How To Deliver Higher Quality Work

A common challenge that today’s companies face is how to quickly deliver high-quality products to market. Even with talented people who take pride in the quality of their work, the output of delivery teams is often of lower quality than is acceptable. Furthermore, business leaders often find themselves asking why the organization struggles to deliver work that is finished. High performing organizations learn how to ask the right questions to help them overcome these big challenges. Below are three key focus areas, along with examples of questions that leaders should be asking.

Stakeholder Engagement

Are all of your stakeholders identified and engaged? Do they have a direct connection to the team that delivers the product? Would you describe the relationship between stakeholders and the delivery team as collaborative? If you answered ‘No’ to these questions, then you may want to dig deeper. Ensuring that all of your stakeholders are engaged is a key to delivering value and reducing waste. When your stakeholders are actively involved and providing feedback to the delivery team, the team can use the feedback to deliver a product increment that is much more likely to be accepted and much less likely to need rework.

Transparency

How visible is the work in your organization? Does every delivery team know the top business outcomes your leadership team is focused on? Are all teams aligned with these outcomes and aware of what other teams are doing so all are effectively aligned toward a common purpose? Can leaders quickly find what delivery teams are working on without disrupting a member of the team to get this information? Transparency is a key to high performing teams. It increases team effectiveness by allowing everyone on the team to contribute to the solution and ensures everyone on the team understands progress towards the goal. It raises solution quality by allowing everyone to provide input from their perspective. It reduces team member’s stress because individuals on the team feel supported by others on the team. They feel that others would catch something if they missed it, and they see all of the information available at that time.

Predictability

How confident are you that your team will meet its commitments? Can you measure how likely your delivery teams are to deliver high value to customers? Do your stakeholders have high confidence that your teams will deliver what they say and when they say it will be delivered? Do your delivery teams utilize proven agile practices designed to increase predictability? Are your teams actively working to improve their ability to reliably deliver on their commitments? Customers value predictability because it allows them to make business plans accordingly. This builds customer trust and leads to increased future business.

Many organizations who undertake an Agile transformation are working to solve similar challenges. At AgileThought, we help leaders identify the business key areas to focus on and we teach them how to ask the right questions. The first step to improving your organization’s ability to predictably deliver high-quality products to market is to understand your environment and where your biggest opportunities lie.  AgileIgnite is specially designed to help you take this first step. If you are considering an Agile transformation, curious about whether your organization could benefit from Agile, or just want to improve your team’s performance, AgileIgnite can help you. AgileIgnite begins with an assessment that helps you understand your culture, your environment, your teams, and how work flows through your value stream.  During AgileIgnite your people are introduced to basic Agile concepts through a combination of trainings and workshops which teach leadership how to guide an agile organization, to identify top business outcomes, to strategically design teams, and to train key personnel on agile.  It ends with a recommended roadmap for rolling out agile across your organization and clear next steps for delivering value quickly. AgileIgnite delivers value rapidly to your organization and is the industry’s best way to launch a transformation.

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