If you asked me a few years ago, I would have been really surprised to hear myself described as an expert in agile. But I spend most of my time using agile to deliver big projects, and teaching and supporting others to do the same. How did I get here, and what have I learnt along the way?

Combining innovation and project management

I’m a fundraiser who has spent the last 15 years working in some of the UK’s largest charities, focused on big project management and innovation. That’s my sweet spot – the mixture of managing complex, cross-organisational behemoths and nimble little experiments. I enjoy taking some of the common sense project management lessons into innovation and transferring the drive and processes necessary to stretch and improve into those big projects.

Just because it’s innovation doesn’t mean you don’t need to think about how you collaborate or manage risk or get people on board. In fact those are all more important when you are trying something different. And just because you’re working on a well-established project with layers of bureaucracy doesn’t mean you should keep doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Innovation and project management have a lot to offer each other.

Nothing has that clearer for me than using agile ways of working. Agile is a project management approach that originally came from software development. It’s all about breaking work down into small chunks, collaborating well and learning and adapting as you go. Many of the agile tools are frequently used in innovation, and with good reason. But it’s not until I started adopting the mindsets and techniques for bigger project management that I really understood its potential.

What agile means for me

I manage two teams. One is focused on project managing our major fundraising appeals, complex multi-million pound projects involving a whole range of stakeholders with wildly different needs and goals. The team is the engine room that keeps everyone else on track. And agile is what keeps them on track. It’s how they prioritise, coordinate and learn. It’s enabled them to absorb much more work than I thought would be possible, and it’s kept them focused on the important but not urgent big picture tasks that previously got squeezed out.

My other team supports all of our fundraising department with innovation. Agile is the foundation of what they do, from delivering new product development sprints to running quick experiments on existing products. We were doing all of this before we started describing any of it as agile. But once we adopted that framing – and more importantly, the mindsets and attitudes that go with it – we started seeing so much more success.

We started delivering work more quickly, focusing on the biggest impact pieces without getting bogged down in details. We used more wisdom from diverse perspectives. And we found more things to celebrate, both because we were doing more good work, and because we were actually stopping to reflect on it.

Where I started: using agile in a crisis

It’s a cliche now to say the pandemic changed how I worked, but the pandemic changed how I worked in dramatic ways!

I had used various agile tools here and there for many years, but it wasn’t until the crisis situation of that first lockdown that it went into hyperdrive. I was leading Christian Aid Week at the time, a fundraising appeal that raised a significant amount of my organisation’s income and almost entirely relied on face-to-face contact. All of that became impossible eight weeks before the appeal.

With just a few weeks notice, we rethought everything, introducing new fundraising products, pivoting others and reimagining everything from how supporters would raise the funds to how they would actually get the money to us. We raised £4m, nearly triple our target. It was only possible because of the way agile enabled us to focus on the most important things and to coordinate work in rapidly changing situations.

Where I am now: agile influencing all of my work

Since then, I keep accidentally finding that agile makes lots of different work better. That’s been true for everything from supporting individual projects to helping senior leaders develop and implement strategy. It’s now a major part of my work. I deliver training for a wide variety of teams to learn these practices and I give one-on-one support to enable them to get started. I’m even writing a book about agile (more on that later!).

Agile has helped me achieve much more than I ever thought was possible. But more than that, it’s helped me do it in ways that feel good. Agile mindsets have helped me get better at listening to all of my team, building on their wellbeing and development and making good decisions together. We’re more focused – we’re confident that we are doing the right things. We don’t need to do everything, but agile helps us prioritise the most meaningful and impactful work.

I’ve learnt a lot along the way! The more teams I introduce agile to, the more I see patterns in the questions and difficulties that emerge. I’ll use this blog to reflect on those (an important agile practice) and share some valuable tips that might help you on your journey too.

I’d love to hear from you. How did you first come across agile, and what does it mean to you now?