This is Sempiternal

sempiternal

/ˌsɛmpɪˈtəːn(ə)l/

adjective

LITERARY

1. eternal and unchanging; everlasting.
2. “the sempiternal sadness of the industrial background”

It is a circle after all. Credit:https://unsplash.com/photos/ZPP-zP8HYG0

In March 2013 the British postrock Band Bring me the Horizon released their critically acclaimed fourth LP “Sempiternal.”

While being a fan of the band from their beginnings — and I could go on for many blog entries about why they are the most innovative force in rock music today — something else is our main focus here. Ever since I first heard the word sempiternal it got stuck in my head. Where is the connection to agile frameworks?

Let me explain.

Now that I spent some time in my new company, the grasp of daily business slowly but surely gets me. In the beginning there was this patriotic motivation for change, large scale projects, and naive creation.

Let me start with saying that this hasn’t died by any stretch in practice as the environment is still very open to change. What has changed though is the slow but steady decline into micro managing all kinds of things. Let it be human interaction, how tasks should be estimated, which improvement ticket is still not solved after several weeks, and so on. This in not specifically a critique. After all, there are roles that have inherited micro managing as their core work (looking at you middle management).

The agile answer to this is self organization. The more we do without having to ask someone, or are dependent on their orders, the more we are self organized. That is why the Scrum guide states that in an ideal Scrum team there is no need for a Scrum Master. An agile mindset in its core is the ability to do as much stuff as possible by self organization.

So you give a team or an organization a framework (best case suited individually) and teach them how to act on their own, with as little help as possible, within it. This means in conclusion, you try to turn down micro management to the highest low possible, and make it obsolete in the best case.

The constant work of an agile coach is to make him/herself obsolete. And now it’s getting, at least in my opinion, contradictory. A process is never finished. You can always tweak it, it will always be in motion, it will, especially if your organization is evolutionary, never be “the one thing that works completely on its own”.

Working as a Scrum Master or agile Coach on its own is a highly undefined job. It has to adapt to whatever organization you face. While I would state that programming is in its core a very linear occupation, working as a Scrum Master is the direct opposite. It’s a circle of sense and respond. It’s a circle of inspect and adapt. And the same is, as far as I am concerned, true for product management in agile teams, at least to greater degree because all the individual parameters of a team bleed into it.

And while it may be in the nature of project management oder product ownership to tend to micro management (even if it should be avoided when possible) it is the same for agile coaches. Just not from the “view of the customer”. You begin to adopt the perspective of your team members and their individualities. And you start micro managing them organically at some point. Here’s why:

1. One harsh reality is, it makes up a lot of the substance and right to exist for an agile Coach or Scrum Master.
2. After all, you look after things that your team should do besides their core activities. And a lot of these things need the attention of your team members and can only be solved by working closely with them.
3. You are a facilitator and what often comes along with that are managing activities within your team or organization in broad. You gotta push people to come on time, to stay open minded and so on.

So after all you are doing a lot of micro managing — maybe consciously or unconsciously, maybe with intent or unintendedly.

So let’s add together:

Your purpose should be to make yourself obsolete.

(Evolutionary or revolutionary) processes are never finished.

You should aim to teach self organization.

Micro management will likely, on a constant base, be inevitable.

Well, that’s what Germans call a “Teufelskreis”, a vicious circle. This is sempiternal.

In the end, only one question: Am I agile enough?

Disclaimer: This is not some sort of ranting, it is more some kind of realization, and maybe (at least for me) a clarification of my job. It is an update to what I thought the job of Scrum Master was when I started versus what I learned trough working in a small agency, teaching courses at a university, working in a fairly large company and talking to a lot of other people in the area of IT and agile.