Homework: Reflection on Agile ways of working and Agile teams
Task Summary
You are required to write and submit a 1500 words individual reflection about Agile ways of working and Agile teams in preparation for your group homework. You will be expected to examine and reflect upon these concepts specifically: The Agile Mindset, a shift from ‘command and control culture' to self-organised teams, how reflection is an important part of the Agile process and the concept of servant leadership and how your adoption of these will support your group's success.
i. Bear in mind that you will be working in a group and there will be a requirement to use agile ways of working in your team - this is a good opportunity for you to focus on how these will prove most useful for you and your team in achieving your assessment goals.
ii. The focus of this homework is to give you an opportunity to reflect on the theoretical knowledge you have developed and how you might put it into practice for your group homework.
iii. Your report will need to be 1500 words in length, although you will have the benefit of an allowance of 150 words either more or less than 1500 words.
Context
In professional life while some parts of a job require individual contribution but progressively more work requires collaboration and group work.
Group learning is designed to help you to learn about the process of collaboration in preparation for your career.
Agile teams and agile ways of working are becoming more prevalent in workplaces and it is likely that you will be a part of an agile team in your career. However, agile is very different from the more traditional ‘command and control' management methods to which many people are accustomed.
Reflective practice is a process of thinking about new experiences with a view of learning from them. It is a form of personal response to new experiences, situations, events, or information. University is the best place to learn, and reflection is considered a key part of the learning process for this course.
Gibb's Reflective Cycle (n.d.)
The above model from Gibb shows the different learning modes of the reflective cycle. We expect you to use this model as a framework for your "Reflection on Agile ways of working and Agile teams". You initiate your activity in this cycle with the description step where you discuss your prior group work and your group work in this subject so far: how it has made you feel, your evaluation and analysis of the group work process and your conclusions.
Have examined important concepts of agile teams and ways of working.
Some of the concepts will be new to you and you will need to examine your thoughts about:
I. Describe your prior experience of group work and how it is progressing with your group to date as you work towards Assessment 3.
II. What are your current feelings? Confident? Irritated? Confused?
III. Evaluate and analyse your personal experience for working in a group before, using a personal example, to establish positive and negatives of the experience to make sense of it in the quiet of introspection.
IV. Draw conclusions about how - with your newfound knowledge of how Agile teams work - you could have benefitted from doing things differently.
V. Draft a 5 step Action Plan including the following items:
i. What will you do to adopt an Agile Mindset?
ii. How will you encourage the team to work in a self-organised manner?
iii. How will you use Agile reflective practice to progressively improve team performance?
iv. How will you bring ‘servant leadership' to your work in the team?
v. How do you believe this will help the team to achieve their goals?
Format your homework according to the following formatting requirements:
i) The answer should be typed, using Times New Roman font (size 12), double spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides.
ii) The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the homework, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
iii) Also include a reference page. The Citations and references must follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.