_posts/2016-10-25-three-small-steps-you-can-take-to-reboot-agile-in-your-organization.md
---
title: "Three small steps you can take to reboot agile in your organization"
authors:
- christopher-goranson
- michael-torres
- kristy-singletary
tags:
- agile
- department of commerce
- national technical information service
- workshop
- agency work
excerpt: "This past summer, 18F held an agile workshop for the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. An agency with roots going back to World War II, NTIS is facing a future that requires a strategic realignment towards open data and services."
image: /assets/blog/agile-workshop/3-steps-team.jpg
---
This past summer, 18F held an agile workshop for the National Technical
Information Service (NTIS), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. An
agency with roots going back to World War II, NTIS is facing a future
that requires a strategic realignment towards open data and services.
This strategic alignment will also require that NTIS operate in a more
nimble, proactive fashion when working with partners in the public and
private sectors.
In order to support NTIS’ success in their new mission, it was important
to us to support the adoption of business practices that future partners
would expect. Our goal was to re-introduce agile techniques into
existing processes through small, rapid incremental changes. We believed
that even small changes could have a big impact on transparency,
accountability, and communication over the long term.
So, we worked with NTIS to host a workshop. Since many of the workshop
participants had taken a course or two on agile before, we knew we
weren’t introducing a new topic. We focused on learning what was working
and what wasn’t, and identified simple tasks we could use to exercise
our agile muscles. The workshop was the first step towards helping us
understand how and where to reboot agile processes within the
organization.
## Step one: Identify what’s already working, and what isn’t
In order to better understand what was working and what wasn’t, we asked
our workshop participants to vocalize their “hopes and fears.” It’s easy
to think of all the reasons a particular idea won’t work, but once we
documented them many of the “fears” were somewhat hypothetical and
abstract. We acknowledged those while focusing on items that were
actually causing issues in the business process. Where possible, we
tried to find a solution from people in the room that could remove or
modify an idea to make it more manageable. In the same way, participants
shared their hopes for ideas and overall outcome.
## Step two: Pick a few small, simple tasks to complete
Next, we asked participants to identify things that would make their
day-to-day operations work just a bit better. We focused on ideas that
were discrete and specific and encouraged participants to break
longer-term goals (improving and streamlining business processes) into
smaller tasks (develop an agenda template for team meetings). As
participants narrowed down on an idea, we asked them to specifically
identify who would benefit from the completion of the task and identify
the value of it. Once someone had developed their idea, they presented
it to the group. When common themes emerged (such as communications), we
grouped those ideas together.
As popular ideas surfaced, we formed teams to develop user stories and
acceptance criteria for common ideas. Acceptance criteria were framed as
being able to answer the question “how will I know when things are
done?” The acceptance criteria helped us understand when and how we
would know a task was complete, and evaluate the results.
Once we identified discrete tasks, we put them on separate cards on a
kanban board. A [kanban
board](https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/08/31/kanban-for-government/) is a
simple tool whereby tasks are organized, grouped, and tracked across a
segment of time, or sprints. As these tasks moved forward, we could use
the dedicated cards to monitor progress:
## Step three: Monitor your progress
Over the next few weeks, we integrated the tasks identified during the
workshop into our sprint process and monitored our progress. We also
experimented in how we worked together, stopping things that weren’t
working, and building on things that did.
The results, while imperfect, were encouraging. Tasks were being
completed across the self-organized teams; not always as quickly as we
had originally envisioned, but participants were seeing first-hand the
value of breaking larger tasks into smaller ones, self-assigning
responsibilities across teams, and enforcing a level of accountability
to report on progress. In essence, a few small agile tools and
techniques were helpful in removing confusion from processes and
shortening how long it took to complete a task.
Through the process, we learned that incremental improvement is still
improvement, and sometimes tools can be a distraction. We were reminded
that teams are often different, with varying levels of comfort for
tools; kanban board on a whiteboard can be just as effective as an
electronic version. Uncertainty and fear of new business processes will
always be there, but they can be mitigated if they make things easier,
and gradually introducing agile processes can encourage broader
adoption.
## What we learned
**Agile doesn’t have to be a “rip and replace” process**. Perhaps one of
the more challenging aspects of adopting agile techniques into existing
projects is the idea that doing so will increase uncertainty, add work,
delay progress, and confuse participants. The truth is that uncertainty
and fear are already there — agile is helping to root these issues out,
recognize their nature, and mitigate against them. Small, rapid
incremental fixes (like the introduction of a kanban board) may still
have a big impact on process and team productivity while introducing an
easier way to track them.
**Do what works**. If productivity on your team is increasing because
you’ve found a modified set of management tools that work well for you,
keep doing what you’re doing. It’s easy to get distracted with the type
of tools and forget about the process. As long as you have concurrence
and participation amongst your team and can address issues quickly, you
can continue to foster a productive environment.
**Listen to your team**. A core tenet of agile is the participatory
process, transparency, and accountability required in order to be able
to successfully deliver in small increments. A formal process and vision
from management will help remove inertia barriers, and those processes
that involve employees are more likely to address their needs. “False
starts” are a risk — building momentum in the right direction and
sticking to it is important, so buy-in before a formal process is put in
place may help to avoid conflicts requiring a lot of course correction
later.
Looking for more? Check out 18F’s [Agile Principles and
Practices](https://pages.18f.gov/agile/) guide, and see our [other
posts on agile](https://18f.gsa.gov/tags/agile/).