Staying aside from traditional management, being progressive requires flexible hours approach. Agile HR methodology is a new modern trend of performance that most of the companies are trying to apply but still fail. Here we provide a how it works article on agile setup for your company.
Where it came from?
Whether you wonder what the origin of agile methodology is, be ready that you fail to catch the trends of modern technology revolution. The rapid growth provided the increase in competition on the market, demanding companies apply unrestrained projects as to stay ahead from the other players.
Dipping one toe in, management describes agile methodology as something flexible to meet the time and quality requirements of the customers. Still requirements are rapidly changing over time, thus, agile is about not only time ranks, but also approach and decision-making.
Thus, project managers and product owners appeared as fresh and new job descriptions. Professional view of these two experts result in agile project management and product development, hitting key milestones while showing accurate project status and deliver points.
By having greater visibility and continuous feedback, agile PMOs can react very quickly to change and bottlenecks in the development process, delivering better software, faster.
Overall, agile methodology appeared for modern software development, but our view now is to show why you should care about it.
What is agile project management?
Daily stand ups is Agile. Before you can say that your team is agile, it is important to have a good understanding and leadership feeling the environment behind your people.
Agile project management is a value-driven approach that allows project managers to deliver high-priority and high-quality work and look like the rock stars to their stakeholders. Lean and flat organizational design approach with a hate for bureaucracy, plodding and costly error-phone decision making to avoid inconsistency in results.
When customers are expected to finalize requirements before they can test-drive the prototypes, overheads and long delays are cripple for the project. Agile project management should work as a strip layer between the team, community and stakeholders, providing communication between these parties.
Agile project management reduces complexity by breaking down the many-months-long cycle of building requirements for the whole project, designing the entire product and then testing to find the flaws. Instead, product becomes more flexible and soft, specified and developed for manageable changes to satisfy the market and customer demand.
Traditionally, project manager burdens himself with balancing project scope, cost, quality, personnel, reporting, risk and adapting as requirements change. Agile methodology divides these overwhelming responsibilities among three core roles:
- The Product Owner handles setting project goals, tradeoff of schedule versus scope and priorities for product features.
- The Scrum Master guides the team to prioritize tasks and removes impediments to avoid risks. Scrum Master also divides tasks into sprints and is responsible for completion after testing.
- The Team Members directly handle most of the task assignment, daily detail management, progress reporting and quality control for the product. Agile team setup describes three core roles except ten or twenty of bureaucracy approach, showing higher speed of task completion and product development, which is core to meet market competition requirements.
Why should you care?
If you have already started implementing agile with your team and it seems complicated, you may be mission one major component: inspect and adapt.
Agile starts with solving problems by providing simple opportunities in development and task completion, it should never be complicated. As a project manager, you should be able first to inspect problem points with communication and understanding task requirements in your team. Delivery process results in team improvement, which is core because your human is your main asset.
Stakeholders demand your personal value for the project, product and company overall and agile is what you actually need.
Agile project management continuously evaluates time and cost as primary constraints. Rapid feedback, continuous adaptation and QA best practices are built on the agile methodology basis. Shorter schedules, top-quality output and proven processes result in increased revenue and customer satisfaction, which is real-time agile delivered metrics.
Agile scale across projects
The mistake some companies make while applying agile methodology is that project managers limit agile scaling by only software projects setup.
Agile methodology works best for software and encounters only this product development field. However, the philosophy behind it describes easing development processes by flat organizational design and flexible hours by dividing responsibilities among team members. So, why not to apply it for any project type?
Agile methodology is applicable for any project, where HRM takes human resource allocation as a project manager.
If you are ready to encounter this, you know that new methodology is not easy to apply. One of the critical job function of a project manager is to meet the project objectives while creating a consistent formula of task deliver; the same applies to strategic HR management.
Scrum tools make any production easy and with best ROI processes, repeatable for multiple teams and projects as the modern approach for organizational structure design. Different physical locations of team members even do not damage the whole process – project management by location is agile too, managing all requirements, requests, tasks, tests and defects into a real-time scale project dashboard online.
This provides management streamline cross-team collaboration much easier, eliminating waste and giving executives numbers they need. Exactly WHEN they need them.
Agile model of HR
Agile model of HR states that human resources’ working responsibilities is not just to implement controls, standards and drive execution, but rather to facilitate and improve organizational agility. Human resources being agile provide value driven approach for tasks, projects, and are ready to implement rapid changes in quality assure.
Driving agility to your people in the company demands adaptability, innovation, collaboration and speed. Efficient growth starts with several agile HR strategies from enhanced and responsible management:
- Training leaders at all levels of the company to act as hands-on coaches, not ‘managers’
- Designing the organization into small, high-performance teams with centralized and flat communication
- Creating customer interaction within all groups and functions in the company
- Delivering a strong, focused mission and values to keep everyone aligned
- Creating systems with transparency of information as a knowledge base for onboarding block chains
- Implementing systems of engagement rather than systems of record
- Building focus on learning culture at all levels
- Implementing a strong external employer brand that attracts appropriate workforce, or even crowdsourcing
- Hiring and promoting progressive experts on market trends
- Creating programs for peer-to-peer rewards and recognition
- Developing programs to foster diversity in teams
- Creating strong and emotional corporate culture that encourages workforce to communicate with the brand
Agile model of HR starts with modern trends as being innovative and progressive to increase efficiency of own strategies. Agile methodology as a psychological basis in the company drives task-oriented approach and helps to deliver values and project details. Engaged people by strong internal and external employer brand supplies retain management and this is just about agile model of HR.
The rise of agile HR over traditional HR
Josh Bersin firstly introduced agile HR as above strategies at annual HR conference of Deloitte, 2012. Specifically focused on how HR should contribute to market changes towards building an agile workplace. Bersin believes that HR is one of the most prior business functions to contribute towards agile design.
Agile Alliance states that agile HR is the ability to create and respond to change in order to succeed in an uncertain and turbulent environment. These capabilities are highly prioritized by organizations and are more and more frequently used nowadays to scale the landscape of competition in global markets.
Agile HR differs from traditional HR by the following prospects:
- Remedial approach to learning versus continuous learning environment. Market trends in VUCA vortex demand employees face opportunities to learn and stretch themselves independently of specific job-related goals. Employee under performs need some fresh knowledge for self-development.
- Recruiting mindset versus continuous talent acquisition. Agile HR organizations invest in own employer branding to retain talents and cultivate ongoing relationships with employees across multiple channels. Traditional HR waste more time and money resources over recruiting mindset without any onboarding and with some effort for brain drain.
- Opaque talent processes versus transparent access to talent information. Agile HR does not own talent management as traditional, but is more capable of employee empower and encourage them for their own development. Employees in agile HR culture organizational culture understand and are active participants in talent acquisition, evaluation and development processes.
- Limited objectives versus unified mission and values. In traditional HR, job requirements are related to specific workplace tasks. Agile HR describes flexible job opportunities and provides clear emotional support for employees to control their on-the-job performance, connecting them with the elements of the organizational culture.
- Implementing systems versus piloting small initiatives. Small-scale initiatives nowadays work best within specific team, job family or business unit. Large-scale systems demand careful research, many resources and deploy over the course of many months. Agile HR provides rapid changes towards organizational design and task deliver, decreasing investments on application.
Agile HR seems to be more productive over traditional approaches. Agile project management is applicable for software development, where in analogy agile HR is applicable to other projects in the company.
Leading agile drivers versus challenges
Responsibilities of HR manager for you in the company is to drive your human resources on a substantial yet flexible to changes workflow performance. Agile patterns as Scrum or Kanban forms are intuitive and easy to implement for overall projects. Possibly, you could face several challenges while applying agile technology to non-it teams.
Individual running with primitive project managers leads to destructive results within teams and failing projects. Value-driven approach and overall performance appraisals cure this challenge, but HR agile is core to meet promises and show numbers.
Agile coaching is something more challenging due to language gaps in lack of agile terminology acquisition – people are scared of words as Kanban, Scrum, sprints and other techniques. Instead, try to be creative and show agile techniques to your workforce and a unique visual management system – draw patterns and canvas of goals, product direction, problems and overflow. Agile is firstly about collaboration and engagements without complex language of progressive HR management.
This transparent visual management applies cards to show everyone what you are working on. Configuration of visual management could be adopted by even more modern and progressive trend – simple and limited online task management. Addressed impediments with team specialization also require project thread dipping, where project division into tasks is dependent by subject features.
HR agile results
Respected scrum researchers on HR subjects provided focus on results that organizations face while applying agile HR in task management. Methodology of value-driven scrum have shown an improvement in turnover rates decrease, workforce effort and engagement increase. Stated below factors show the impact of agile on employee retention and task management:
- Confidence in the organization and leadership
- Room for growth
- Fair exchange
- Environment for success
- Authority and influence
HR agile is a facilitation of progressive changes for the company, which results in flexible environment for product development, market changes, customer development and efficient project management.
Applying agile HR needs more technology for time economy. Considering Workly for time and attendance would save about one hour per day, solving routine paperwork problems of workforce control.