Implementing Atomic Habits for Agile Transformation

“Rome wasn’t built in a day” is a phrase quoted by John Plywood. It is one of the known and popular phrases as it reminds us that no success can be achieved easily, it takes time and constant development to make great things happen. This concept is easily stated in the book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear, which says every small habit works towards achieving a larger chance for success. These small habits leading to bigger change are known as atomic habits.

When we come to agile, as its title suggests, the implementation of agile must also be completed with agility. Transformation to agile takes some time it cannot be achieved in a day. To achieve great success one has to be patient and consistent in its growth. Agile starts with a change in mindset, which is achieved by taking small steps at a time in changing your habits and behavior. Agile provides us agility in its results, working agile gives us agility in product-market time, improvement in operation and development with agility as well as individual employee growth with agility and continuity. Making agile transformation earlier requires developing good habits and behaviors. Cultivating habits may be small or big organizations ensure that they are cultivating agility, as cultivating habits ensures breaking out the potential and continuous improvement, without which an organization's agility will slowly die.

Agile is a system of evolutionary change where each good habit leads to another causing a change. If we see in our life every habit cause a link for other for example; when we go out to buy anything we feel good causing us attracted to other and buy other and then other. So today let’s see some good habits for agile transformation.

Get Better Bit Everyday

Change never needs to be huge or instantaneous, drastic and huge change at once may cause frustration further avoiding it. Always try to improve a little every day. With a bit of change every day after a year you will observe a larger change within yourself. To improve try following the formula of linking one habit to another.

Applying Clear Tasks

In agile when working as a team member you can have a clear view of your tasks for the day listing important ones on the top. This will provide clarity for your complete day. As a leader, you can go with micro-managing tasks giving complete clarity and priority to team members about their tasks and then further guiding them for the day. Here small habits will help you for clarity like asking only powerful and meaningful questions and listening to others before speaking.

Keep on Improving Continuously

To transform to agile and keep on being agile the one most important and key atomic habit is continuous improvement. To improve each day and not get tired of it, try to implement small and easy habits that lead to the larger habit instead of focusing on the larger ones directly. Humans are more diverted towards completing easy tasks than difficult ones, using this we can improve ourselves by stepping towards easy habits that help us lead to success. As said by John C. Maxell “You will never change your life until you change something you do daily.” To have recurring success continuous improvement is the key. Even after transforming to agile, to be always agile continuous improvement is required.

Choose Wisely When it comes to Habits

As discussed repeatedly habits are what makes a man. What you chose as a habit is what shows what you will be in the future. Habit choices influence your life; having good habits bring you to progress with endearing people, developing knowledge, and productivity. Whereas, bad habits lead to destruction by bringing stress, outrage, and failure in life.

As forming good habits in our daily life is important, breaking out of bad habits is also essential. Now we know how to implement good habits in life. Let’s move towards breaking bad habits.

To break bad habits the must thing is to ignore them. By making bad habits invisible and ignoring them, will start forgetting to implement them, and slowly our minds will break them. Secondly, we can break them by making them unattractive and convincing our minds that these habits are bad and why they should not be followed. By showing the negative points of the habit and making it unattractive we can easily break it off. Thirdly, as we did for good habits of following small and easy ones to implement, go vice-versa following difficult or impractical ways to bad habits for breaking them.

By following small steps for applying habits we can adopt good habits and break bad ones. By every day using good atomic habits we will be able to transform and continue implementing agile.

 

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.