For years and years, I've been a strong advocate of goal-setting within your agile teams. Ares where I think goals are important include:
- At the daily stand, focusing the conversations towards the teams' goals;
- During sprint planning and at the sprint review, focus towards the sprint goal;
- If you're doing releases, ala SAFe release trains or a similar mechanism, then having a release-level goal is important;
- To me, Definition of Done and Definition of Ready, are goal-oriented. Providing clarity on the teams' constraints;
But...
Does anybody remember the Cool and the Gang song Celebrate?
I sure hope so.
I want to write a short post about celebrations. For some reason I've encountered quite a few teams lately who are struggling. They're completing sprints and releases without getting much in the way done or meeting expectations.
In other words, they're ending their efforts: sad, depressed, without a sense of accomplishment. In a word, they’ve got no reason to – Celebrate.
Of course there are many reasons for it and I can't possibly explore all of them here. But the examples have made me reflect back on some of my best experiences with teams delivering “the goods”, and I wanted to share an example.
