Create an open and safe environment by encouraging conversation and experimentation, in order to surface problems and impediments that are slowing the team down or preventing its ability to deliver value.

The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) certification validates a practitioner’s ability to understand and apply agile principles and practices, making it one of the most coveted credentials in the agile industry. One of the key principles of Agile is the promotion of an open and safe environment that encourages conversation and experimentation. This approach is critical in surfacing problems and impediments that slow down or impede the team’s ability to deliver value.

Principle of Encouraging Conversation and Experimentation

In order to create a productive agile environment, it is crucial to promote open dialogue and allow for experimentation. When team members feel safe to communicate their ideas and concerns openly, it fosters better collaboration, trust, and problem-solving.

Encourage Conversation

Agile practices emphasize the importance of frequent and open communication. Face-to-face conversations are the most effective and efficient method of conveying information, as they enable the real-time exchange of ideas and immediate clarification of any misunderstandings.

Tips for promoting open conversation within an agile team can be:

• Daily Stand-ups: Encourage team members to share what they did, what they plan to do, and what blockers they are facing. This helps to create a collaborative environment where everyone is aware of the progress and problems.
• Retrospectives: Regular retrospectives create a platform where teams can reflect on their performance, discuss what worked well, what didn’t, and how they can improve.
• Open-floor policy: Encourage team members to discuss any challenges or ideas without fear of judgment or retribution.

Encourage Experimentation

Experimentation is a fundamental principle of agile that encourages continuous learning and improvement. Embracing a ‘fail-fast’ mentality enables teams to innovate, improve processes, and deliver greater value.

Some ways of encouraging experimentation are:

• Celebrating failures: Create an environment where failures aren’t shamed but are seen as learning opportunities.
• Small incremental changes: Encourage the team to make small, incremental changes to processes and workflows to see what effects they have.
• Support risk-taking: Encourage risk-taking within the team by providing support and guidance. As experiments may fail, teams should feel that it’s safe for novel ideas without fear of failure.

Surfacing Problems and Impediments

In the agile framework, ‘transparency’ is an essential foundational pillar. By promoting a culture where team members are comfortable raising issues and discussing less-than-perfect results, challenges, and blockers can become opportunities for process improvement and teamwork.

• Visibility of work: Use visual management tools like Kanban boards or burn-down charts to make work, progress, and impediments visible.
• Regular status updates: Daily scrums or stand-up meetings can bring visibility to the issues faced by team members.
• Impediment backlog: An issue or impediment backlog keeps track of all known issues and their statuses in a single place.
• Retrospective meetings: These provide an opportunity to identify problems, discuss them and develop a plan to resolve them.

Conclusion

Embracing conversation and experimentation in a safe, supportive environment is vital for running agile teams at their highest potential. Not only does it empower individuals and teams, but it also promotes continuous learning and improvement. It surfaces problems and impediments, enabling teams to address them promptly and prevent them from hampering their ability to deliver value. As one studies for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) exam, it’s key to understand and embody these principles in real-world application.