Agile Principle 8 — Maintain constant pace indefinitely — Myth or Reality?
Do the following phrases sound familiar?
- There are too many distractions, I cannot focus on my tasks
- These production issues hamper our progress
- I hope I can focus on my actual work for one day
- I am too busy, I have too much to do
- We hate unfinished work at the end of the sprint but we are not sure how to improve
How a team achieves sustainable development in this situation? The 8th principle of agile. In reality, it will be hard to find any agile team 100% dedicated to a single project that can enable such a capability. The agile teams are constantly interrupted by many things such as production issues, mentoring, estimations for new work, technical issues, company meetings to name a few. This creates low morale, less engagement, and productivity and general unhappiness. The teams can be extremely busy while accomplishing little.
Sometimes, little attention is paid to a team’s collective state of mind to maximize productivity A critical ingredient for achieving a constant pace. Can a team reach a mental state with maximum productivity to achieve sustainable development?
There is a term for that — flow state. This is our story of how we improved our agility and throughput by improving Scrum, implementing aspects of Kan-ban through the flow state lens.
In positive psychology, a flow state, also known as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
The good news is, you can create factors that will facilitate this flow state. Aspects of Scrum and Kan-ban are a natural fit for the flow factors that enable flow state. I will share with practical examples of how we have created a reusable framework utilizing Scrum, Kan-ban and other agile best practice principles through flow state lens.
Athletes, artists, authors, musicians, and engineers experience this state. You probably yourself might have experienced it.
The flow theory was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s who studied the artists, scientists, athletes and other people that engage in creative work in a state of hyper-focus and high level of engagement.
This is the highest productivity state that you can achieve. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about factors that help people enter Flow State.
The 5 critical factors are
- Rewarding and Challenging Work
- Clear Goals
- Clear and Immediate Feedback
- Measure your progress
- Intense Focus
Now imagine if you can implement these factors for an agile team. Good agile teams are very productive and if you can facilitate the team members to enter Flow State more often, you can turn a good team into a great team. A team that can achieve a constant pace despite the challenges.
This is how we do this.
1. Rewarding and Challenging Work
We aim to create tasks (user stories) that are challenging and will stretch the ability of the team members. If the tasks are too simple, this will create boredom and if the task is too challenging that this will create anxiety. So be careful in creating tasks and get the balance right. We also create work to conduct regular R&D and tech talk sessions to provide rewarding and meaningful work to the team members.
Another important aspect is to tell the bigger story to the team. The impact of the work that the team is doing in improving business processes or helping customers should be highlighted at every opportunity.
2. Clear Goals
Use Scrum Sprint Goals effectively. Create meaningful goals and use the language of the business to ensure that when the team meets the goals they have provided an improvement (working software) to their clients.
3. Clear and immediate Feed
Vertically Slice the user stories into work that can be completed within a few days. Aim for a high level of collaboration during development between clients, product owners, business analysts, and developers. Create a feedback loop that is much shorter than two weeks. For example, we have now created a two-day feedback loop with our clients instead of two weeks. The team will get clear and immediate feedback
4. Measure Progress
We created an internal tool that enables the team members to monitor their progress using a wide range of parameters. This is not just a user story progression that can be tracked using JIRA or scrum board but a 360-degree live progress measurement board giving team members to measure feature completion against parent stories, budget and time.
5. Intense Focus
We have implemented Kanban principles into our teamwork ethics to create an increased focus. This is done using WIP limits, Focus on finishing before starting, reducing context switching and small meaningful slices of work. More on this can be found at my Kanban blog.
I believe that we have come up with a reusable framework that can be configured and optimized for your own teams to maintain a constant pace. Try it and let me know if you benefit from it.
