How to bring agile ways of working to your team

This article is written by Sam Roberts Head of Open Government at the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The values of transparency, accountability, and participation are core to the concept of Open Government. These ideas — that we should be open about our work, proactively invite views and opinion and ensure that wherever possible the evidence behind decisions is made available — also underpin our work as public servants.

A commitment to openness and transparency can manifest in a number of ways, from publishing data in open formats to holding formal and informal public consultations to canvas opinion and views. But what about our actual ways of working? How do we ensure that we are embodying these concepts every day in the way we go about our tasks?

Using agile outside the tech-bubble

Inspired by the tech sector, digital delivery teams have long experimented with agile design and development approaches, using methodologies to engage their staff in transparent and collaborative delivery, enabling rapid concept generation, role definition, objective setting, and manageable workflows.

Agile is a deeply practical approach that can only work when colleagues are supportive and aligned with principles of transparency and accountability, willing to share their progress, and learn from failures

While these approaches have been proven to work in digital environments, there are many aspects which can be used in the development of policy. Furthermore, agile approaches can themselves embody the principles of open government by making the amount of “work in progress” visible (transparency), making expected team behaviours explicit and building structures to enable oversight (accountability), and making workflow visible so that all team members are involved (collaboration).

While recognising that not all agile approaches are appropriate for all teams, and that there are a huge variety of different policy products and team cultures, there are ideas within Scrum and Kanban that will often result in visible benefits which help staff navigate complex, sometimes difficult projects and situations.

Public servant use cases

Agile is a term used often to describe a wide variety of situations and working styles. In my view, agile working is a deeply practical approach that can only work when colleagues are supportive and aligned with principles of transparency and accountability, willing to share their progress, and learn from failures.

It’s possible to bring together Kanban and Scrum in ways that work for particular teams and particular workstreams. Two examples:

Scrum for cross-cutting projects

To effectively deliver work that cuts across multiple departments and agencies it’s important to divide tasks, engage strategically, and develop proposals and overarching narratives into a coherent package.

Scrum is an agile approach which involves fortnightly planning meetings to prioritise units of work from a larger backlog of tasks to be completed in a timeboxed period. At the end of this timeboxed period (often two weeks) a retrospective session is held to review progress and draw lessons from the successes/failures of the timeboxed phase (aka the “sprint”).

Developing the UK’s fourth OGP National Action Plan in 2018/19 involved three elements:

• Stakeholder engagement
• Content Development
• Consolidation

To achieve each it was important to use an agile structure that could be quickly readjusted to account for shifts in the landscape, and account for variable stakeholder availability. Through regular check-ins and visualising the work in an accessible manner, it was possible to quickly understand the current state of delivery, and also flag where issues were emerging, preventing things reaching a final state of completion.

The approach allowed for a quicker turnaround of the constituent parts of the National Action Plan and enabled the team to check discrete sections with government and Civil Society counterparts in a reactive and expedient manner. By developing the separate components individually it was possible for a team of four to deliver a final product much more quickly than had been in the case in previous iterations, focusing on the constituent parts and bringing together into a final, consolidated document, rather than working as though it were a single longform piece.

Kanban for urgent reprioritisation

Officials can sometimes be required to respond to unforeseen situations. In a traditional policy team this can have a significant impact on productivity, as significant parts of the team are pulled away from core work, leaving those left to reprioritise or pause critical work.

Kanban is a way of working that was first implemented in factories as a way of tracking the supply of components in manufacturing to ensure swift and timely replenishments. In an office context the same approach can apply, and the modern implementation of Kanban is all about having a visual reference that easily relays the priority, interdependence, and responsible owner of work in train. Kanban is also a great way to open up a team, making each other aware of responsibilities and tasks through the visualised workflow.

In rapid response situations, this helps with reprioritising and shifting capacity at short notice. Officials working in isolation will often decide autonomously what is and isn’t urgent, but by using Kanban staff are able to take decisions collectively, to protect against the risk of high priority work being forgotten.

The core principle of being open and clear about priorities and workflow are still applicable to a policy context

In a Kanban system, activities can also be divided so that responsibility falls on the team, rather than individuals. In this scenario, officials can break down work into manageable tasks then task those with capacity. Using the technology we have access to allows this to happen remotely, so even when teams are physically distant they can still see priority work and allocate resources appropriately. This approach also means that officials with capacity can be brought into the process, freeing up those working to looming deadlines for high profile deliverables.

Don’t believe the nay-sayers

Within any team, the delivery of objectives and the principles of transparency and accountability are the responsibility of the wider team.

This is crucial to any project management function, as it falls to everyone to contribute towards mutually agreed objectives. As it is the responsibility of the project manager or Scrum master to record progress and hold the various ceremonies to sign off and set workstreams, it is incumbent upon the wider team to actively participate in these and to ensure their work and prioritisation is understood by colleagues. By being clear about actions and owners, and presenting this in a way that is easily understood by colleagues across the team and wider department, the resilience and prioritisation of work is significantly improved.

Transparent ways of working are applicable to any task, regardless of nature. I often hear that agile doesn’t work in a policy context, and that the dynamic nature of policy development means that applying frameworks, ceremonies, retrospectives and fortnightly plans are redundant and inappropriate. While this may be true in some cases, the core principle of being open and clear about priorities and workflow are still applicable, in order to reduce duplication and create a shared sense of ownership and responsibility across the team.

We are often guilty of discussing concepts such as transparency, accountability, and participation exclusively in the abstract, but by adopting practices that have these values ingrained it becomes clear that they apply as equally to everyday working as to high-level policy development. As public servants we should strive to be as open and clear in everything we do, by truly living these principles, we make our workplaces inclusive, our colleagues more informed, and the quality of our work demonstrably better.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)