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I’ve worked in over ten different agile teams; I’ve worked in scrum teams, I’ve worked in Kanban, and I’ve worked in something in between. The only two constant’s I’ve noticed is
· every single team has worked in a different way than the next
· every single team is convinced it’s not doing it right
I think that if teams are practising Agile correctly, then every team must operate differently. I know this is against the standard theories and practices that everyone keeps telling you but, let me explain. The agile principle I believe in the most is Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I describe this as “People, over processes and tools” and what that means to me is. People come first. If your team hates stand-ups, don’t do them. If a team member hates speaking up, don’t make them. If your team hates a Friday deploy don’t do it.
Here’s another example, I used to be in a team, and we had a twenty-minute stand-up; didn’t matter what we did we always ended up back at a twenty-minute stand-up. Over the months, we tried everything we could to reduce the stand-up. We talked about it in retro, we used alarms, we even tried an open meeting format so that people could leave when they want or not even show up. Still, after a few iterations, the stand-up time crept back up. I should have said at the beginning, why were we trying to change our stand-up length. Not because we were not hitting our deadlines or velocity was reducing, or we were wanting to increase team morale. We were desperately trying to change the team behaviour because we thought we were doing it wrong, but we were doing it right for us.
I’ve also been in a team where if stand up lasted more than three minutes, people would get agitated. I’ve learned its ok to have different processes for the different teams I’ve been in.
Don’t try and be the perfect agile team; Perfect is the enemy of good. Take each day at a time and don’t worry if you’re not following every process written in every book entirely. If you’re not doing them its because you’re doing things more important. That might change tomorrow, but that’s a problem for future you.
Find out more about agile-together here
