Skills Agile Teams Need to Succeed

Agile approaches have revolutionised the way IT and development teams work over the last three decades. Increased success rates in bringing products to market, greater speed, higher efficiency, and increased team motivation have all been reported as advantages. Agile approaches have had such a big impact that they've expanded all over the place. The same principles are used in a wide range of industries and tasks today.

Agile approaches have become a hot topic for research and insight experts during the last five years. Due to a lack of time, resources, and investment, many teams have turned to agile to help them make better use of their resources. However, in order to make the change and gain the rewards, an insight team must possess the necessary skills.

Agile teams can choose from a variety of talents to focus on. These six, on the other hand, have the potential to accelerate success and have an instant, positive influence.

1. Emotional Intelligence

Traditional command-and-control systems affect agile environments, which are fast-paced, divergent, and less bound by pre-determined obstacles. Though this allows teams to react to challenges more easily, it also necessitates a far higher level of emotional intelligence to function well.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a skill that helps people relax and collaborate more effectively. Team members can improve co-operation by identifying, analysing, and responding properly to the emotions of other team members by developing EI. This is also important for anticipating behaviours, empathising with worries, and resolving problems. Because when formal structures are removed, a greater focus is placed on team member relationships and people' capacity to work well with others.

2. Leadership & Teamwork

The leadership and teamwork dyad is mentioned in almost every list of needed job abilities. However, for agile research teams, being able to do both at any one time is critical. Leadership is used to influence others, offer direction, support others and drive teams to accomplish specific goals.

Teamwork, on the other hand, promotes leaders to delegate more effectively, increases efficiency, and allows members of an agile research team to form smaller working groups that complement each other's skills. The breakdown of formal structures and rapid team re-configuration are driving forces that contribute to a larger reliance on all members' capacity to demonstrate both leadership and teamwork skills, similar to why emotional intelligence is important within agile teams.

3. Adaptability

The iterative nature of agile projects mandates that insight teams be capable of adapting on the fly, which comes as no surprise. Adaptations can take a variety of forms, which adds to the complexity. Research cycles may produce unexpected results, necessitating a shift in focus. Alternatively, difficulties that develop throughout a phase may be better investigated using a different methodology.

The crucial point is that, unlike previous research projects, the end result and later stages of an agile project may not (and most likely will not) be as expected. To that end, the ability to shift gears and be guided by study findings rather than project design is a valuable asset.

4. Persuasive Communication

Persuasive communication is a talent that many academics are already cultivating in order to give more powerful reports to stakeholders. It entails conveying information in a clear, straightforward, and effective manner. Agility is a fantastic technique to deal with "wicked problems," as the area of design thinking refers to them. Due to incomplete, contradicting, or shifting parameters, these are situations that are regarded impossible to fully resolve.

The iterative nature of agile research methodologies allows tiny aspects of the problem to be tackled at a time, and a path to be carved through the larger issue. However, as complexity grows, so does the demand for more straightforward communication. The problem and solutions must be conveyed in a common language to encourage stakeholders to take action. To do so, team members must be able to devote 100% of their attention to an issue, take the time to understand how others view it, ask the right questions, and translate complexity internally.

5. Reflexivity

Reflexivity, defined as an attitude of systematically attending to the context of knowledge formation, can be difficult to comprehend, let alone cultivate. The ability to acknowledge and account for the biases that are built into any study method, as well as how results are analysed and conclusions drawn, is the essence of reflexivity.

The value of reflexive thinking is reinforced by agile methodologies, which is typically connected with qualitative research. As additional decisions are made based on earlier research, these decisions may be influenced unintentionally by creeping biases or the procedure laid out by agile approaches. Simply prioritising quantitative methodologies allows agile projects to run in shorter cycles, as an example. To ensure that research remains impartial and useful, the ability to reflect on or question decisions before biases have an impact is critical.