I often encounter teams and team members who express frustration with Agile, saying it forces them to work too fast and accomplish nothing meaningful.
When I ask them what’s going on, they often share:
– They’re stuck in an “agile death march” with pre-determined tasks and deadlines.
– Daily standups feel like long, serial status updates, leaving no time to actually get work done.
– There are significant delays due to a shortage of skilled personnel.
Furthermore, these teams frequently skip essential practices like regular demos or retrospectives. Managers might focus too much on life coaching rather than supporting true agility, leading to distrust and an anti-Agile culture. This atmosphere results in dissatisfaction with product outcomes and concerns over deadline adherence, essentially turning Agile into a glorified version of the waterfall method.
To genuinely harness Agile, a shift from a resource-efficiency mindset to a flow-efficiency approach is required, which means changing the culture.
Flow Efficiency Cultural Changes
Collaboration among team members enhances flow efficiency, teamwork, and throughput, and it also helps manage work-in-progress (WIP). However, achieving effective collaboration necessitates a comprehensive cultural transformation.
Cultural aspects include:
– Topics open for discussion
– Interpersonal treatment
– System rewards and incentives
Rewarding individual achievements over team collaboration often results in prolonged cycle times and reduced throughput. A lack of communication about work planning or retrospectives strips a team of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Additionally, assigning tasks with strict execution deadlines undermines team efficacy, regardless of Agile practices.
For Agile to succeed, cultural changes are essential. Without managerial commitment to such changes, Agile transformations are doomed to fail.
Still, you have options. Even if your organization doesn’t support an Agile culture, you can modify your own working methods.
I’ll dive deeper into these concepts in a series of articles.
The Series:
– Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1
– Effective Agility: Three Suggestions to Change How You and Your Team Work, Part 2
– Effective Agility: Three Ways to Change Your Team’s Project Culture, Part 3