I interact with team members all of the time. They speak in terms of:
Their leaders have made them “go agile”;
That it’s not going the way they want it to be;
That things are worse than before;
Or that nothing has changed, they’re still underappreciated, overworked and stressed out.
You get the picture.
But when I dig a little deeper, I find that they (the teams themselves) haven’t really been doing agile (Scrum, Kanban, story writing, estimation, etc.) very well. They’ve been going through the motions and picking the aspects that feel the most comfortable for them.
If I reference Scrum, then it’s what Schawber called many years ago a Scrum-but. They’re only doing a few parts of it, not getting much value, and complaining that it’s not working.
The POWER
You see the problem is that you need to truly dive into things to get the real value out of it. For example, transparency. The teams need to change their behavior so that they truly are transparent in everything they do.
Perhaps hard to do initially, but essential in order to gain the benefits.
I want to truly challenge folks who aren’t seeing benefits from their agile efforts to self-reflect. Really examine their practices and approaches. And, if they’re skipping some things, to add those back to their experiments. To try to do the very best they can to become fully immersed in all of the principles and practices.
Wrapping Up
One of the keys to agile transformation is applying the principles and doing the practices as a whole. Independent of whether your leadership team is supportive of them or not.
If they’ve asked you to “go Agile”, then they’ve given you permission to not only do it but to do it WELL. So, give them what they asked for and see what happens.
You might be surprised at the results…and I’m sure they will be as well.
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.