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…
The myth in Agile is that it is meant to make you go faster. It’s not. It’s about working on the right thing, at the right time and delivering value to your customer. It’s about avoiding statements like… “We shipped, but no one is using it.” “No one wanted all this extra stuff.” “It doesn’t do what we thought it was going to do.” Agile is about feedback and validation loops to ensure the right…
It’s been a few weeks but you have already been back to it – the grind. The day in, the day out – moving things along, perhaps pushing a rock up a new hill for a new purpose. But that’s what you are doing. That’s what you are focused on. Not everyone wants to go back to the grind and they will try to push you off. But if you keep going, that’s when you…