Our creative team used Agile to complete a project none of us knew how to do at the offset to create our own podcast and deliver four episodes in the course of three two-week sprints. How did we do it? This project management methodology taught me how to be a better team player.

What is Agile or Scrum?

For those who are unaware of this modern teamwork method, Agile is an approach to project management that leaves workers responsive and flexible to change throughout various phases of projects such as building software. It’s about creating an environment where team members choose activities to complete among the various tasks involved with deliverables and set their own deadlines to meet project due dates. The best advantages of Agile are deeper collaboration and sense of personal ownership over collective work. 

Push vs. Pull Management Style

Agile involves a “pull” management style. In other words, team members choose the work they are going to work on from a master list of deliverables and related tasks (see Kanban definition, below), and the manager’s job is to remove barriers blocking the team member’s success. Coming from a background in traditional “push” management, where work is delegated and assigned with strict due dates, it was difficult to wrap my head around this new form of leadership. In a sense, individuals self-delegate based on the time they have available and the skills they currently have or can acquire easily. So why is agile superior? As a driven individual who prefers autonomy over my work, I was able to take on a workload that matched my abilities and desired level of challenge rather than being delegated tasks that were more in line with what others envisioned for me. Overall, I had more fun, did work I felt more passionately about, was more productive, and grew quickly as a result of this “pull” or Agile management system. 

Getting Started

The key method to running a successful Agile campaign is to have a method of communication that is clear and transparent for all team members. Three critical assets helped our Podcast team achieve our objective, including the Kanban, daily standups, and post-task retrospective.

Kanban

 Kanban is a method to organize work-to-be-done to achieve the desired outcome. Teams can build a physical Kanban of Post-It notes on a wall, or can use a free too like Trello to build a digital Kanban board (see picture, below). Team members work together the build the Kanban, first creating separate items of deliverables and then separately listing out all individual tasks required to complete the deliverables. In its simplest form, the Kanban should be broken into five different columns, including “Deliverables,” (such as podcast Creative Brief, Episode 1 of the podcast, etc.), a “Backlog” or a list of all the tasks required to achieve each deliverable, “Work in Progress” or WIP, which are tasks team members are currently working on, “Pending” which are task are on hold or have a blocker of some sort, and “Done” which are all the completed tasks. Team members can add their initials to tasks they are currently working on and set due dates for completion so that others who may be waiting on the completion of that task to start another can plan accordingly. I must say, few things feel more productive than seeing the tasks in the “done” column stack up!

Daily Standups

Many teams have daily standups. The method is simple: mention something you completed the day before, something you are working on now/next, and finally mention any blockers you may have. The advantage of meeting 1-2 times a day it infuses the team with a greater sense of collaboration which helps people feel more included, productive, and supported by the group and the manager.

Post-Task Retrospectives

Retrospectives or “retros” lead to performance improvement and opens the floor for the group to share thoughts about what worked, what didn’t work, and what they and other team members do next time to improve. For example, after filming each episode of our podcast, the team met to first discuss what worked, such as the script or the process for onboarding a podcast guest. We then discussed what didn’t work, such as tech issues or pre-show jitters related to unpreparedness, and finally we discussed what we could do for the next episode to make it a better experience, such as making pre-production checklists to feel more prepared. This simple post-task standup gave us the chance to seriously reflect on our group performance, which connected the team, bringing us together and making and production more fun and engaging. We typically spent a good portion of the retro meeting laughing about silly things that happened during the task, which is a bonding experience we would have missed out on if it had not been for our post-task retros.

Agile Obstacles

When the concept was first introduced, I was unproductive because I was waiting for work to be assigned to me. The biggest change was introducing team role definition. Titles such as “producer”, “script writer”, “editor”, and “equipment manager” helped our team better identify which tasks on the Kanban fell under our umbrella, and encouraged collaboration because we were more easily able to see where tasks overlapped, showing where we needed to work together with people with other roles and skills to complete our tasks. Beware however that roles should be loosely assigned – if roles become too permanent and rigid, teams will not be as adaptable and flexible as they could be, resulting in individual growth stagnation, more blockers, attitudes and egos, and reduced team flexibility and productivity.  

In Conclusion

Why is Agile better than traditional management style? Simple. It keeps team members happier. When everyone has the room to grow and visually see their progress toward creating something bigger together, more work gets done with less drama, less effort, and less manager oversight. Could eight people learn to produce a podcast and release four episodes in a six week span without Agile? Possibly. But did we grow, have fun, and feel the pride of accomplishing more than we ever expected? Absolutely.