Agile Challenges: Effective Strategies for Team Improvement
You have probably experienced a situation at least once in your work life, when an agile team is struggling to deliver. It is over-sized, leading to unpredictable performances, variable velocity, alternated flow. It is in those situations that keeping tight to agile playbook might be hard. But it is exactly in these moments that sticking to the rules and following the scrum guide is mostly helpful.
Teams often do not realise how poorly they operate the agile practices and lose the perspectives on the key principles that make agile different than other project management practices: transparency, monitoring and reaching the flow, improving constantly and relentlessly actionable metrics, actionatr continuous improvement in the way the team operates.
It is when I hear statements like: “my team is in perfect shape, we do not need any improvement” that I worry the most.
When this happen, the right thing to do is systematically try to resume the correct backlog management, reassess the estimation process and restate the team groundrules. If the scrum master is actively present in the team, you shall understand the why behind this failure and retrain her/his agile skillsets. The scrum master should in fact facilitate and be in charge of leading the process and support the PO as a backlog custodian. In our experience often the so-called Scrum Master is a project manager or the team does not have a real scrum master: in this case you you should find an experienced one, possibly with coaching experience.
What we often see in day by day agile coaching is that there are often the Business Analysts (BA) who write the user stories for the developers, since the PO is very far from the team day work. In those cases the BAs shall be able to anticipate the analysis of undefined work sprints before if unclear and operate US clearance before new sprint come. The key is leveraging the rhythm of the team and do not loose pace.
Another aspects we have seen often especially in large organisation trying to adopt agile practice is the fragmentation of epics in endless number of sprints. This happens to mitigate delays in taking charge of the work but this approach completely forgets the principle of “stop starting, start finishing!” which puts emphasis on delivering in production, not managing with vanity promises.
To conclude, although it might seem difficult, particularly for long lived teams, the agile practice should be periodically reviewed and with proper support the deviations should be brought back in track as soon as they are discovered. The journey is neither trivial nor easy but essential for long term sustainability of teams and maintaining the flow of work.
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