5 Actionable Steps to Align Agile Teams

Misaligned teams are like rowing a boat in different directions—plenty of effort, but no progress. But alignment doesn’t have to be elusive; it just requires a set of simple, common-sense practices.

In this article, I’ll show you five actionable principles to foster alignment, collaboration, and continuous delivery in any Agile environment. So let’s do it!

What is Alignment?

Alignment means that all teams are working in the same direction toward a shared goal. No hidden agendas, no conflicting priorities—just one clear, common purpose that unites every team and individual.

Misalignment occurs when teams start working on conflicting objectives, creating confusion, wasted effort, and, ultimately, a failure to deliver business value. Alignment ensures the entire organization moves forward as a cohesive unit, delivering meaningful and impactful results.

Alignment is simple: one goal, one objective, one vision—for all teams and individuals. When everyone is on the same page, the organization can move forward as a cohesive unit, delivering meaningful and impactful results.

Common Problems Seen Without Alignment

1. Conflicting Team Goals
   Teams work toward different objectives that contradict each other, creating inefficiency and friction. Dependencies become burdensome instead of collaborative steps toward progress.

2. High WIP (Work in Progress)
   Misaligned organizations often suffer from high WIP, leading to inefficiency, excessive task switching, and decreased flow. This problem arises when capacity and demand are mismatched—stakeholders push for more work than the organization can realistically deliver.

3. Low Business Impact
   Teams focus on tasks that fail to contribute meaningfully to overall business goals, diluting the organization’s impact. Often, work gets prioritized simply because it’s in the backlog, rather than because it aligns with the shared vision and increases business value.

4. Missed or Unresolved Dependencies
   Misalignment often results in teams neglecting, misunderstanding, or underestimating critical dependencies. This leads to delays, wasted effort, and a lack of coordination, undermining delivery timelines and quality.

Reasons for Misalignment

• Lack of Shared Vision, Purpose, and Goals
  Without a clear and unified direction, teams are left to interpret priorities on their own, leading to conflicting objectives.

• Lack of Coordination Between Teams
  Teams operate in silos, failing to synchronize their efforts and collaborate effectively on shared outcomes.

• Late Integration of Work
  When teams integrate their outputs too late, issues with dependencies and mismatched deliverables surface, creating delays and inefficiencies.

• Demos Not Attended by Dependent Teams
  Teams fail to engage with each other’s work through regular demos, missing opportunities to resolve interdependencies, align progress, and course-correct collaboratively.

Addressing these root causes is critical for fostering alignment and driving impactful results across empowered teams.

Five Keys to Better Alignment

1. Start with a Shared Vision
   Align everyone around a clear purpose and a shared vision to ensure all efforts contribute in the same direction.

2. Empower Teams to Define Objectives
   Let teams plan and set their own goals and objectives, aligned with the shared vision, to foster ownership, accountability, and intrinsic motivation.

3. Encourage Collaboration on Dependencies
   Promote direct communication and collaboration between teams to address overlaps and interdependencies effectively. Teams own their own dependencies; needing a leader to coordinate is seen as a failure.

4. Deliver and Integrate Often
   Deliver value frequently—double as often as you think necessary—to maintain momentum and quickly uncover issues with alignment. Never let integration debt grow.

5. Demo and Reflect Together
   Regularly showcase progress, share feedback, and reflect as a group to ensure alignment and continuous improvement. Remember that a dependency always has a supplier and a receiver. The supplier demos, and the receiver accepts. If no receiver can be defined, reconsider if this is truly prioritized work.

By applying these five keys, organizations can transform misaligned teams into a cohesive, high-performing network working toward shared goals.

How?

1. Plan Regularly
   Align demand with capacity by engaging in regular planning cycles, such as every 6–12 weeks. Allow teams to define their own objectives and dependencies while empowering them to resolve dependencies collaboratively. Make dependencies, and deliveries, visual on a board or in a tool.

2. Create Space for Communication
   Facilitate frequent communication between teams to address dependencies and resolve issues as they arise. Use techniques like daily Scrum of Scrums or similar to promote cross-team collaboration. Use the dependency board.

3. Leverage Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
   Build a robust CI/CD pipeline capable of running frequently—ideally several times a day. Automate testing extensively to enable frequent integration and avoid accumulating integration debt, even in hardware-driven workflows.

4. Adopt a No-Fault Policy
   Ensure that faults during integration are addressed immediately. Failing is acceptable, but issues must be fixed promptly to maintain progress and reliability. Adapt fail fast, fix fast.

5. Embed Demos in the Workflow
   Make demos a critical part of the workflow. Schedule demos as milestones in your planning process, and establish that nothing is considered "done" until it has been demonstrated. This practice fosters alignment, accountability, and shared understanding.

By integrating these practices into your organization’s workflow, you can build a rhythm of collaboration and delivery that ensures consistent, high-quality outcomes and better team alignment.

Conclusion

Implementing these practices fosters a culture of collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement. By planning regularly, visualizing dependencies, fostering communication, leveraging robust CI/CD pipelines, adopting a no-fault policy, and embedding demos into the workflow, organizations can align teams effectively and deliver high-quality outcomes consistently.

These principles not only help manage complexity but also promote transparency and trust across teams, ensuring that every dependency and deliverable is well-understood and addressed. With this approach, your organization will be better equipped to navigate challenges and sustain long-term success.

You can call it agile, DevOps, value-driven delivery, or something else—the principles apply in any modern, non-waterfall environment. You don’t need to call it agile; it’s just common sense.

Which of these principles is your organization missing? What will you do next to start implementing it?

Last updated Jan 29, 2025