Agile Maturity

Whilst working for a Client previously, I had the welcome challenge of moving a new team, that as individuals, all know about Agile but were used to delivering in Waterfall. I started with a few high-level talks about how they can deliver work much quicker, emphasising the importance of short feedback loops and agreeing on the definition of done before we start churning out products etc.

The team ate it up, they loved the idea(s) especially when we started talking about Pull vs Push. So then we began, we started with an introduction to Kanban, we spoke about the definition of done, and we moved on to building a backlog.

This is where things start to come unstuck

This is the first time I realised there was a level of maturity required before an Agile delivery team can really start running. As an example, I’d challenge the team; ‘For Project 1, what are the component parts that will meet the product owners requirements’. The answer I was expecting was a list of activities or tasks that would take about a day to deliver. What I got was a series of bold story sized deliverables; ‘I will deliver the 10 point plan‘ which in reality is perhaps 20-40 days worth of work when split up into smaller bite-sized activities.

I kept pressing the team to break things down more, but if you’ve never done this before, you just don’t know how to do it.

Furthermore, as is true with all projects and Agile delivery teams the individuals just don’t know how fast they can go, until they’ve gone through the process a few times.

Just get started

As Jeff Sutherland says in The art of doing Twice the Work in Half the Time Just get started. If you wait until your team have been on some scrum course all you do is slow them down and ask them to deliver something they’ve only ever seen in a class-room or book setting. By starting, you and the team begin learning, you learn about the process, you learn about how you and your team mates work, you’ll find and deal with problems, perhaps re-designing your workflow to suit a new way of working, essentially human nature takes over, you find a problem and work through it.

So, just get started!

Happy Valentines day 😍