Agility

I have been part of teams where agile methodologies have just started and witnessed the shift. Most of the issues in the transition phase were common, and I am going to share some of them.

The team shift

The first major huddle organization faces is team dynamics. They first start creating teams into smaller groups which they generally call scrum teams.

The decision to form a team is often to add Engineers, QA, and one Project manager, a product owner. The dynamics are generally not based on the team goal or team comfort but are more toward delivery items. This often reflects the organizational communication style.

The team doesn't become autonomous or start taking decisions, but rather still follows the same steps/process but is now in smaller groups.

Delivery process shift

To get agility this is the place where you need your major shift but unfortunately often organization doesn't make any change here.

We still have a waterfall delivery strategy applied but with smaller teams. The long specification creation process, the design analysis phase, the development and the testing phase.

It's a mini waterfall methodology. Where there is no iteration and a lot of handoffs.

The tools shift

For adoption, I felt this should be the last thing on your plate but unfortunately for most organizations, it's the first step. Choosing a ticket system like Jira is often considered a successful shift.

These tools should be used as enablers but this rather becomes a roadblock. Management starts using this tool to predict the future and evaluate the present. This is often scary and causes the team to slow down. To collect all sorts of useless metrics, the team starts capturing more and more data points.

I have no concerns with the data points but generally, these points are used in the wrong way, for e.g using story points as estimation and prediction, using velocity as a measure, using bug count as performance etc.

Mostly I have seen teams not aware of these metrics and are being evaluated on these.

Management expectation

One place where there is no shift is this layer. They continue to work in the same fashion. Asking different metrics, driving decisions and dictating priorities still continue and make them less agile.

They expect the delivery process to become faster by adopting agile without losing control over the process and decision-making.

Thought process shift

The shift is expected to follow the agile manifesto, but it rather goes in opposite direction.

For e.g. "individual and interaction over process and tools" become process and tools over individual and interactions.

"Responding to change rather than focusing on plan" become long lengthy plans in Jira and changes are often considered as scope creep.

"Give the environment and trust the team to get work done" never happens since the thought process shift from waterfall doesn't happen.

These are just a few examples, most teams are stuck with the process, and nomenclatures and focuses too much on velocity, story points, and multiple meeting ( grooming, planning, stand-up, retrospective etc ).

Conclusion

I am not contexting with tools and processes but rather on the focus.

Once sprints are planned, changes are never welcome. Guess estimations with story points and projecting over velocity are all wrong.

The team should be given a goal and trust that they will get it done, in this process they might take some bad decisions but if the decisions are small they won't cost much and they will learn and become autonomous.

Allowing small and quick changes, letting them push and iterate quickly. Talk to clients often in this process and get early feedback and course corrections based on that.

Decision-making goes with the team. The job of management is to help the team achieve their goal, and provide all support.

This whole philosophy breaks because of trust. Organization shifting to agile keep the decision with management and judging teams and not trusting is the major problem.

They ultimately become Scrum Fall instead of agile.