Are we having fun yet?

Legoland theme-park has very few Lego creatures. A staff member explained:

- It is a lot of work building them out of small bricks. 

That just sounds backwards. Building with Legos is fun, not work. How can that be?

For the folks working at the Legoland building from Legos is hard work. The resort operates by strict, unbending rules. Cheerful staff, while smiling and genuinely trying to be helpful, is going by a well-memorized script. Thinking on the job is discouraged, and absolutely no initiative or having fun is permitted. These guys look and act like well-behaved robots, which they are payed to be during the work hours. Robots do not have fun, no matter the activity. 

Most of us are not paid to build Legos, but a lot of our jobs can be no less fun and creative than putting little colorful bricks together. It is important to not let rules, scripts, and check-your-humanity-at-the-door culture ruin that fun.

Empowering Agile teams: culture clash. Part II

This is a follow up to the earlier article on this blog "Empowering Agile teams: culture clash".

Agile frameworks empathize empowered teams, flat structures, and meritocracy. Agile transformation is about re-defining who holds authority and responsibility.

Agile approach both allows and requires all participants to care. This is the other side of the struggle. While it is hard for command-and-control management to step away and let the team self-manage, it is even harder for the team members to suddenly start to care.

Power concentrated on the top of the org chart leads to classical principal-agent problem. In many a traditional organization team members have no reason to care about technical quality, steady pace of delivery, or building the product that customers actually want. Management makes decisions about what gets done and how results are accessed, and carries responsibility to the customer. Team members are expected to show up and do what they are told.

Self-managed teams, the corner stone of the Agile organization, have the information, the skills and the power to deliver what the customer wants. To become self-managed and claim that power, the teams also needs a will, and perhaps some incentives, to care about the organizations’ success. Agile transformation is about reminding people of their power, and waking up that will to care and be in control.

Good Agile teams break the rules

Agile frameworks are sets of rules. To become Agile, an organization or a team learns these rules, tries to understand what the rules mean, and executes according to the rules. Not necessarily in that particular order.

Good teams learn rules quickly and follow the rules well. Or do they?

Agile philosophy is all about learning, gathering information and feedback, making small changes, and gathering feedback again. As teams mature and understand the philosophy of being Agile, a rule may get re-assessed, adjusted, and sometimes even completely disregarded. The team will consider the outcome, and either go back to the previous version of the rule, stick with the updated rule, or make another change based on new learnings.

Consider this example, discussed by Mike Cohn: standard Agile rule recommends that the team works on backlog items in the order set by Product Owner. But depending on the technical details of the project, the team may be able to maximize delivered value if it is allowed to do minor adjustments to the order of stories.  

Another standard Agile rule that is often broken is to use collocated teams only. This rule is often not followed due to business constraints, and in those cases breaking this particular rule can and often does lead to serious problems. However, more mature Agile teams that choose to let some members work remotely part of the time, can stay productive and perform on par with completely collocated teams. Being able to occasionally work from home helps people concentrate, allows to save time on the commute, and overall improves enjoyment and morale of the team, which promotes better productivity.

Rules of the Agile frameworks are designed to help teams create a situation that encourages learning, taking responsibility, and enjoy their work. Teams that have developed a deep understanding of the reasons behind the Agile rules, should be allowed and encouraged to modify the rules to fit the details of their physical environment, particular complexities of the project, and organizational specifics. A mature self-managed Agile team can be trusted to develop their own rules for best performance.