By Bryan Stallings, Chief Evangelist, Lucid Software
To keep up with today’s pace of technological innovation, leaders must develop their skills in navigating change and adjust their ways of working to move quicker than ever before.
Agile is a product-management methodology inspired by a group of software developers seeking an alternative to more limited linear approaches. An Agile mindset is a belief system that embraces adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement–core principles necessary for leaders to successfully facilitate transformation. It naturally aligns with Agile values, which guide how teams adapt to modern ways of working and navigate change. Whether or not you use formal Agile practices, leaders can draw inspiration from these values to foster a culture of flexibility, innovation, and growth.
Let’s take a look at a few of the Agile values and how leaders can help their teams align with these values through tangible tools and resources:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
This value emphasizes the importance of people and their relationships in driving innovation and problem-solving. The true power of agility lies in fostering strong, collaborative connections between team members, and leaders need to make sure their tools and processes aid in that goal.
To help get to the end goal quicker, teams can create dedicated virtual spaces within Lucid Software to organize their key resources such as charters, working agreements, and other critical artifacts. In those spaces, teams have a single, shared space to connect. A team space in Lucid creates a virtual room that replicates a lot of the benefits of the physical team rooms, bays, or war rooms they might have had before.
Fostering strong collaboration in meetings starts with effective meeting facilitation. Lucid offers customizable templates that help facilitators lead more collaborative daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. When beneficial, Lucid’s new private mode allows teams to submit their ideas and inputs anonymously, making meetings more inclusive where all voices can be heard and prioritized equally.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Agile prioritizes delivering functional solutions that provide immediate value over creating extensive planning documents. Leaders can foster this approach by encouraging iterative progress, focusing on what works, and using real-world feedback to guide continuous improvement.
To achieve this, Agile includes team members in the planning process to gain insights into their point of view on the work and how to tackle it. Lucid’s new estimation capabilities make this easy by facilitating interactive team estimation sessions where teams collaborate to determine the effort, complexity, and risks of their backlog items, ensuring all perspectives are considered to achieve alignment. When planning is a collaborative effort, teams can better determine priorities and focus their effort for the best results.
Another way teams can remain nimble and provide immediate value is through tools that streamline their planning processes. According to data by Smartsheet, over 40 percent of workers surveyed spend at least a quarter of their workweek on manual, repetitive tasks like data collection. But solutions like Lucid can reduce that effort. For example, Lucid’s two-way integration with Jira and Azure DevOps (ADO) enables seamless data synchronization between Lucid and teams’ systems of record. This integration eliminates the need for manual data entry before or after planning sessions, significantly speeding up the process and enhancing data accuracy while also removing the need for extensive documentation.
As teams work through their planning process, they can also organize and interact with their system of record through seamless integration in Lucid via Dynamic Tables. Teams can import backlog items directly into Lucid, displaying it in a customizable table format with tailored attributes derived from the imported cards. For example, during sprint planning, backlog items might begin as cards in an “Unassigned” column, and as team members select them, they can drag and drop the cards into columns or rows linked to their names. This action automatically updates the integrated task management system, like Jira, without requiring users to switch tools.
Responding to change over following a plan
Agility involves viewing plans as flexible guides and embracing change as an opportunity for improvement. This value promotes resilience and readiness to adjust course when needed to deliver the best outcomes.
To maximize results, leaders can incorporate tools that help them visualize how different teams are interconnected and where they rely on each other to move their work forward. For example, Lucid’s dynamic roadmapping features provide interactive visual timelines that help keep teams aligned with shifting priorities. With Lucid’s latest dependency mapping capabilities, teams can visualize and manage dependencies directly from Jira and ADO, ensuring that potential risks are not only identified but also mitigated early in the planning process. Dependency mapping helps teams avoid costly delays, keeping projects on track and aligned with key objectives.
Agile values, rooted in an Agile mindset, serve as a foundation for strong collaboration, allowing teams to work together toward common goals more seamlessly. By promoting continuous learning and alignment, teams can stay flexible and adapt to changes, enhancing both their products and their collaboration across departments. When teams embrace this agile approach, they gain the confidence to navigate collaboration and deliver value faster, shaping the future of work.
To learn more about putting Lucid Software to work for your teams, click here.
Bryan Stallings is the Chief Evangelist at Lucid Software, the leaders in visual collaboration. With 25-years of experience across manufacturing, financial services, IT, management consulting and SaaS, Bryan helps organizations see and build the future.
