The Only Three Things You Must Do To Improve Agility - Mike Cohn
Distilled to its essence, it’s quite simple to be a Scrum Master, agile coach, or anyone seeking to improve team or organizational agility. There are only three things you need to do and Saint Francis laid them out succinctly over 800 years ago:
To improve agility, we have to start with what’s necessary. Change practices that go against agile principles. If programmers and testers aren’t part of a single multidisciplinary team, that needs to change.
If the team doesn’t see the benefits of iterative and incremental work, you need to talk to them about that.
Similarly, if management is imposing deadlines without regard to the team’s opinion, you’ll need to help them see the light.
Having made changes necessary to enable agility, look next at what’s possible. There will be many more options to choose from now, such as:
- Shortening iterations
- Improving teamwork
- Reducing handoffs by overlapping work
- Introducing new practices such as story mapping or job stories
“Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Doing What’s NecessaryThen Do What’s Possible
Don’t try to improve too many things at once and choose wisely. Initially there will be opportunities for small changes to create outsize improvements.
Finally, Do the Impossible
At this point, it’s time to do the impossible . . . except that now very little is impossible.
Having iteratively and incrementally improved, most teams feel powerful enough to take on challenges and changes that would have seemed impossible before.
What still seem impossible are changes outside the team. Managers may still impose deadlines. Stakeholders may foist too-frequent changes because they’ve heard agile teams “embrace change.”
Fixing these outside-the-team behaviors isn’t impossible, but it is harder and often takes time. Fortunately a team that has done the necessary and then the possible will be ready to do the impossible.
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