The pandemic has pushed Agile Ways of Working (WOW) beyond tech teams to enterprise, and with all the challenges that it has posed, agility is key for organisations to survive and thrive.

In our latest webinar, Agile 101 for Communicators we explored the basics of agile and its importance for communications professionals, including:

• Embracing agile ways of working

• Driving the communications campaigns for your organisation's transformation

• Learning to do communications planning and adopting best practices of agile ways of working to drive efficiency and prioritisation.

Check out our webinar for a taster to find out what Agile Ways of Working is about and how it can benefit you and your team.

Our guest speaker, Erum Quddus, Founder of The Agile Storytelling Company, specialises in Agile transformation communications and how to be a communications practitioner in an Agile environment.

Erum has over 5 years of experience as an agile communications leader and 20+ years in financial services and fintech in agile transformation, digital delivery and mobile banking.

Q&A with Erum Quddus

Are there any tools you would suggest to aid agile ways?

I’ve been looking at it, and for me, it could be interpreted in two ways.

First - If it’s about adopting Agile Ways of Working, there are the three practices that I talked through in the session yesterday that you could try:

• #1: Working in 2-week cycles, or sprints

• #2: Minimum viable product (MVP) approach

• #3: Sticky Post-It Note Planning (Trello or Kanban)

Second interpretation - In Agile, there are tools such as Rally, Jira or Confluence etc that help teams plan, manage and track work, and bring teams together to collaborate on it. So all the work is in one place.

For example, comms activities, as well as all other work, would be added in this tool.

I hope one of these answers your question.

Please could you clarify if you're suggesting comms plan their agile work outside of any tool the main project team might be using?

In short, no. Comms teams should absolutely add their work to any tools being used internally, such as Rally, Jira or Confluence. This way, the company has one version of the truth, and can get a snapshot view of the work and capacity across the business at any time - this is a pivotal part of becoming a predictable organisation.

Our comms planning tool is intended to create the plan, with colleagues/stakeholders/content providers. So you’d use it in sprint planning or if you’re using SAFe, in PI Planning (or big room planning). And the activities in this plan would be added to the tool (Jira etc) that’s being used internally, in the same way as all other work.

Your agile team might be using DevOps, so would using a separate comms planner would duplicate the work?

Here’s how I’m interpreting it - is our comms planning tool a duplication of the tool being used by a DevOps team?

No, comms teams should add their work to any tools being used internally, such as Rally, Jira or Confluence etc. This way, the company has one version of the truth, and can get a snapshot view of the work and capacity across the business at any time - this is a pivotal part of becoming a predictable organisation.

Our comms planning tool is intended to create the plan, with colleagues/stakeholders/content providers. So you’d use it in sprint planning or if you’re using SAFe, in PI Planning (or big room planning). And the activities in this plan would be added to the tool (Jira etc) that’s being used internally, in the same way as all other work.

Feel free to get in touch with Erum if you have any other questions at erum@theagilestorytellingcompany.com.

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