Increase your agility in 2026 - The ultimate guide

As you may know, the economic situation has changed drastically in recent months.
In 2022, interest rates were still close to 0 % and this “cheap” money ensured that private consumption was very strong. This led companies to prioritize growth and drive innovation.
However, with a sharp rise in interest rates and a resulting decline in consumption, these priorities have shifted. Instead of growth, the focus is now on profit margins and instead of innovation, cost optimization plays a key role. And since software development is a costly business, we have seen waves of layoffs at big tech companies as well as an increasing popularity in measuring the productivity of software teams. And it is this new focus that means that Agile coaches and scrum masters are now more than ever required to take responsibility for their teams and the delivery of new features.

For this very reason, I have put together 5 tips that will help you to meet your requirements as a “Agile Delivery” manager.

Only if you understand what the current priorities are in your company can you act in a targeted manner. Ask yourself these three questions to gain more clarity in this regard:

• What is currently very important to the management?
• How has this focus changed in recent months?
• What routines do you have with management to align your priorities?

Now that you have questioned whether you know the company’s priorities, you need to check whether your teams are also clear about the company’s priorities. As a coach or lead, it is also your job to check whether your teams are in line with the company’s priorities. You can also ask yourself three questions for this:

• How do teams currently learn about the priorities in the company?
• How do teams agree on what their main contribution to the overall goal is?
• What changes can help to ensure that the expectations of management and teams are aligned?

Even though one of the core objectives of agile working is to build self-organized teams, many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Team Leads still suffer from phenomena such as “micromanagement” or excessive team support. This in turn leads to the supposedly “self-organized” teams not being able to act completely on their own. Here, too, you can reflect on whether your teams are really self-organized:

• Does your team have a common understanding of what it means to do a “good job”?
• Is your team able to accurately estimate what they can deliver in a given time with given resources?
• Is the meaningfulness of tasks questioned in the team or are they simply processed?

If something is not running optimally, it is often assumed that the team and the team members need to improve. In most cases, it is actually the case that the systems in which the team members operate need to be improved. The reality often looks like this:

How can the systems be improved?

• Does the team receive all the information it needs to achieve its goals on time?
• Does feedback from users quickly reach all relevant areas of the company?
• Are you given enough freedom as a team to organize your work independently?

One of the reasons why many “Agile Coaches” now have the title “Agile Delivery Manager” is to clearly symbolize that responsibility is taken for the team’s performance. As early as 2020, the Scrum Guide stated the following: “The Scrum Master is responsible for the effectiveness of the team”.
Not only is it currently important to do this, but due to the cost savings that companies are making, taking responsibility is also expected.

As the economic situation becomes tighter, measurable performance is more important than ever. To maximize this in 2024, you can take these 5 points to heart:

#1 Reflect on the company’s priorities

#2 Align expectations

#3 Develop truly self-organized teams

#4 Improve the system

#5 Take responsibility

To ensure this, it is important to regularly reflect on the questions I have given you in this article. With our Agile delivery tool “Echometer”, a few questions are asked at each retrospective in the form of a Health Check so that you can always keep them up to date.

If you want to test the tool for free, you can do so here:

How to

⚙️ Agile Delivery Retrospective: How the retro works

1. Random Icebreaker (2-5 minutes)

   Echometer provides you with a generator for random check-in questions.

2. Review of open actions (2-5 minutes)

   Before starting with new topics, you should talk about what has become of the measures from past retrospectives to check their effectiveness. Echometer automatically lists all open action items from past retros.

3. Discuss retro topics

   Use the following open questions to collect your most important findings. First, everyone does it themselves, covered. Echometer allows you to reveal each column of the retro board individually in order to then present and group the feedback.

   • When did your ways of working create a suboptimal flow of work (e.g., policies are unclear, not suitable or not adhered to)?
   • When has our way of working worked well?
   • What are recent examples for an increment that wasn't working / shippable at the end of the cycle?

4. Catch-all question (Recommended)

   So that other topics also have a place:

   • What else would you like to talk about in the retro?

5. Prioritization / Voting (5 minutes)

   On the retro board in Echometer, you can easily prioritize the feedback with voting. The voting is of course anonymous.

6. Define actions (10-20 minutes)

   You can create a linked action via the plus symbol on a feedback. Not sure which measure would be the right one? Then open a whiteboard on the topic via the plus symbol instead to brainstorm root causes and possible measures.

7. Checkout / Closing (5 minutes)

   Echometer enables you to collect anonymous feedback from the team on how helpful the retro was. This creates the ROTI score ("Return On Time Invested"), which you can track over time.

⚙️ Agile Delivery Retrospective

When did your ways of working create a suboptimal flow of work (e.g., policies are unclear, not suitable or not adhered to)?

When has our way of working worked well?

What are recent examples for an increment that wasn't working / shippable at the end of the cycle?

Open this retro now