Agile Is Useless For A Lazy Team
Never awaken those who pretending to sleep
A Lazy Team Sucks
I’ve kept the post for several months, and thought one day I should write an article talking about how to kick off an agile revolution in baby steps and what should be considered to increase the probability of success.
When I read the post for the first time, I felt sympathy for the poster’s situation because I could fully be in his shoes feel how hard he had tried to struggle with kanban. And obviously he suffered from tough conditions from members. Let me summarize some points of the post as below:
- The team transitioned to kanban, but didn’t buy in
The poster did not explain why they decided to transition from sprinted work to kanban practice. But it was apparently that the team didn’t buy in the practice.
- Skip regular ceremonies in Kanban
And then, the team intentionally ignore the regular events in Kanban practice. They tried not to communicate, not improving process based on the cadence review, cycle time not adopted, no WIP limit, and got resistant to breaking stories, which explicitly pointed out the immaturity of them.
- Some thought sprinted work is better than Kanban
Even worse, some people felt sprinted work was better than Kanban. Well, I don’t think so, and it might be an excuse not to abide by the rules. Because they never really took it into practice, not to mention sprinted work would worked for them.
Implicit Reasons Behind The Situation
Why did it happen? I had once came through the same situation before. In my opinion, I think there were primary 3 reasons for the context.
Firstly, it was immature members that caused the atmosphere. I think many project managers, or agile coaches, might have come across the similar scenario. No matter how hard you had tried to lead members to achieve common goals or let them understand best practices. They get passive to what you told, or even do the opposite to object your intention.
For a low self-organized team, the harder you push, more tired you feel.
And then, the supervisor did not play a key role to deal with the situation, even just let it go. In this case, the poster did not get the sponsorship from the management, so even if he wanted to implement agile best practices but nobody supported him, which became an obstacle to process improvement.
Finally, the hiring process might have failed in the very beginning. Because it is transparently that they already hired passive members due to some consideration, such as budget limitation, urgent requirements, etc. And unsuitable partners resulted in unacceptable collaboration model.
As you identified the above patterns happening in your environment, I won’t suggest you do anything aggressive. Instead, I suggest you actively do nothing to keep your energy.
The Best Moment to Kick Off Agile Revolution
As an experience agile practitioner, I won’t advise you to start agile revolution immediately unless 3 conditions were satisfied in your environment, as below.
- aggressive members
I still remembered how powerless it was to cope with passive members, because they often were against your endeavor to improve the process. Therefore, for an experienced agile coach, he is supposed to build relationship with members, identify potential ones who are aggressive, and unite them to accumulate impact over the organization. When the group is formed, it gets easy for your to lead them to understand agile mindset. - management sponsorship
Whoever you are, a scrum master, an agile coach, or a product owner, you need the sponsorship from the management. Before I try to lead a team to adopt agile best practices, I would talk with the management regarding why and what I would do to the team; seek alignment with the organization. Because I clearly understand agile transformation without management support is just bullshit. - experienced agile practitioner
Finally, it is an experienced agile evangelist that matters to start the revolution. I don’t care if the role should be a scrum master, a project manager or what. After all, everyone could become a change agent that motivates others to adopt agile methodologies. From my point of view, the professional should be able to identify defects of work process and make use of suitable options to seek continuous improvement, instead of just copying what agile best practices say.
Baby Steps to Lead a Team to Get Agile
If your environment involves the above 3 conditions, it is highly possible that you need not forward the wrong direction and next question is how to make a team used to iterative and incremental work model. In my opinion, I would do 3 things to revolutionize the way it works, with baby steps.
First of all, I would sprinted the development work to lead a team to deliver increments within a short, periodic duration. Indeed, I don’t really suggest you adopt contemporary frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, or XP, etc. Instead, try to make the team accustomed to deliver workable increments in an iterative and incremental manner. If they are able to achieve this, it gets cost-effective to coach them constructive practices in agile methodologies.
Secondly, I would set clear goals and expectations for each sprint. Sprinting the development work is insufficient for members to collaborate together. They need to understand why they should deliver increments and what kinds of goals they have to achieve, and further collaborate to talk about how to take requirements into practice.
Lastly, constructing feedback loops improves the sprinted model. You cannot expect a correct result with a repetitive, false pattern. Usually we would stop for a while to review what happens during each sprint, reveal problematic patterns that endanger a team’s performance, and brainstorm solutions to improve them. In this way, a team could gradually correct defects for sprints and gets better than ever. In fact, most team would fail for the first several sprints because they might over-select items, underestimate complexities, etc. Therefore feedback loops become a turning point to adapt themselves to real conditions.
Coach’s Murmur
For the poster, I did approve of his actions trying to motivate members to improve the working model. However, he might ignore some implicit key points that would impact the result, and even worse injure his reputation. In this article, I’ve led you to analyze why agile adoption fails, what exactly the reasons are, what conditions should be fulfilled, and how to effectively kick off a simple agile transformation.
Let Me Help You
Now I provide free, 1–1 online consulting service. If you have any agile related problems or project management issues, please reserve a web call with me. I would answer your questions as possible as I could.
👉 Book now: https://calendly.com/uragilecoach/consulting
🎁 Anyone who reserves for the web call would be rewarded with a secret gift that helps you grow on project management skills.
If you acknowledge the value I share with you, do as below:
1. 👏 the article
2. subscribe me for latest contents
3. follow me on other platforms for further information
- IG: @ur_agile_coach
- Podcast: Agile Rocket
- Youtube: Your Agile Coach
- LinkedIn: Tsung-Hsiang Wu
- Twitter: @ur_agile_coac
