The clicking moment is an easy one – it’s when it all comes together and everyone goes “oh look it worked”! They don’t see the hours, days, weeks, months, and maybe even years of work that went into getting it to that point – all they see is when it clicks. That’s okay, you know what went into making that happen, the drive and initiative for it to happen. You know what it takes to…
Cycles are great to get into, they are predetermined, we know the outcome, and we can see the start, middle, and end – they are awesome at helping generate predictability and visibility into what we are doing. But they can go bad, they can wear you down, and they can take you down the wrong path simply out of habit. When we transition from intent and action to auto-pilot in our systems we fall into…
The developers are doing agile. Your testers are doing agile. The Product Team is doing agile. Does your finance, sales, and marketing teams need to do all of their work in agile? Does your entire organization need to follow agile? No, they don’t. The benefit of agile is to deliver units of software that can be viewed and accessed by these teams in a more iterative way so they can see the building of the…
If you are not taking into account all the other work your team is doing, you are setting an unrealistic expectation of delivery for what your team is working on. If the work they are doing is not accounted for in what they see, then they will feel stressed, then burnt out by all that is on their plate. Sprint Capacities only work when your team is 100% only doing development work, as soon as…
That last bug that came back with another issue. That demo that worked all the way through but blew up right at the end. That sales pitch that was perfect but missed on crucial detail. We can agonize over all the losses, and near-misses, and be almost there or we can get to work on making it happen, bringing it together, and trying again. You are only so close for a little while, and then…