What Colors are on your Agile Career Palette?

For those that advocate for Agile within their organization or help organizations adopt Agile, often times your career path is opportunistic based on what opportunities appear before you. This helps the Agile advocate at one level gain experience but can prevent the more methodical thinking of where you want your career to go.  At some point, isn’t it good to be in the driver’s seat of your own growth? 

For example, if the Agile advocate (e.g., Agile Coach) only has team level coaching opportunities, they will never gain the experience and skills needed to coach at a management or organization level.  If the Agile advocate only has Scrum based opportunities, they will not gain the experience of working with Kanban, Lean Development, or scaled frameworks.  Instead a methodical aspect to their career must be incorporated.  This is where the Agile Career Palette can be useful.  

The Agile Career Palette provides a colorful approach to better understand what Agile capabilities and experience an Agile advocate currently has and then provides an incremental approach to explore, learn, experience opportunities in the future based on gaps and interest. An Agile Career Palette provides the Agile advocate with what is artistically known as the colors they bring to their work.

These colors represent several key facets (IMHO) of what it means to be an Agile advocate of any type.  The key facets include the agile experience acquired, levels coached, agile roles played, fields where you apply agile, agile processes implemented, business and technical practices applied, agile training delivered, agile change management and soft skills applied, agile certifications acquired, and giving back to the agile community in the form of articles and seminars.  While there may be other areas of focus, I have found that these tend to cover most of the important Agile areas. 

Those who benefit most from the Agile Coaching Palette are the Agile advocates who play a role as Agile Coach, Agile Champion, Agile Sponsor, Team level advocates (e.g., ScrumMasters, Product Owner, etc), and Agile leaders of any kind who are looking to advance in their Agile journey. The Palette approach reminds those on their agile journey of the many areas they may desire to experience, learn, and play along the way.

Based on real experience, the Agile Career Palette is a methodical and incremental approach in helping you consider what you may want to do next, depending on where you’ve been and more importantly where you would like to go.  The “where you would like to go” is meant to be applied in an incremental manner.  Usually about 6 months gives you enough time to make progress but short enough to reflect on where you’ve been and where they want to go next.  

If you are an Agile advocate, consider trying an Agile Career Palette approach to help you better shape and color your future.  First start by establishing your current state of the key facets mentioned about.  Then, commit to an increment of improvement based on your interests or gaps.  It will help you be more laser-focused on building your future!

Gamification for your Agile Journey

Gamification adapts game concepts to nongaming situations to engage employees and motivate them to improve their performance and achieve a beneficial behavior. It rewards employees for completing performance levels with points, badges, privileges, and sometime monetary incentives. Gamification can be deployed as one of the possible techniques to engage employees as part of your Agile Journey.

The key to gamification is that it must be driven by a clear business goal with a clear outcome.  With the context of Agile, the goal with gamification is to encourage employees to become engaged in Agile, with the outcome of ‘giving back’ to the Agile community.  While your Agile journey may start with training and coaching, you eventually would like employees acting as Agile Champions to give back and start sharing their knowledge and experience within their colleagues.

As an example, let’s say you have established an Agile Education Vision with the goal of getting employees to give back to the Agile community.  As one technique, you decide to use gamification to motivate and engage employees to become Agile Champions and give back to their local community. Let's posit five levels of Agile Champion and the points needed to achieve each level:

• Steel: 5 points
• Bronze: 25 points
• Silver: 50 points
• Gold: 100 points
• Platinum: 250 points

By achieving certain levels, a precious medal badge is earned which the employee can add to their signature line and receive an award to support the behavior, both to recognize this achievement. The vision lays out the following education elements, together with the points earned by completing each one:

• Take the online “Agile Overview” for awareness: 5 points
• Attend Scrum Master, Product Owner, team, or manager training per your role: 20 points
• Take a variety of short online courses such as “How to Write User Stories” to build skills: 5 points each 
• Attend a 45-minute seminar/webinar on various Agile topics such as “Lessons Learned from Sprint Retrospective” to understand process: 5 points each
• Write an internal blog article and share with the internal Agile community: 25 points
• Create and present a webinar and share with the internal Agile community: 50 points

Notice that by taking the “Agile Overview,” the participant immediately becomes Steel level. This gets them into the game which may motivate them to keep playing. Also notice that the bigger point items promote giving back to the internal Agile community. This preferential valuation aligns with the goal of giving back while building their Agile knowledge along the way.

If you use gamification, ensure the achievement is real, that it helps the employee with their work, and is aligned with your Agile goals.  Finally, please remember that gamification is just one technique within your Agile toolkit in building an Agile community and having a successful Agile journey. 

PS - to read more about how Gamification can help you in your Agile journey, consider reading Chapter 16 of the new Agile book entitled Being Agile.