Remote and hybrid work, in particular, has highlighted many collaboration pain points. Keeping team members engaged and contributing through text-based communication can be a challenge, for example, and keeping them all on the same page visually is difficult without rooms (with walls and whiteboards) in which to collaborate.
Using visual collaboration tools can help software development, marketing, and many other teams move through their processes more quickly and seamlessly, allowing their products and ideas to deliver value faster. Organizations looking to improve collaboration and scale Agile methodologies and approaches to more teams across the company can implement visual collaboration with team-level coordination tools to strengthen collaboration and alignment across teams.
Dedicated Virtual Spaces
When team members are co-located, they have access to physical environments where they can come together as they move through their Agile events.
“In these spaces, teams often put a lot of stuff about their progress — as well as about who the team is, what their charter is, what their goals are, and who has responsibilities for what — and put it on the walls,” says Dan Lawyer, Chief Product Officer at Lucid Software. “But many teams have lost those spaces.”
Teams still need ‘home bases’ for their Agile efforts, and these can take the form of shared virtual canvases that act as hubs for charters, working agreements, and other key resources, offering similar benefits to those of physical rooms. A team space in Lucid serves as a virtual room that captures many of the advantages offered by the physical team rooms, bays, or war rooms they may have used in the past.
Customizable Templates for Agile Events
The Agile events teams work through, in physical or virtual environments, include daily standups, sprint planning sessions, retrospectives, and more. But not every member of a team has the same level of expertise in how to facilitate those events and ensure they are productive and valuable.
With access to customizable templates designed for Agile methodologies, teams can move through their events more efficiently. Purpose-built collaboration tools provide support throughout these processes.
“The feature sets that Lucid has created and the ways our templates are constructed make it really elegant for somebody that is facilitating events to come in and have all of the tools, capabilities, and resources they need every step of the way to successfully lead a team through its events,” says Lawyer.
Private Mode Options
Collaborating in virtual environments can bring up unique sensitivities and sometimes touchy underlying team dynamics. Not all employees are equally comfortable contributing to virtual discussions, for example, or always feel they get an equal opportunity to even be part of the conversation.
Giving team members the ability to contribute ideas or share feedback anonymously, which can encourage psychological safety for team members and help ensure more voices are heard to support more inclusive decision-making practices. For example, in private mode, both the authors of sticky notes and the content of newly added notes are concealed from other collaborators. After the session, the content of the notes can be revealed while keeping the authors anonymous to preserve privacy.
Estimation Capabilities and Data Synchronization for Smarter Sprint Planning
Agile approaches require teams to understand and assess the effort required for tasks, while staying on top of projects that can frequently change scope. The more quickly and collaboratively teams can plan their sprints, the more effective they will be as they move through them.
Tools from Lucid give teams the ability to more swiftly and accurately assess and update their estimates using a poker-planning style approach, then sync those estimates with their Jira or Azure DevOps (ADO) solutions. By conducting interactive team estimation sessions, teams work together to evaluate the effort, complexity, and risks of their backlog items. This collaborative approach ensures that all viewpoints are considered, ultimately supporting better alignment between project planning and project execution.
To streamline their planning processes, teams can leverage Lucid’s two-way integration with Jira and ADO, enabling seamless data synchronization between Lucid and their systems of record. This integration eliminates the need for manual data entry before or after planning sessions, accelerating the process, enhancing data accuracy, and minimizing the requirement for extensive documentation.
Conclusion
Driving maximum value from Agile approaches requires flexible tools that enable more natural, intuitive ways for teams to work.
“Agile professes to be agile, but the tools teams use are often very rigid and get in the way of teams’ ability to behave in any kind of agile manner,” says Lawyer. “These systems need to be somewhat rigid so that they can properly do the jobs of tracking information, reporting, and so on, but they really don’t handle the human side of things well. When it comes to creativity, ideation, and scenario planning, I’ve seen many teams feel very claustrophobic and trapped by the tools they’re using because those tools don’t support the freeform nature of much of their work.”
Teams embracing Agile methodologies can leverage Lucid’s Visual Collaboration Suite—Lucidchart and Lucidspark—along with its flexible custom canvases backed by powerful automation and data management capabilities to enhance collaboration, streamline planning, and foster innovation. They can visualize workflows, engage in real-time brainstorming, and maintain project alignment, all while seamlessly integrating with their existing systems to drive better outcomes and deliver value more efficiently.
To learn more about powering your business’s vision with Lucid, go to lucid.co.