Building Your Agile Mindset, Idea #3: Look for Ways to Innovate

[#1]

G’day, training & certification community! Last week, I let you know about our brand-new free course called Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira, designed by rock star @Andrew DeBell.

Inside that course is a tip sheet listing six concrete ideas to help you build your agile mindset. We want to hear from you with your real-life experiences putting these ideas in action.

This post is the third in a series (also check out the first idea and second idea!). In each, I’m sharing one of the tips, and you can comment on this post below with how you’ve put it into practice in your professional life. Our plan is collect our favorite advice in one post, then share it back with you—and put it on our website, for other folks to learn from.

Also: We’ll be awarding something special to our most engaged users throughout the series! 👀 🥳

Ready to get started with the third tip?

Tip #3 to Build your Agile Mindset: Look for ways to innovate

Agility is all about delivering maximum value to customers. When a customer's needs change, you need to respond quickly with an innovative solution.

Having an agile mindset means you're constantly looking for opportunities to innovate. This could mean improving your team's internal processes. Or enhancing features of the product you're building.

As you complete your daily tasks, think if there are ways to improve what you're doing. Analyzing and improving your team's work will be valuable for your future career.

Now, answer these questions by adding a comment below:

• Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re regularly innovating?

• Where do you have room to improve looking for ways to innovate?

• Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you flex your habit muscle so that you innovate more?

I’ll go first, to get you started with an example.

The truth is, I’m a creature of habit, so looking for ways to innovate is not my strongest suit—it doesn’t come naturally to me to think “how could we do this differently” on a super-consistent basis. However, that’s where my team comes in! I have a few teammates who are absolutely that kind of thinker (looking at you @Ben Thoma @Marshall Walker Lee @Seema Seehra) so I make it a habit to either *actually* ask them, or ask myself: what might those folks wonder about or question around a process or idea.

How do you look for ways to innovate? Share below—and don’t forget to check out the course!

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Enroll today in the free course: Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira

Read the first post in the series: Tip #1: All about respect

Read the second post in the series: Tip #2: Communication!

Read the fourth post in the series: Tip #4: Actively improve your skills

Read the fifth post in the series: Tip #5: Ditch perfectionism

Read the sixth post in the series: Tip #6: Be ready to PIVOT

[Sam Nadarajan]

Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re regularly innovating?

I'll set limits on how long I will do things a certain way. For example, I will facilitate retros in one format for 3 months, then switch up formats. I use time to help me not get stale.

Where do you have room to improve looking for ways to innovate?

Innovating on a schedule can cause pressure and anxiety. That can lead to innovating and making changes for the sake of making changes, not because it's making the team operate better. I level set by asking myself if what I am changing to is not worse than what was there before. It doesn't have to be significantly better, but if it at least matches or slightly exceeds the effectiveness of the previous way of doing things, then it's not a complete loss.

Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you flex your habit muscle so that you innovate more?

Innovation is not a solo endeavor. Always have someone you can bounce ideas off of, even if that person is not on your team. Also don't be afraid to reach out to people in a different industry than yours, you'll find that their perspective will highlight something important that exists as a blind spot to others in your industry.

[Jaime Netzer]

"I level set by asking myself if what I am changing to is not worse than what was there before." — Genius, @Sam Nadarajan !!

[Andy Gladstone]

Where do you have room to improve looking for ways to innovate?

This may not be the intention of the question, but I'll answer my way anyway (I'm being innovative!) I need to speak up more when we innovate as an organization about how the innovation may or may not affect our support teams. We are great at roadmapping and developing new products and services for our end-users, but need to think more about how both minor and major changes can affect the teams tasked with supporting them. We cannot define success and innovation by release cycles alone, we need to do a better job looking at the changes more holistically.