Team Agility Quotes

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren’t the responsibility of individual departments, but are a part of everyone’s job, every day.

We practice mastering ourselves in the moment so that we can better open ourselves to being a servant leader and to harness our emotions and choose what to do with our reactions.

Over-seriousness is a warning sign for mediocrity and bureaucratic thinking. People who are seriously committed to mastery and high performance are secure enough to lighten up. —Michael J. Gelb

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Celebrate Successes, but Don't Declare Victory

small batches of work, small teams, short cycles, and quick feedback—in effect, “small everything.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

What this team did not realize was that having dirty tests is equivalent to, if not worse than, having no tests.

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality.

The Future of work is all about CREAM. More Consciousness, Relationships, Empathy, AdaptAgility, and Meaning. We must be building a more human-centered context for stakeholders, as opposed to JUST MORE profits for shareholders".

We found in surveys of Agile teams that some 80 percent to 90 percent of Agile teams perceive tension between the way the Agile team is run and the way the whole organization is run. In half of those cases, the tension was “serious.

It’s often the case that teams working in agile processes do not actually go back to improve the user interface of the software. But, as the saying goes, “it’s not iterative if you only do it once.” Teams need to make a commitment to continuous improvement, and that means not simply refactoring code and addressing technical debt but also reworking and improving user interfaces. Teams must embrace the concept of UX debt and make a commitment to continuous improvement of the user experience.

A retrospective’s huge potential for learning should not be off-limits to any team member.

It appears evident that, for the average team, insisting on writing tests first, before functional coding, improves quality.

A ScrumMaster’s role on the team is compared to a sheepdog. They guide the team toward the goal by enforcing boundaries, chasing off predators, and giving the occasional bark.

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

Where is the integrity in telling the team they “must have all this done by this date” when you haven’t asked the team if it is even possible?

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem. —Theodore Rubin

every Scrum team needs a ScrumMaster.

Beginners think that there is no documentation in agile, which is not true. It’s about choosing the types of documentation that are useful.

At the core of healthy team relationships is trust and respect.

In high-performance teams, "the leaders managed the principles, and the principles managed the team.

Iterative development, when accompanied with reasonable end-of-iteration reviews—product, technical, process, team—is also self-correcting.

In an agile project the team takes care of the tasks and the project leader takes care of the team.

true agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.

If you have a problem and to solve it you need someone else to change, you don’t understand your problem yet

To be full of love and enthusiasm for your work is a prerequisite for collaboration, a professional obligation;

Intrinsically we humans want to be happy, and happiness derives from having purpose, pursuit towards interesting and challenging ‘something’ that is greater than oneself.

Good agile project managers and teams don’t focus on mistakes — or on who did them, or on how many times they were done.

We choose and wear our clothes every morning. Attitude is the same. Positivity is an attitude – we can choose to wear it every morning

Our goal is not to create a deliverable or a feature: it’s to positively affect customer behavior or change in the world — to create an outcome.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”?

If everyone is speaking the same language, then it becomes easier to create a team where everyone is of the same mind.

A team can employ agile practices, but it won't achieve the potential benefit of agile development without embracing agile values and principles.

High Performance Teams and Execution Speed, has no value, if you are going in the wrong direction!

A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team’s health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste.

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.

A job interview is a two-way communication to probe for cultural and team fit. No matter which side of the table you sit, you should be asking questions that are important to you without fear.

stress can be a real monster you have to vanquish from your team. And one of the main ways to do this is by ensuring that you plan your project in a very sustainable way, from the very beginning.

Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a solution. Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.

Situational leadership articulates that effective leaders are the ones able to change their behavior according to the situation at hand. It identifies leadership styles relevant to specific situations.

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban Similarities: - Both are Lean and Agile - Both use pull scheduling - Both limit WIP - Both use transperency to drive process improvement - Both focus on delivering releasable software and often - Both are based on self-organizing teams - Both require breaking the work into pieces. - In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time)

A maxim in the theater tells us this: On time is already late (Devin 2009). That is, if we arrive at work on time with our bodies only, having not groomed our minds to collaborate, we are simply late. Unprepared.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

So, why do we do development work in these short cycles? To learn. Experience is the best teacher, and the scrum cycle is designed to provide you with multiple opportunities to receive feedback—from customers, from the team, from the market—and to learn from it.

Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down.

First, how could I protect my team from the incessant demands of the business and achieve what the Agile community now refers to as a “sustainable pace”? And second, how could I successfully scale adoption of an Agile approach across an enterprise and overcome the inevitable resistance to change?

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate.

I noticed a bumper sticker that said, simply, "gravity works." yes it does. Rock climbers know this and plan for it. So do agile coaches. I use this metaphor to illustrate that, in our physical environment, somethings are simply taken as a given. Constant. Always present. Undeniable. So, too, in our work environment.

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.

One of the kindest services a scrum master can do for his or her team and for the organization as a whole is to create transparency—to radiate information. Transparency allows us to see flaws, and when we see the flaws we can make the choice to do something about them. We can stop being victims of process and start being warriors of change.

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.

Executives, project leaders, and development teams must embrace a different view of the new product development world, one that not only recognizes change in the business world, but also understands the power of driving down iteration costs to enable experimentation and emergent processes. Understanding these differences and how they affect product development is key to understanding APM.

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge.

Driving exploration is critical, but knowing when to stop is also. Product development is exploring with a purpose, delivering value within a set of constraints. Frequent, timeboxed iterations compel the development and product teams and executives to make difficult tradeoff decisions early and often during the project. Feature delivery contributes to realistic evaluations because product managers can look at tangible, verifiable results.

a good set of questions to determine whether a project leader—or even an individual contributor—has an agile mindset might be, "In what specific ways and with what practices do you focus on value first and constraints last?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you manage teams rather than tasks?" "In what specific ways and with what practices do you adapt to change rather than conform to plans?" Try these out in your organization to get a feel for your agile maturity.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness—in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.

SEVEN CHANGE MASTERY SHIFTS • Change Mastery Shift 1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to innovate on the opportunities inherent in change. • Change Mastery Shift 2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of change. • Change Mastery Shift 3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose, value, and meaning to rise above immediate circumstances. • Change Mastery Shift 4: From Control Focus to Agility Focus. Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results. However, agility, flexibility, and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul. • Change Mastery Shift 5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress. • Change Mastery Shift 6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions. • Change Mastery Shift 7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus. Effective leaders are more secure in themselves; they possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way; their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change.

Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code. As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project to increase productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving productivity further toward zero. Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. Management does not want to expend resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually, they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky. A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it’s a green-field project. They get to start over and create something wonderful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system. Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does. This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.

Bram stared into a pair of wide, dark eyes. Eyes that reflected a surprising glimmer of intelligence. This might be the rare female a man could reason with. “Now, then,” he said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can make things difficult.” With a soft snort, she turned her head. It was as if he’d ceased to exist. Bram shifted his weight to his good leg, feeling the stab to his pride. He was a lieutenant colonel in the British army, and at over six feet tall, he was said to cut an imposing figure. Typically, a pointed glance from his quarter would quell the slightest hint of disobedience. He was not accustomed to being ignored. “Listen sharp now.” He gave her ear a rough tweak and sank his voice to a low threat. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say.” Though she spoke not a word, her reply was clear: You can kiss my great woolly arse. Confounded sheep. “Ah, the English countryside. So charming. So…fragrant.” Colin approached, stripped of his London-best topcoat, wading hip-deep through the river of wool. Blotting the sheen of perspiration from his brow with his sleeve, he asked, “I don’t suppose this means we can simply turn back?” Ahead of them, a boy pushing a handcart had overturned his cargo, strewing corn all over the road. It was an open buffet, and every ram and ewe in Sussex appeared to have answered the invitation. A vast throng of sheep bustled and bleated around the unfortunate youth, gorging themselves on the spilled grain-and completely obstructing Bram’s wagons. “Can we walk the teams in reverse?” Colin asked. “Perhaps we can go around, find another road.” Bram gestured at the surrounding landscape. “There is no other road.” They stood in the middle of the rutted dirt lane, which occupied a kind of narrow, winding valley. A steep bank of gorse rose up on one side, and on the other, some dozen yards of heath separated the road from dramatic bluffs. And below those-far below those-lay the sparkling turquoise sea. If the air was seasonably dry and clear, and Bram squinted hard at that thin indigo line of the horizon, he might even glimpse the northern coast of France. So close. He’d get there. Not today, but soon. He had a task to accomplish here, and the sooner he completed it, the sooner he could rejoin his regiment. He wasn’t stopping for anything. Except sheep. Blast it. It would seem they were stopping for sheep. A rough voice said, “I’ll take care of them.” Thorne joined their group. Bram flicked his gaze to the side and spied his hulking mountain of a corporal shouldering a flintlock rifle. “We can’t simply shoot them, Thorne.” Obedient as ever, Thorne lowered his gun. “Then I’ve a cutlass. Just sharpened the blade last night.” “We can’t butcher them, either.” Thorne shrugged. “I’m hungry.” Yes, that was Thorne-straightforward, practical. Ruthless. “We’re all hungry.” Bram’s stomach rumbled in support of the statement. “But clearing the way is our aim at the moment, and a dead sheep’s harder to move than a live one. We’ll just have to nudge them along.” Thorne lowered the hammer of his rifle, disarming it, then flipped the weapon with an agile motion and rammed the butt end against a woolly flank. “Move on, you bleeding beast.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

agility is relative and time-based. If your software team can’t deliver software and keep pace with changes in the environment, your team is not agile.

The first thing we have to do is to look ahead two to three sprints to understand which product backlog items are likely to be worked on (Cohn 2005, 206; Pichler 2008, 146). This requires decomposing and refining product backlog items earlier; more detailed items can now be found at the top of the product backlog. The next step is to identify any dependencies between the teams by asking the following questions: Do they have to work on the same feature or component? Does any team act as the supplier of another team? If so, is it feasible to supply the feature or component and use it in the same sprint? To eliminate problematic dependencies, we may have to change the product backlog prioritization.

With agile retrospectives the team drives their own actions!

Getting feasible actions out of a retrospective and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve.

The goal of retrospectives is help teams to continuously improve their way of working.

Agile retrospectives give the power to the team, where it belongs!

Leaders facilitating team responsibilities must link accountability to motivation in order to be highly effective.

The purpose of velocity is to give all stakeholders an idea how many iterations it will take a team to add the desired set of features, which helps set reasonable expectations and reduces chances of disappointment.

While a team’s deliverable is the product, a scrum master’s deliverable is a high-performing, self-organizing team.

Leadership – inborn or learnt? The case for situational leadership

It has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk. Listening is an art form, and asking questions is a tool to active listening. Yet, asking

stories. It is unimportant, disregard

Of course, there is one obvious thing we could do to try to improve velocity: work longer hours. Working a lot of consecutive overtime might initially cause velocity to increase (see “Overtime” in Figure 7.14). Figure 7.14. The effect of overtime on velocity (based on a figure from Cook 2008) That increase will almost certainly be followed by an aggressive decline in velocity along with a simultaneous decline in quality. Even after the overtime period ends, the team will need some amount of time to recover before returning to its reasonable baseline velocity. I have seen examples of where the trough (decreased velocity area) during the recovery period is larger than the crest (increased velocity area) during the overtime period. The end result is that lots of overtime may provide some short-term benefits, but these are frequently far outweighed by the long-term consequences.

Scrum’s rich history can be traced back to a 1986 Harvard Business Review article, “The New New Product Development Game” (Takeuchi and Nonaka 1986). This article describes how companies such as Honda, Canon, and Fuji-Xerox produced world-class results using a scalable, team-based approach to all-at-once product development. It also emphasizes the importance of empowered, self-organizing teams and outlines management’s role in the development process.

As an Agile software development team, we’d been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren’t Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code —

High power high interest stakeholders – manage closely; High power low interest stakeholders – keep satisfied; Low power high interest stakeholders – keep informed; Low power low interest stakeholders – monitor with minimal effort.

Leaders usually need to be directive and supportive during the forming stage,

Ask team members to share a favorite travel photo, but not name the place. Team members ask questions and try to figure out where the photo was taken. Ask team members to share their favorite photo and

According to the findings, the most effective team building practices in creation of virtual networks of practice are: ‘(1) recruitment and selection; (2) training and development; (3) rewards and recognition; (4) supervisory support; (5) rules regarding knowledge disclosure; (6) time pressure; and (7) collaborative programs and projects (Jolinka and Dankbaar

the enablers of situational leadership are empathy, active listening and a propensity to understand complex human and team interactions. The challenge in leadership is all about applying the proper situational behavior. We have to analyze the situation and shift from our incumbent approach towards a situation, to the style which the situation warrants and which leads to the optimal outcome. By integrating and implementing ideas of situational leadership in our work place we can become better leaders.

The clearer and more simply the vision is stated, the easier it is for team members to buy into it.

Exhibiting vulnerabilities requires being confident in yourself and being able to laugh at your own mistakes. People who have to appear perfect often feel that way because they lack self-confidence. Yet, being willing to open up and be vulnerable can do more to make a team come together than standing aloof.

has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk.

Scrum is a lightweight framework designed to help small, close-knit teams of people develop complex products.

A scrum team typically consists of around seven people who work together in short, sustainable bursts of activity called sprints, with plenty of time for review and reflection built in.

A development team represents a significant investment on the part of the business.

One way that the product owner maximizes ROI is by directing the team toward the most valuable work, and away from less valuable work. That is, the product owner controls the order, sometimes called priority, of items in the team’s backlog. In scrum, no-one but the product owner is authorized to ask the team to do work or to change the order of backlog items.

Another way that the product owner maximizes the value realized from the team’s efforts is to make sure the team fully understands the requirements. If the team fully understands the requirements,

For a company culture to change, the top executives must be on board with changing it. This means they must understand what the change means for them.

You should choose a set of simple rules that govern the format of your code, and then you should consistently apply those rules. If you are working on a team, then the team should agree to a single set of formatting rules and all members should comply.

We ignored the fact that many customers don’t know what they want. We ignored that fact that even when they know what they want, they can’t describe it. We ignored the fact that even when they can describe it, they often describe a proposed solution rather than the real need.

While both Agile and CCPM offer ways to aggregate risk, CCPM advocates elevating this risk to the project and portfolio levels whenever beneficial, and whenever acceptable to the customer. In contrast, Agile focuses its risk aggregation on the scrum team, ignoring the benefits of aggregating risk to the highest level feasible. There’s no reason Agile projects can’t also benefit by aggregating the risk beyond the scrum team, to the project level.

Interestingly, Agile’s scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional “single task owner” approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit. But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it’s better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments.

Thomas Alva Edison, the great American inventor, once said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Edison knew the power of failure in giving us a feedback, on what we are doing wrong, and how we can improve ourselves. Many people we know are afraid of taking the first step, taking a risk and moving away from their comfort zone. They are afraid of the difficulty that the first step poises. Of