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empowerment

The 95% Rule for Agile Leaders

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The 95% Rule for Agile Leaders

Now that I think about it, a “rule” sounds a whole lot more formal than I intend it. Perhaps I should call it a guideline or a heuristic or a thinking tool?

Ah, I don’t know. Let’s get into it and make that determination afterwards.

The Rule

It’s simple really. It revolves around telling your teams what to do. That is providing your directives, strong opinions, and guidance when you’re interacting with your fledgling agile teams.

The premise is that for every 100 opportunities that you are confronted with in your organization to provide prescriptive advice to your teams, you get no more than 5 times to actually tell your teams what to do.

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The Agile Project Manager—Do You TRUST Your Team?

As an agile coach, one of my favorite expressions in response to nearly any situation I encounter in an agile team is—“trust the team” or “trust the process”. So here are a few examples of what I mean:

If you think the team has underestimated their work and are leaving velocity on the table, “trust the team”…

- If they have underestimated they can always pull in more work. And you know, you could be wrong, so allow the team to sort through how they understand, size, and execute their work. They’ll appreciate the trust you’ve given them and will invest in doing good work.

- If you do see poor estimation or poor execution & adjustment, then bring this to the attention of the team within their retrospective. Give them examples, but allow them to explore the most effective way(s) to improve.

The Agile Project Manager—The Cost of Transparency

The Agile Project Manager—The Cost of Transparency

As I learn and grow my agile experience, I continue to find value and power in the notion of transparency. It’s one of the softer of the agile tenets and one that gets mentioned often, but rarely emphasized as a critical success factor.

So what is transparency? Let me give you an example. In many agile instances teams and structure don’t simply come into being. Usually functional managers or other leaders put some serious thought into the composition of their initial agile teams: