New Year’s resolutions and Agile Delivery have a lot in common, and February is a good time to talk about the similarities. According to US News, 80% of resolutions fail by the second week of February.
When you make a resolution, your optimism about positive change is strong.
Much like a resolution identifies change that is needed and aspirational, Waterfall to Agile transformation holds great promise for organizations as well because of the:
ability to frequently validate with our business that we are on track
autonomy we grant teams as they alone set work pace and approach
clarity that user stories bring
The little-discussed secret of successful transformations is that they involve really smart people….who need to change. And, as US News notes, the deck is stacked against success, with most aspirational changes(resolutions) failing.
When I wrote this blog, our organization was in our 3rd year of Agile transformation, and making progress reinforcing change. These are ways we held on to our Agile resolutions:
Strengths clarity. Much as we assess our team on where their strengths lie and how to amplify those strengths, we do the same with Agile teams. We observe ceremonies and work, and define a different plan and goals for each team. More mature teams focus on refining prioritization of work, or expanding their capacity. Less mature teams focus on the consistent execution of scrum ceremonies, or a focused effort to swarm a challenge point like testing or writing stories.
Innovation | Autonomy. Just like a stand-up meeting has democratic participation from each member of the team, we have a lovingly titled Scrum Masters Support Group where teams bring best practices and problems to each other. This group has solved roadmap planning by leveraging an add on tool to Jira that one team discovered on their own. The issue of releases spanning multiple sprints was solved by another team. Retrospectives were made more effective with a public domain tool.
Let the Rabbits Run. We work hard to figure out ways to let people move fast, and stay out of their way. We still have accountability to executive leadership in how we track budgets, commitments to business, and expected deliveries. But we have adapted financial tracking, charters, architecture approval and cyber security review to better fit Agile and not be a barrier. Charters identify the iron triangle (whether scope, cost or time is primary criteria), epics that define work by priority, and the project vision. Architecture review is done in stages, and cyber review is embedded instead of front loaded to the projects.
Performance Coaching. Much like a resolution for fitness is more likely to succeed when a person has a coach, we adjust PMO strategy each year to offer personalized support to teams. Whether it is observation and feedback to ceremonies, the ongoing support group lunch and happy hours, or best practice review to solve issues, we coach one-on-one and sometimes in groups. We share a Scrum reference guide and create our own tools to enable scrum teams to execute their own health checks of processes.
Agile is revealing. A slacker team member has nowhere to hide in a daily stand-up. A product owner has to have a spine and make tough decisions about priority. A scrum master must find their peaceful inner self and have the health and consistency of team process as their most important focus.
When you give your teams thoughtful support, Agile also reveals powerful collaboration, results, team spirit and joy in delivery. And aspirational resolutions become reality.