Our soft skills help us to face changing environments like the current ones. On this occasion I want to share 07 examples of how to apply soft skills in agile projects according to my experience and with what I learned in the course "Digital Agility and Transformationals" of the professor miguel angel vera of structuralia.

#1: Carry out effective negotiations: 

Negotiations must not allow either party to “lose”. 

For example, if the Product Owner indicates in the product backlog that he wants to generate a report to be able to present it to his Senior Management, the development team must negotiate the scope of the requirement and present alternatives to the PO. In this way, the negotiation seeks that the PO can satisfy your need and the team develops a functionality in the foreseen time.

#2: Practice active listening: 

There are three levels of listening: (1) Internal listening, where you listen but interpret from a personal perspective, (2) Focused listening, where you empathize with the thoughts and experiences of the interlocutor, and (3) Global listening, which adds to focused listening detect subtle physical and environmental cues. 

For example, when we are giving feedback to an agile team member for poor performance during the sprint, it will be important to recognize if he shows signs of tension, a shaky voice, or averts his eyes so that we can have a better understanding. global listening that allows us to address the situation, understand the original reason and how to solve it.

#3: Maintain effective facilitation methods

It consists of the best way to organize effective meetings and workshops.

For example, we are carrying out a customer journey session with the client, in order for it to be successful, it must have: clear objectives of the results of the session, inform and enforce rules such as: the non-use of mobile phones, respect for the ideas of others, respect the times etc In addition, it will be important that the client is heard and everyone contributes.

#4: Align Globalization, culture and team diversity 

Different cultures in a project make it very enriching due to the different points of view, knowledge and experience that the team comes with, but it is also a challenge.

For example, if we are in a retrospective session and we have teams whose culture is very entertaining and talkative, we cannot allow the rest of the team to feel self-conscious and not participate. In the same way, it will be important to establish rules of coexistence such as finding spaces where the time zone is considered and only the working hours of all the teams are respected.

#5: Resolve conflicts

Although conflict is natural, it is important to know how to recognize it in order to solve it. There are 5 types of conflicts from the most chaotic as a level 5 of "total war", a level 4 of "crusade" or more stable levels such as level 3 of "discussion", level 2 of "disagreement" and level 1 of “problems to be solved”.

For example, if during a sprint a member of the development team approaches us to show his discomfort with another colleague, the complaint should be heard and the language analyzed, which will vary according to the level of conflict, as shown below:

• Level 1 (Problem to be solved): the language is generally open and constructive
• Level 2 (Disagree): Language begins to include self-protection
• Level 3 (Discussion): team members begin to use non-constructive language,
• as exaggerated generalization, prejudices, or magnified positions
• Level 4 (Crusade): The conflict becomes more ideological and polarized.
• Level 5 (Total War): The language is combative.

After identifying the type of conflict, strategies differentiated by level could be taken, such as:

• Level 1: Try to build a collaborative scenario to help build consensus around a decision that everyone wants to accept.
• Level 2 (Disagreement): Involves the empowerment of team members to solve the problem. 
• Level 3 (Discussion): Adapt to the different opinions of people. Although this may involve compromising the work to be done, we must not compromise the values of the team.
• Level 4 (Crusade): Requires diplomacy, since the team may need a facilitator to transmit messages between the different parties.
•  Level 5 (Total War): While it may be unsolvable and it will help to figure out how we can find people ways to live with it. 

If for the case of this example, level 5 is predominant, an alternative would be to separate them into different projects.

#6: Effectively manage distributed teams

Many studies indicate that more than 50 percent of agile teams worldwide are geographically dispersed, making communication and the use of information radiators a challenge.

For example, if you have an agile team of 6 people and they are all in different countries, tools such as Microsoft Teams Kanban boards, Trello or Jira can be used for daily meetings along with a stopwatch to ensure timeboxing and with a Scrum Master. moderating the session to answer the three questions: what did we do yesterday? What if we are going to do today? And what if we have impediments?

#7: Promote participatory decision

Agile teams must have a high commitment and participation where the empowerment of the team is favored more and less direction of command and control in the projects.

For example, if we find ourselves assigning weights to user stories we can use tools such as simple voting, thumbs up / down / sideways, voting from 0 to 5, among others. In this way, the whole team will participate.

Source: Course "Agility and Digital Transformation" by miguel angel vera of structuralia.

Lastly, tell me in the comments what other soft skills do you use in your agile projects?