Here we are at the end of the road. It seems like we have been digging into a bunch of Agile. I hope you have enjoyed my old man stories. It is a career’s worth of trying to implement these ideas. Lets do our last one, lets dig into Agile Principle 12.
Principle 12: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.
Let me guess, you hate Agile Principle 12?
He’ssss baaaaaack. I say to Alfred, no I don’t hate it.
I understand why it is there in the principles. The thing is that it really shouldn’t be. If you obey Principle 11 then Agile Principle 12 just happens naturally. I worry that enshrining it will lead to management deciding to implementing it by decree.
On toxic teams this just worsens the problem.
There should be a disclaimer.
So you hate another one of the Agile Principles.
I don’t really hate any of them. There are some that I think are ineffective and others, like this one, have prerequisites. In a heavily authoritarian management structure can easily see an edict going out that we will do this at the end of each sprint. This I command.
If your team is not ready for this then each week you will get long meeting of recriminations and accusations. Who needs morale when you got meetings.
Finally, I think you see this in high functioning teams. The natural back and forth of shared suffering and shared responsibility, leans itself to conversations on how to prevent that from happening in the future.
Next in the high functioning team, each member naturally adjusts their behavior because they are helping someone they respect. It comes naturally when the group finishing its storming and norms into a productive group.
Implement that before the functional norm sets in and you will pay.