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•  individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
• working software over comprehensive documentation;
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and.
• responding to change over following a plan

 An agile culture is one that has a bias towards collaboration and cooperation and minimizes autocracy, control and bureaucracy. It pushes decision making down the organization to enable teams to take ownership of business outcomes and holds them to account. 

You will often hear agile teams described as cross-functional or at least aspiring to be. When a team is defending why they haven’t completed something at the end of a sprint and cries “the development is done, we have passed it over to the testers!”, or “it’s just waiting for dev ops to deploy it to production”…someone will often respond with “I thought you were supposed to be a cross-functional team?”.

So, what is a cross-functional team and how would having a truly cross-functional team help address the situation above?

 What is Agile? Agile is an umbrella term for light-weight frameworks, tools and techniques that help teams and organizations achieve agility. Initially specifically aimed at Software development, following recognition by Harvard Business Review, McKinsey & Company etc. agile is now spreading rapidly to all parts and all types of organizations. 

 Think about your favourite sports team – or person. They will have a coach. In fact, many successful business people and politicians do too. Coaching is a profession that is more complex than it looks, but provides huge value when done well. 

Considered to be one of the agile frameworks, alongside Scrum, XP, DSDM amongst others, Kanban has been gaining popularity as a lightweight method for helping teams deliver effectively.

Kanban is best described as “a method for optimizing the flow of valuable work”, as it is not guided by rules, but key principles

ou have to understand throughout the journey that growing an Agile culture is both an art and a science. 

The “science” includes: 

• Researching agile-based values
• Running a survey to collect current customers, and employee input and feedback
• Updating vision statements
• Rolling out Scrums, etc. 

The “art,” handles working within the existing cultures and management styles to overcome organizational inertia. This is the hard part because it takes care of any resistance to change. You must keep building momentum to develop your organization’s agility.