If you come to our team’s area in the FT’s London offices, a strange sight will greet your eyes: massed ranks of Post-it notes, arranged in colourful groups across an entire wall.

What are we up to, and why are we doing it? It’s at the heart of an experiment by our team to find better ways to process our work and to improve the way we work together as a team. We are adopting some of the agile methods that have transformed how software is developed across the world and are applying them to our work as lawyers and compliance professionals. For further information, see Practice note, Agile software development methods.

Above all, it’s our latest attempt to manage that perennial problem for in-house lawyers: too much work and too many things to do at once.

It all began with marshmallows.

An agile trainer from FT’s Technology department came to one of our team meetings late last year and set us a challenge: who could eat eight large marshmallows most quickly? One of us would eat the marshmallows one by one and the other (me) would have to shove them all in his mouth at once.

The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate why it’s more efficient (and less stressful) to work on one task at a time rather than trying to jump between multiple tasks (context-switching). Sure enough, my colleague, eating her marshmallows one by one, not only finished more quickly than me but also had a far more enjoyable time in the process. One of the aims of agile working is to encourage that “one by one” approach to completing tasks.

Agile working takes a variety of forms and the approach our team has adopted is based (loosely) on the kanban system. At its most basic, kanban categorises tasks as "to do", "doing" and "done". A task (written on a Post-it note) will start in the “to do” column, move to “doing” and end up (one hopes) as “done”.

Our tasks therefore fall mostly into four main categories: "backlog”; "week”; “today”; and "done”. Essentially, this splits the “to do” tasks into those we’re planning to get done this week and the “Backlog” of tasks that are going to have to wait.

The method we follow is similar to that used by Lonely Planet’s legal team and our agile quest was initially sparked by a video in which Kate Sullivan, Lonely Planet's GC, describes how her team adopted the system. This article provides further information on Lonely Planet's use of agile working.

At the heart of the agile process is the daily “stand-up” where we gather round the kanban board for 15 minutes each morning to review the work “Done” the previous day. We then decide which “Week” tasks we’re each planning to do “Today”, moving our (individually colour-coded) Post-it notes as we do so.

Every Tuesday, we extend the stand-up to around 45 minutes for a more in-depth review of the week (or “sprint”) just gone, and what we’re planning to do over the coming week. This provides an opportunity to review what has gone well and not so well, and why some tasks may have remained stuck at the “Week” stage.

Incidentally, for those wondering about confidentiality, task descriptions don’t go into much detail, and highly confidential matters can be referred to by a code name (and could even be left off the board altogether if necessary).

In her video, Lonely Planet’s GC Kate Sullivan, describes the transformational impact agile working had on managing what had been intolerable work levels for a small team. Although the effect was less dramatic for us, the introduction of agile working methods has still been a positive experience. We already worked on a system of “KCPs” (key contact points) where each team member focuses on particular internal clients, so we were in less need of a way to handle the problem of “everyone having to deal with queries from everyone.”

However, a KCP-based approach can have a siloing effect, and it’s here that agile methods have had the biggest positive impact. We’re all now much more familiar with what other team members are doing and, in particular, the lawyers are more aware of what the compliance team are working on, and vice-versa. This helps us to identify and address issues more quickly and also improves team cohesion. Our GC has also found it useful to get a daily oversight of what the team is working on.

Here are a few tips, based on our experience, for other teams who may be contemplating adopting a similar scheme:

Agile won’t be a panacea for every team, but if you’re a small or medium-sized team dealing with issues of workflow management, it’s well worth looking into. All you need are some Post-it notes, marker pens, and enough free wall space…