, to adopt effective agile practices. Discussing why adoption of agile practice at scale is important for organizations today is beyond the scope of this article.

The subsequent sections assume that the importance of business agility and the critical role played by agile coaches are understood in its true sense. Without that, it is almost impossible to conceive why the following 5 attributes of a planning tool as discussed in this article are so important to an agile coach.

1. Team Topology

Delivering large systems and solutions is inherently a complex endeavor. The complexity is primarily due to the number of people and their alignment needs, level of abstraction from which each of them looks at a solution, number of solution components and so on. However, the principles that help address these, are not that complex. The key principle is - organizing around value at every level. Mostly, every tool for planning and work management provides a structural framework to represent people and the level of abstraction. It is often termed as project, workspace, or something else. However, an effective agile planning tool is the one that brings more clarity and flexibility in terms of how different people involved in strategy and execution can be organized, irrespective of their reporting structure. This helps optimize the flow of information and break the silos. This is further strengthened by the support of multi-level system requirement in terms of requirement hierarchy, which is the next attribute we are going to discuss.

2. Requirement Hierarchy

Whichever methodology is being used for system development; effective requirements management is critical to success. Earlier, there was a tendency to prepare a complete requirement specification document, well in advance, when the cone of uncertainty is still broad. It is unknowingly based on the assumption that a point solution exists, and we know what it is. But in the case of modern solution development, the reality is a lot different.

Lean agile practices, on the other hand, not only admit that things may change rapidly, but also leave room for an emerging understanding driven by collaboration, which is based on intent and not specificity.

An efficient agile tool is expected to support a scalable model of requirement to express system behavior with just enough but reliable information which is communicable to the stakeholders involved in that level. This hierarchical model shouldn't be restrictive; it should rather offer flexibility to fit well in different situations. For instance, a story can be originated independently from within the local context of a team or it can be a part of a new feature being developed. Hence, the relationship between feature and story must be flexible enough to accommodate and represent both the scenarios.

3. Supports Multiple Ways of Working

There are several ways of working that uphold the key principles of agile practices. From a team's perspective, ways of working are not perpetual commitments; they shouldn't be so. If they were, how would they improve and embrace better ways of working in the future?

Tools, especially in the work management space share a very interesting relationship with the ways of working. We see two common anti-patterns in practice:

• A team or an organization often selects tools that best (or if possible, completely) suit their current way of working. The tendency to overfit current practice makes them reluctant towards identifying improvement opportunities.
• After adopting a trendy "agile" tool they gravitate towards whatever they used to do in the absence of that tool. In the worst case reskinning is done for a set of sub-optimized processes with an "agile skin".
  Tools that support multiple variants of agile practices (like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe etc.), with out-of-the-box or minimal configurational changes, are ideal for teams in their long journey of achieving improved agility. Moreover, different groups of product teams following different methodologies is also relevant in a lot of scenarios. How the tool provides a cohesive environment for them is crucial with respect to the overall experience.

4. Offers Data-driven Insights

We learn from our experiences only when we reflect on them. Effective agile teams, periodically, reflect on how to become more efficient, and then tune their behavior accordingly. To facilitate this, your agile planning tool should be equipped with sufficient analytics functionalities that can keep the teams guided through different phases of their work. It need not be at par with business intelligence (BI) category. For instance, in Scrum, different scrum ceremonies can be fueled by appropriate data-driven insights that can enable better decision making. The data and its presentation should not only augment the decision making at crucial juncture of those ceremonies and events, but also facilitate the most common activities performed. For instance, during an Iteration Planning, while showing the backlog contents to the team, it is equally important to facilitate the movement of those items from team backlog to iteration backlog.

5. Facilitates Collaborative Nature

Collaboration is unarguably the heartbeat of any agile team. The agile manifesto rightly places the following value among all the four values discussed above:

we have come to value Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

One interesting point to note here is that - although tools play a vital role in collaboration, the aforementioned agile value emphasizes on the importance of individuals and their interactions with fellow team members. Therefore, you should never fall for tools that claim to have an alternative for human interaction or completely overrule its requirement.

So now, the next obvious question would be - how does any agile planning tool add value to the collaboration aspect? The answer is - through establishment of transparency. An agile tool needs to perform a complementary role. In any ecosystem there are dedicated tools like email, MS Teams, Google Chat, Slack, Zoom and many more for collaboration. Your tool is not expected to take over the role of these tools. Rather by handshaking with some of them it can augment the transparency on time.

An Artifact is refined through collaborative inputs. Although, discussions can be done in person or on the platforms, as mentioned earlier, a built-in discussion section can trigger the points and help summarize. That really helps in holding the context. Therefore, a tool that offers the contextual space for exchanging the trigger points, has an edge over the ones that don't have this capability in some form.

Additionally, notifications on team collaboration tools (instant message or email) play an important role in getting timely update on artifacts you care about.

The Current Scenario and Way Forward

It is often observed that tool features and their outputs start shaping slowly, which may lead to constrained ways of working. The consequences remain unnoticed for a long time, primarily because, many teams and organizations do not even know how to define and measure success or failure of their processes.

Leaders keep chasing their teams for outputs instead of outcomes. As teams deliver their work, they should reflect on raising the bar, every single time. They should attempt small positive change in their way of working and demonstrate the result to others. There are tools that claim to support well-known (but often not so well understood) ways of working out of the box. Very few - if not no one - understands what that exactly means. So be aware of that before getting swayed in by the claims often tools make in the market.

The ultimate goal should be to establish a continuous flow of value. Teams must focus on how they can continuously improve the flow of value they deliver to their customers and business. For example, certain desired ways of working may not be implementable immediately due to current maturity level of the team or the nature of work. That is perfectly fine until the periodic reflection is in place.

Finally, a word of caution - Agile coaches are servant leaders and hardly own any meaningful individual performance metric that they would want to optimize. Therefore, when it comes to an agile planning tool selection, an agile coach's priority is to help the team (not only execution but strategy team as well), achieve their goals rather than looking for tools that may help them in the agile coach role.