Curing TANS: a corporate disease that is your handicap to value
One of the worst things a Scrum Team can do when creating value is procrastinating. Not doing what matters right now. It seems to me that the “right now” part is quite often overlooked and therefore we’re not creating the beautiful products we could be building.
But I found out what is causing the problem here. And it’s infectious. It has already been spreading throughout the majority of large organizations. In this article, I hope to help you diagnose whether your company has contracted it, too. But before we do that, let me tell you what it is. I’m getting shivers just thinking about it. It’s called… TANS (There’s Always a Next Sprint).
Acceptance is the first step
Let’s get the hardest step out of the way first. It’s likely that you’re blind to having TANS. And I get it, it’s not an easy thing to stand up, and say “we are TANSaholics”. Lucky for you, there’s a cure. But let’s start with assessing if you actually have it or not. Symptoms to look out for are most often like this:
- Diluted focus; Sprint Goals are not clearly formed how they provide a stepping stone toward Product Goals. Sprint Backlog items, therefore, don’t have a clear reason why they’re being worked on, the then “stakeholder X wants it”.
