Blog 5 min reading
Do you feel like you're working harder than ever and not getting anywhere? The average worker spends almost an hour a day simply trying to remember information they've read or heard before. This is known as "continuous partial attention".
The Information Age has left us all with a prevalence of information, not knowledge. With so many distractions, we have to work twice as hard to stay productive. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your productivity in the office that don't involve drinking more coffee or listening to music while you work.
If you want to get more done and leave the 9 to 5 world behind forever, adopting an agile workflow will do wonders for your productivity. And if you want to stand out in any job or company, it's essential to adopt a set of best practices from agile methodologies.
Small morning meetings
Small morning meetings are quick meetings at the start of each working day that can be used to catch up, plan and build an action plan. They are short, efficient and informal. You don't need a wall-sized whiteboard, a fancy conference room, or even a meeting leader.
A morning meeting can be as small as two people chatting over a cup of coffee in the break room. The secret is that it happens every day without fail. The first group of the day doesn't need to have a specific agenda, but it should have these three attributes:
- It must have a finite duration.
- Your participants must know the rules of engagement.
- It must have a clear purpose.
Weekly demonstrations
Weeks usually have five days, but that doesn't mean you should try to squeeze in five weeks of work. If you take one day a week out of the equation, you'll free up a significant amount of time. Your productivity will increase and you'll be able to concentrate on the most important aspects of your work.
Instead of scheduling your team's tasks for five days a week, schedule them for four days and then take one day a week out of the equation. That one day will become a weekly demo day. On demo day, you can show what you've accomplished since the last demo, show progress towards long-term goals, or launch important new initiatives for management.
Seamless integration and deployment
How many times have you almost finished a task when a new project comes along and throws a spanner in the works? These interruptions are normal, but they can significantly reduce productivity.
When you have a team, everyone needs to be able to integrate seamlessly. That way, when someone needs help with a new task, they can connect without tying up everyone else who has a project in progress.
When teams have to "clear the decks" before starting new tasks, this leads to a huge loss of productivity. In more traditional organisations, many teams have conversations about "how to deploy software" and "what technology to use". Today, the best teams focus on "how to deploy software" and "how to use technology".
Deployment is how you get your software from your laptop to production. Technology is the tools and platforms you use to build the software.
Pair programming
If you've ever worked in the software industry, you've probably heard of pair programming. It's one of the most effective ways of increasing productivity. But you may have assumed that it's only possible in a completely remote team.
Pair programming is the practice of two people sharing a single computer while working on the same project. Both people are dedicated to the project, but only one of them is typing at a time.
When one person is in charge of the keyboard and the other of the computer, productivity will increase significantly. But how can you do this remotely? Well, you don't have to do it remotely. You can do it in person, or you can do it over the Internet. There are ways to integrate video conferencing software and other tools to make this a seamless process.
Automated testing
Does your team spend more time writing code than testing it? If you have a quality assurance team and a team dedicated to software testing, that's to be expected. But if you're testing your work yourself, you're wasting time.
Automated tests are automated checklists that allow you to test your code quickly and consistently. They tell you whether your code is working or not. They can save you hours of time and frustration.
You may have heard that automated tests are expensive to create. But unless you're building an entire application with them, they're not expensive; they're cheap. If your team is producing high-quality code, the testing process should take around 10-20% of the entire development cycle. That leaves plenty of time to create automated tests.
Conclusion
Productivity is the amount of work you produce divided by the amount of time you spend. You can be more productive in many different ways. You can try to work more hours each day, but that's not sustainable.
You can try to work more efficiently by managing interruptions better. Or you can work smarter by adopting agile methods. Working in teams has always been a great way to increase productivity, but modern teams can take productivity to the next level by adopting agile methods.
Grupo Oporto Forte is offering Agile Process Management training with an excellent team of trainers ready to increase your team's productivity with innovative agile methods..
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