Few Simple Tweaks to Boost Value Shipping

I have used following simple tweaks to produce great benefits in our endeavor of shipping value to the market.
To implement these tweaks we spent zero money and it does not ask for any certification either.  All it took was an open mind and some practice.  
Maybe this could help your teams too.

1) Parallel Testing:: It needs some mindset change. All it requires is Dev+QA participation while PM/PO is describing the User Story and a common desire by Dev+QA to produce good code.
An additional benefit of this practice would be, QA fols stop thinking that "Logging MORE bugs" is the yardstick of their performance.
They would inculcate thinking that NOT allowing a bug to creep in, is their real yardstick of their performance.

Even a mason knows the right time to use his plum bob is, while building the wall, not after building it.

2) Merge Columns:: On your wall board (whatever board you call it) you should not have 2 separate columns for “Development” & “Testing”. Having these 2 columns is as good as giving a license for having silos for "Dev" & "Testing".
Just merge these 2 columns into a single column and call it “Building”. You will see the magic it brings in terms of team collaboration, particularly between Coding and Testing functions. 
A work item (UserStory / UserStorySlice) in this column becomes joint ownership of Developers & Testers. It will come out of this column, only when Developers AND Testers feel happy about it. 
You will see how radically it reduces to and fro between Dev & QA.

3) Vertical Slicing:: Slicing User Story needs zero money. Though it needs some practice by PM/PO. It also needs some change in the way PO & Dev decide to ship. It needs some curtailing of ambition for Shipping the entire User Story in one go.
This sounds a bit counterintuitive, but this is extremely effective as it avoids a good amount of wastage from being built.

4) Information Radiator:: Radiating only those metrics that matter is crucial. Deciding your North Star metrics involves some thinking, actually a good amount of team thinking, (sometimes involves heated arguments within the team). A team needs just 2 things for an  Information Radiator
(a) a brutally transparent way of working and (b) a large monitor placed in a common area.
Placing your Information Radiator in the corridor on the way to the coffee machine is a perfect choice. Radiating the information to ALL (within the team as well as outside the team) is the key. The money spent on the large monitor will be paid back 100 times in a matter of 2 months. 

Information Radiator nudges us to focus on the right questions and helps us to avoid wasting time on bike-shedding.

5) Acceptance Criteria:: Start working on a UserStory only if it mentions some Acceptance Criteria (even if it is minimal). Inculcating this discipline of mentioning Acceptance Criteria costs zero money and this practice will reduce the chances of getting a boomerang from the customers. It nudges the PO to develop good outward focus and that hugely helps the PO while describing the User Story to the team.
At the same time, the team (particularly the Dev Team) must keep in mind, insisting on Acceptance Criteria is just to nudge ourselves for a better discovery process. It should not be treated as a Contract.