How do you deal with leadership? Is that something of topmanagement alone? How do you develop effective teams? What are the pitfalls and how do you prevent them? How to ‘Scrum’? How do you handle a transformation towards agile working?Agile is not a hype but inescapable in a rapidly changing world, especially where technology is concerned. We do not live in an ‘era of change’ but in a ‘change of era’. That means a different way of working and organizing. Agile is the way to go. How?In the almost 25 years that I have been working as a consultant, I have seen a lot of development of methods and techniques. But never one as disruptive as agile working. In my daily work as an Agile Coach I see what it means to experience this transformation as a team and / or organization. But also how difficult it can be. Many people ask for Best Practices. But Best Practices depend on the context: what works in one organization may not work in the other. I believe in Good practices though. A framework like Scrum is one of these Good Practices. And the context-related added methods that have proven to work well in that context provide the Best Practices in that specific context. Anyway, today is a good day to start working agile. Or, as an African proverb says:

The best moment to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The second-best moment is now.

Below is a Good Practice to work agile in your organization. Take the following as inspiration only and adjust it for your context.

1. Decide that you want to experiment with agile work with a team or project and that you want to learn (and be willing to adjust, accept consequences). In short, that it is worth trying to improve.

2. Do a one-day training (for example Scrum) and then get started (‘learning by doing’).

3. Stick the 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto to the walls where you work. Put above it: we have agreed to apply these principles.

4. Determine with the participants how you work out each of the principles in your context. Also stick those workouts to the wall with the principles.

5. Start your work on the basis of the new, agile way of working (based on what you have learned in the training you have followed).

6. Do ‘inspect and adapt’ where necessary.

7. Determine what the new way of working delivers (metrics) in what is relevant in your context. That could be more valuable software per invested euro, more employee engagement, reduction of absenteeism, increase of innovations, etc.

8. Roll out the new way of working to more projects, teams, departments, organizational units. That’s it.

Just start!