My Team Is Broken…Let’s Try Agile
There is no process, methodology or programme that you can follow that will compensate for having the wrong people in your team to start with.
At a recent event a very interesting discussion was triggered by an aggressive question from one of the attendees. The essence of this question was: “What do you guys want? I’m not a developer, but I know what I want and I go out there and make it happen. You guys spend a year deciding what programming language to use! How do I make you produce something?”
The ensuing discussion started well enough with several people pointing out that forming a team of developers (one java, one .net and one PHP) and then asking them to choose the technology to use is probably the wrong way to approach a project. It then deteriorated into something of a lecture on how if he “adopted agile” he would have a product owner to make these decisions, the devs would start holding hands and singing Kumbaya every morning, his product would be built and everyone would live happily ever after.
Really? Is improving your team’s performance as simple as taking off your old flannelette Waterfall shirt and replacing it with the latest hipster Agile t-shirt? Of course not.
This team has people problems. They are not even close to the point where they can think about process problems. If you build a team with people who can’t make decisions and then fail to provide the leadership (or find a leader) to guide them through the complicated process of building a new software product then that team is destined to fail before a gannt chart is drawn or a hand of planning poker dealt.
A product owner might help solve the situation this team finds itself in. But she will do it because of her personal qualities, not because she calls herself a product owner and will apply an “agile process” to the team.
The Agile Manifesto states “we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over process and tools.” Sometimes I feel this has been corrupted into “we value agile processes and tools over individuals and interactions.”
Think about Brad Pitt. For the sake of this argument let’s agree he is a good looking guy. When he puts on a suit or even a t-shirt and shorts two things happen. First, he continues to look good because he won the genetic lottery. Second, he makes the clothes he is wearing look good. Now imagine I come along and put the same clothes on. I’m no Freddy Krueger but I will probably look like a balding, greying, thirty-something guy trying too hard to be cool. But there are clothes out there that make me look as good as is possible given the raw materials they have to work with. Well, I hope so anyway.
The point is that if you have a talented bunch of people who work well together then they would probably make an anarchic work environment look good (Github anyone?). Sadly, most of us are going to work with people who tend towards the average. Blindly copying the working practices or methodologies of the Brad Pitt’s of the development world will not suddenly transform our teams into superstars. Take inspiration, sure, but find the style that suits your team based on the individuals in it and the way they interact with each other and the project stakeholders.
Oh, and if your team looks like Freddy Krueger, there is no way of dressing it up to look better. You’ll just have to kill it somehow and hope it doesn’t come back from the dead.
