Our Agile Strategy series has prompted a lot of questions about how you really put an agile strategy in place. Here’s a checklist for putting together an agile plan and an agile process. As a side note, there’s a dedicated video to each item if you need to go deeper.
Agile Strategy Checklist:
- First things first, you need to have guiding principles in place because you need to be able to address market shifts.
- Second thing is you need to have prioritized opportunities. From the landscape of opportunities, you need to make sure they’re prioritized so that you can address new ideas when they emerge.
- Third thing, you’ve got to have a road map in place. Maybe it’s a year-by-year road map or maybe it’s a dynamic roadmap. Either way, you need to have visibility into the upcoming priorities across the organization.
- And last, but certainly not least, you need to have quarterly key results, action items, or milestones so that everybody in the organization knows their individual action.
Get the Free Guide for Setting OKRs that Work (with 100 examples!)
So those are the four things that make up the planning components of having an agile strategy in place. Once you have the plan in place, you have to put the process behind it.
Strategy Reviews
Weekly or monthly metric reviews? We love weekly, but monthly is fine. Why? Because you need to check in on your strategic performance on a regularly committed process. The second most important thing is having quarterly refresh meetings that are two to three hours, giving you the time to adapt the plan. These reviews are not just a readout, they are the heartbeat of any agile strategy process.
Picking an App
And then, of course, to make it easier on everybody in your organization, have an app in place so you can dynamically change the plan when you adapt it every quarter. These two pieces together make up your strategy sprint. And with that, you have the components of your plan and your process to make sure that you have a real agile strategy.
