Any move to Agile development brings with it the need to develop agile skill sets across your project teams. Developing Agile skill sets is something you’ll have to work on a continuous basis.

Here are three tips for developing Agile skill sets:

1. Focus on team culture and cohesion

Developing Agile skill sets in a new or established teams starts with team culture and cohesion before you even tackle anything Agile related. Collaboration is at the heart of Agile. If you don’t have a collaboration, then developing Agile skill sets is going to made exponentially harder.

Focusing on team culture as part of developing Agile skill sets starts with infusing Agile in your culture. It can start with working with your project team to reevaluate communications and collaboration to date. Then put in a plan with measureable goals

2. Develop an agile framework as a foundation

One of the more successful tools for developing an Agile skill set is to have an Agile framework in place. An Agile framework documents how the organization is implementing Agile development and project management to drive their development projects. Suffice it to say, there’s a whole lot of interpretations of Agile going on out in the market giving added importance to your organization documenting their own Agile framework.

3. Create an agile reading list

The body of knowledge and thought leadership around Agile is ever expanding with new books, articles, blog posts, and podcast becoming available all the time. An Agile reading list doesn’t need to be some mandatory reading list with a quiz afterwards. It can be sharing links to blog posts on your internal wiki or establishing a chat room for trading links to Agile reading materials.

Conclusion

Developing Agile skill sets needs to be a collaborative effort. You aren’t going to be able to do it all as a project manager. Full team participation is developing Agile skill sets can be a handy way to help seal the deal because

Will Kelly is a technical writer and analyst based in the Washington, DC area. He has worked with commercial, federal, higher education, and publishing clients to develop technical and thought leadership content. His technology articles have been published by CNET TechRepublic, Government Computer News, Federal Computer Week, Toolbox.com, ZDNet.com and others. Follow Will on Twitter:@willkelly.