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How Do You Vote Someone Off of Your Agile Team?One of the conundrums of agile conversion is that although you are ordered by management to "self-organize," you don't get to pick your own team. You may not have pictured it this way, but your agile team members are going to be the same people you worked with before, when you were all doing waterfall! I know I wasn't picturing it that way for my first agile team, so I thought I should warn you. (I thought I was going to get between six and eight original Agile Manifesto signers. That didn't happen.).
Why "warn" you (as opposed to "reassure" you, say)? Because the agile process is going to reveal every wart, mole, quirk, goiter, and flatulence issue on the team within a few hours. In the old days, you could all be eccentric or even unpleasant in your own cube, communicating only by document, wiki, email, and, in extreme situations, by phone. Now you are suddenly forced to interact in real time, perhaps in person, with written messaging as the last resort. And because this is new to all of you, you will feel stressed out, and you will not be at your best. I guarantee that your first thought is going to be: "how do I vote someone off?"
From starpulse.com <more>
- WAIT: Crucial Consulting Advice
So you want to be a consultant. You probably think this will involve yourself talking and your client respectfully listening. Your client will put you in front of her team to present a PowerPoint deck outlining how Everything Will Be Different Now. You will then distribute copies of your Initiative Plan to each of her subordinates. Once you have given everyone their marching orders, they will do exactly what you outlined in orderly fashion.
But just to make sure, you personally will visit offices in New York, London, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo to double-check that everyone is doing what they should. You will shop in Rome, buy gadgets at the Seattle Space Needle, have some fabulous meals along the way, and you will reach 1K Status this year. That is why you want to be a consultant--you want to be consulted!
Not so fast, El Guapo! Overbearing, meddling, quick to take offense and quicker to offend: you aren't James Bond. You are everyone's...mother in law. Yes, even if you are a guy. Guys are the worst mothers in law.
http://www.bizcrecise.com/lifestyle/what-your-mother-in-law-is-trying-to-tell-you/ <more>
- Lead and Lag Measures for Agile Transformation
"Oh for goodness sake, you put it in upside down!"
"I'm sorry, Secret. I thought the pointy end went in first."
-Secret Squirrel and Morrocco Mole, Secret Squirrel
I'm always excited to learn something new, and this week a colleague introduced me to the "Lead/Lag" concept of measuring the performance of a change program such as an agile transformation. He also introduced me to the "Secret Squirrel (and Morocco Mole)" Hannah-Barbera cartoon series from the 1960s, which briefly seemed to be a more interesting thing to discuss, but I'm pretty sure you guys should all pursue that on your own without further commentary from me. We agilists are a fun bunch.<more>
- Ignite Your Own Interpersonal Feedback Revolution
The concepts of "continuous feedback" and "continuous improvement" are central to agile and lean philosophy. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen have a wonderful book entirely about team retrospectives. "Inspect and adapt" itself, the 12th principle underlying the Agile Manifesto, has been subject to inspection and adaptation and trumped by "Plan-Do-Check-Act." Teams, processes, work-in-progress--all are ideally subject to frequent observation and tuning.
But what about the people? As agilists (or non-agilists with common sense), we recognize that we succeed or fail based on the quality of the people and interactions on a team, regardless of the process followed. If we are going to squeeze maximum value out of ourselves, shouldn't we be putting something in place to tune our people even before we tune our processes? The grim specter of Annual Reviews rears its ugly head. Or "360-degree Feedback."<more>
- Delegation, Meet Agile
You might not expect to encounter the "delegation" concept in a blog post about agile software development. After all, agile is all about the "self governing team." But in the real world, if you are in a company which is transitioning to agile, and you are the project manager of a newly created agile team, you may well need to consider how to create a situation around your team that allows self-governance to emerge without making you completely crazy. In real life, your first few weeks with your agile team can seem like your worst nightmare. This is not because there is something wrong with you. This is completely predictable. Stop blaming yourself.
If your team is used to having you, as a project manager, take all the responsibility, and you suddenly stop telling people what to do, (along with not setting up their meetings, not taking their notes, and not getting them a projector every single time for every single meeting), you should not expect them to do what is needed, no matter what the Agile Founding Fathers say. Instead, your team members, being humans, will go ahead and take advantage of you and do whatever they feel like doing. And remember, they are under a bunch of stress themselves with this whole "agile transformation" thing, so you're not seeing them at their best.<more>
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