An agile principle often overlooked
An individual’s performance depends on two factors: ability and motivation. One of the principles in Agile is to build projects around motivated individuals. Typically, there is emphasis on religiously abiding by scrum roles, ceremonies, backlog management, story granularity, frequent delivery of software, etc. but the motivation level of the team members who are the primary stakeholders in all of the above processes is often ignored or rather always assumed to be positive.
In many organizations, managers doesn’t have too much choice in building a team for a project. They form the team by choosing individuals from within the organization who are available at the time of project initiation or recruit people from the market. So, it can be safely assumed that it is common to have an agile team comprised of individuals whose desire to accomplish tasks, strive to find better ways to do things, and achieve product success are not established and should not be taken for granted.
A team comprising of motivated individuals that has the capability to self-organize is a prerequisite to truly benefit from Agile methodology.
The expectations from the team members in agile are high. They are expected to deal with changing requirements, self-organize as a team, and show value addition to the product on a frequent basis while striving for good design and technical excellence. Since the management is expected to trust the team’s decisions completely without much interference and maintain a flat structure, the success or failure of a project is entirely dependent on the team. This puts agile projects at higher risk even when a few individuals in the team are not motivated and lack interest.
Highlighting lack of motivation in team members as a key risk in agile projects and listing things that a scrum master can do to mitigate this risk is the objective of this article.
Identifying the reasons for lack of interest in team members and finding ways to motivate them is the only way to address this risk. Listed below are a few things that a scrum master, who has limited authority in a matrix structure, can pursue to motivate the team members:
- Interesting Work: Understand team member’s areas of interest and let him or her experiment with new technologies in that area (e.g., by building proof of concepts) within the scope of the project. Project him or her as a go-to person in that area within and outside your project.
- Recognition: Recognize and reward the high-performing members and make arrangements to assist the under-performing individuals. Though a flat structure is recommended by agile, not recognizing the efforts of high-performing individuals may discourage and prevent them from repeating the same performance.
- Business Impact: Make the team realize the impact of its work on the business and how it positively affects the firm (e.g., increase in revenue, savings in cost, making the life of users easy, etc.)
- Visibility: Improve the visibility of the team within the organization especially among the senior management. Provide them opportunities to present their work.
Managers should make use of the data recorded in project tracking software (e.g., JIRA) to derive metrics at team member level to assess their performance. They should identify the root causes for under-performance of the team members be it ability and/or motivation and proactively take steps to address it. Taking the motivation levels of the team members for granted and trusting their decisions completely in a flat structure without any oversight is a recipe for failure.
