Delivering non project work in an agile way
Agile principles can help your team to deliver everyday work too.
Agile ways of working enable organisations to be more nimble, deliver more value, be more attractive to talent, drive better outcomes and deliver improvements more quickly.
Agile principles are often applied to delivering projects. The principles of being more iterative, empirical and value focused can add huge value to teams’ ‘business as usual’ work too.
We have found the agile principles to be just as helpful in supporting teams to deliver their everyday, business-as-usual work in a more collaborative, sustainable and innovative way.
Here are two examples of teams who now deliver their everyday work in an agile way.
Communications Team
We supported Amnesty International UK’s Communication Team to embed agile ways of working across their varied BAU work. They achieved “more moments of celebration in 5 months than the previous 3 years”.
- The team now spend more of their time delivering high impact work.
- The whole team are now using their time more effectively, especially reduced time spent in unnecessary meetings.
- Siloes have been broken down.
- The team understands what each other are working on so are collaborating and sharing knowledge more efficiently.
Human Rights Education Team
The Human Rights Education team at Amnesty International UK were high-performing but managing a large and complex workload. Working in silos and feeling disconnected from their strategy, their productivity was affected and they were feeling isolated and overwhelmed. We coached them to:
- Start working in 4-week agile ‘sprints’ with collaborative objective setting and task planning.
- Run regular team reflection sessions to collaboratively identify how they could work better together.
They now:
- Uncover creative ways to deliver the same impact with less work (e.g. coaching teachers to deliver training instead of delivering it themselves).
- Feel shared ownership of the team’s strategic priorities, culture, and ways of working.
- Prioritise more effectively and uncover more opportunities to collaborate.
