3 Steps to Maximize Your Team’s Productivity

Great news, your organization decided to embark on an Agile transformation journey and to adopt an Agile mindset. Everyone is excited to embrace modern ways of working, learning new methodologies and is looking forward to change. In the mist of the excitement, senior leadership asks how much is this going to cost and, more importantly, what will be our return on investment. There are well known methods to calculate ROI so we will not discuss them here. Instead, we will focus on maximizing ROI under the modern ways of working.

Return of Investment – Driven by Productivity

To maximize return on investment, modern ways of working rely on increasing productivity of the work that teams perform towards realizing a vision. Vision is defined by the organization and must be not only clear but also realistic and achievable. Achieving the vision should be challenging for the organization but should not be an impossible goal that will never be attained resulting in a demoralized work force. Vision provides the organization with direction, a North Star, a place where teams and their members are collectively heading to realize value for the organization. Increased productivity enables a faster realization of the vision and the value it brings to the organization and its customers. Vision should be customer centric, successful organizations are obsessed with providing customer value.

The team, the mode and the tools – The keys to success

Team morale, transparency and the right tools are direct positive contributors to productivity. A trusted, empowered and well-trained team guided by a sense of empathy, respect and humility is an invaluable productivity promoter for the organization. Invest on training the team in a common methodology and process. Listen to the team and learn from their experience. Continuously improve the process based on feedback from those who get the work done. Study what worked so it can be repeated throughout the organization and pay attention to what did not work well so the practice can be avoided or eliminated going forward.

Transparency – The only way to thrive

Transparency makes productivity visible to the organization highlighting achievements and exposing challenges while enabling predictability. Transparency enables good communication keeping all stakeholders informed in order to promote good decision making based on the latest data. Tooling allows the empowered, knowledgeable team member to reach their full potential. Tooling also enables transparency throughout the organization in the forms of a single source of truth, developing and collaboration tools and large information radiators.

A final recap

In summary, set a clear vision, empower knowledgeable workers, and provide the tooling they need to succeed. Productivity gains will follow.