Without an agile workflow, you might find yourself struggling with a cumbersome workflow or process. Implementing one can improve customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance.
But, this is easier said than done. Creating agile workflows requires careful planning and execution and the right software to efficiently manage tasks, track progress, and facilitate effective communication.
In this article, I’ll explain what makes a workflow agile and give you a step-by-step guide for how to create one.
What Is An Agile Workflow?
An agile workflow is a way of working that emphasizes flexibility, continuous improvement, and adaptability.
It allows teams to respond quickly to changing requirements and delivers customer value in shorter cycles. By breaking down work into smaller, manageable pieces called sprints, agile workflows promote transparency, collaboration, and accountability.
Agile workflows involve an iterative process that differs from traditional working methods like the waterfall methodology. In agile, teams revisit and reprioritize remaining work to be completed at the end of each sprint based on customer feedback. This increases flexibility, speeds up delivery, and allows for more frequent feedback.
Traditional project management workflows are more cumbersome and require formal change requests to modify timeframes and reprioritize task completion, which can compromise delivery.
The Agile Workflow Lifecycle
The agile workflow lifecycle involves these six key phases. Here's a brief overview of each.
- Ideation: In this first phase, conceptualize project details to clarify the work to be done, estimated resources, timelines, quality considerations, expected outcomes, deliverables, and assumptions.
- Inception: Update, finalize, and document project information. Assign and fund the work to be done.
- Iteration: This is the longest phase and where most of the work happens. Teams use a customer feedback loop to revisit and reprioritize the remaining work and complete the expected deliverables.
- Release: In this phase, conduct quality assurance and complete documentation and training for end users before the customer receives deliverables.
- Production: After the customer receives final deliverables, this maintenance and support phase ensures consensus around next steps and adherence to quality standards.
- Retirement: In this phase, a product may no longer be useful or supported, requiring it to be retired or replaced.
How To Create An Agile Workflow
Creating an agile workflow requires careful planning and execution. This step-by-step guide to create workflows is designed to empower your team and fuel productivity.
1. Define Goals & Gain Buy-in
As with most projects, agile workflow creation starts with clearly defining goals, objectives, and deliverables to ensure you gain the buy-in needed for your workflow to succeed.
The project manager needs to understand the business requirements of that workflow and the desired outcomes (i.e. what is expected to happen after you implement the workflow?)
Once you have consensus across team members, communicate the proposed workflow to the entire group of affected stakeholders. Ensure that stakeholders understand next steps for the workflow and gain their support for implementation so you can align the team to execute.
2. Establish a Method For Prioritizing The Backlog
You’ll need a system for creating a prioritized backlog that lists the tasks and/or user stories to be completed during a project.
Here’s a sample approach that spans the project management life cycle:
- Project planning: Populate the backlog with the initial scope identified in the project charter
- Project execution: Continuously update the backlog with tasks and user stories as the team iterates on feature development. This includes tasks that may be out of scope for this particular effort.
- Example: the team decides it would be fun to include a personality-based assessment as part of app development. It’s not part of the original scope, but it could be something interesting to consider for follow-on work and/or if the team has additional time to spare. Add this idea to the backlog so you don’t lose it!
- Project monitoring/controlling: Hold periodic backlog grooming sessions (e.g., once a month if you follow a two-week sprint cycle) to prioritize items for development. During sprint planning sessions, identify which tasks you’ll include in the upcoming sprint based on that prioritization.
Add tasks and/or user stories to the backlog based on the value provided, prioritizing the most critical and high-value items. Collaborate with stakeholders, product owners, and team members to inform backlog development.
3. Set Up A Sprint Planning Cadence
Decide on the sprint cadence that is appropriate for your project. Two-week sprints are most common in software development, but sprints can also range from one to four weeks depending on the industry and the pace of your project.
Once you’ve established your sprint cadence, schedule a sprint planning meeting a day or two prior to the start of each sprint. The goal of sprint planning is to decide what work can be reasonably delivered in the sprint based on upcoming priorities, roadmap progress, projected velocity, and, most importantly, the sprint goal.
As you gain experience working with the team, you’ll get better at estimating team velocity. This will enable you to set reasonable limits on work in progress and accurately forecast planned work.
4. Assign Cross-Functional Team Roles
Form cross-functional teams with the necessary skills and expertise to deliver upon their role within the workflow. Project teams should be self-organizing and clearly understand their roles and responsibilities.
5. Hold Regular Meetings
Conduct regular meetings to get feedback on the workflow, keep everyone aligned, and drive continuous improvement. Daily stand-up meetings allow team members to provide updates, discuss any challenges, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Sprint review meetings and sprint retrospective meetings allow the team to gather feedback, evaluate their performance, and identify areas for improvement.
6. Create a System for Product Releases
Document how you intend to handle releases. At minimum, the product release process documentation should include:
- a list of cross-functional stakeholders with contact information (including backups for when folks are out of office) and their roles and responsibilities
- a step-by-step checklist for what activities to perform as part of the release process, including testing protocol and what constitutes approval for a release
- a communication protocol to ensure stakeholders that do not directly participate in the process are kept informed
- a risk management plan, including strategies for addressing risks that may be realized
7. Use Agile Tools and Software
Agile tools and software are crucial for managing team workflows and tasks, tracking progress, and facilitating effective communication.
Numerous tools, such as enterprise project management software, simpler task boards, and collaboration or workflow management platforms, are available to streamline workflows and enhance team collaboration (this is especially important for creative workflows).
8. Embrace Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement requires regularly evaluating the team's workflow and performance, identifying areas for improvement, and incorporating feedback into future sprints.
It also means encouraging team members to share their ideas, experiment with new approaches, and embrace change as a catalyst for growth. This is how you build a culture of continuous improvement.
Key Team Roles in an Agile Workflow
Agile workflows involve specific roles that contribute to the success of the project. Let’s explore some of the key roles in an agile team.
- Product owner: Responsible for defining and prioritizing the product backlog, which is the list of features, enhancements, and bug fixes. They work closely with stakeholders and users to gather requirements, clarify expectations, and ensure that the product meets customer needs. They act as the voice of the customer and are responsible for maximizing the value delivered by the team.
- Scrum master: Team facilitator and servant leader. They ensure that the team follows the Scrum framework, remove any obstacles that hinder progress, and protect the team from external distractions. The Scrum master also facilitates sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives and promotes a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration within the team.
- Agile development team: Individuals that carry out the work. They are responsible for self-organizing and collaborating to complete the tasks that were committed to during sprint planning. Development team members may have different specialties or areas of expertise, but they share the responsibility of delivering a high-quality product at the end of each sprint.
- Other roles: Other people involved in agile workflows might include testers, designers, developers, end users, and other internal or external stakeholders, such as customer support, legal, compliance, or even executives or board members.
Types of Agile Workflows
Agile methodologies are versatile and can be tailored to suit different team- and project-specific needs and requirements. Across multiple variations, agile frameworks share the common principles of adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Scrum: Scrum is one of the most widely used agile frameworks, particularly in software development, and clearly defines roles, ceremonies, and artifacts. Work is performed during time-boxed iterations called sprints, which usually last 1-4 weeks. Each sprint begins with a planning session where the team selects what to work on. Daily stand-up Scrum meetings, reviews, and retrospectives are held at various points during the sprint.
- Kanban: Kanban is a visual agile method that promotes a continuous flow of work. It uses a Kanban board to visualize tasks and their progress across different stages, typically represented by columns. The workflow limits work in progress (WIP) to prevent bottlenecks and maintain flow. As tasks are completed, new ones are pulled from the backlog.
- Lean: Inspired by lean manufacturing principles, lean focuses on minimizing waste and maximizing value. It emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement and eliminating non-value-adding activities. Lean agile workflows often incorporate practices that involve identifying areas of inefficiency or waste in your workflow.
- Feature-driven development (FDD): FDD focuses on formulating advanced features and scope. It’s a customer-focused, incremental method aimed at delivering frequent, tangible outcomes. With FDD, teams can quickly isolate errors and make adjustments while avoiding or minimizing delays.
- Extreme programming (EX): EX relies on customer feedback as the primary input for making technical software changes. The goal of EX is high-quality deliverables, as determined by customer satisfaction with those deliverables.
- Crystal: Crystal focuses on the individuals and interactions component of the agile manifesto to let self-organizing teams figure out how to optimize their workflows based on unique project needs.
Benefits of Agile Workflows
- Increased flexibility and adaptability: Traditional project management methods often struggle to accommodate unexpected changes, leading to delays and frustrations. Conversely, agile embraces change and encourages teams to reassess priorities and regularly adapt their approach.
- Higher value deliverables and shorter cycles: Agile project management allows teams to release working software or products incrementally instead of waiting for months to see tangible results. This helps gather early feedback from customers and enables teams to make course corrections along the way, ensuring that the end product meets the desired outcomes.
- Improved team collaboration and transparency: By breaking down work into sprints, team members have better visibility into each other’s tasks and progress. Daily stand-up meetings, where team members share their accomplishments, plans, and any roadblocks, foster open communication and enable quick problem-solving to identify bottlenecks.
- Increased customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational performance: Testing and customer feedback are built into project execution, which helps sprint teams learn as they go through each iteration, improving employee engagement and operational performance. It also elevates the quality of the final deliverables and customer satisfaction with those deliverables.
- High levels of predictability: The agile approach increases visibility throughout each cycle. When teams can get a clearer roadmap earlier in the process, it makes it easier to minimize risks, meet specifications, and deliver on time.
Tips For Creating Agile Workflows
Effectively implementing agile workflows requires careful planning and execution. Here are some practical tips to help you create successful agile workflows:
- Define clear goals and objectives: Before diving into agile, clearly define your goals and objectives. Identify the problem you are trying to solve, the desired outcomes, and the metrics you will use to measure success. This clarity will guide your agile implementation and ensure that your workflows align with your objectives.
- Involve stakeholders and users: Agile workflows thrive on regular feedback and collaboration with stakeholders and users. Involve them in the process right from the beginning and throughout the project. By incorporating their perspectives and requirements, you can ensure that your workflows prioritize customer value and address their needs effectively.
- Start small and iterate: When implementing agile workflows, start with a small pilot project or team. This way, you can learn and adapt without having to involve the entire organization in the messiness that occurs at the beginning of this process. Gather feedback, identify areas for improvement, and iterate on your workflows based on the lessons learned. This iterative approach will help you refine your development processes and streamline your workflows on a regular basis.
- Invest in training and support: Shifting to agile workflows involves a mindset shift and potentially new skills and knowledge. Invest in training and support for your team members to ensure they understand agile principles and practices. Coach and mentor your team members to embrace the agile mindset and apply it effectively in their work.
- Embrace collaboration and communication tools: Agile workflows rely heavily on collaboration and communication. Invest in workflow management tools that facilitate effective collaboration, such as project management software, chat platforms, and video conferencing tools. These tools will enable your team to stay connected, share progress, and collaborate seamlessly, regardless of their location.
- Continuously Evaluate and Adapt: Agile is about continuous improvement. Regularly evaluate your workflows, gather feedback from your team, and adapt workflows, as needed, based on the insights gained. Embracing a culture of learning and experimentation helps you optimize your agile workflows for maximum productivity and success.
By embracing the principles of flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement, combined with robust workflow automation, agile empowers teams to adapt quickly, deliver high-quality results, and exceed customer expectations.
Join For More Project Workflow Insights
Want to connect with other digital project managers to share resources and best practices? Join our membership community and get access to 100+ templates, samples, and examples and connect with 100s of other digital project managers in Slack.