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10 Tips to Undermine an Agile Team’s Ability to Deliver

July 23, 2012 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management

10 Tips to Undermine Agile Team Ability to Deliver
By Ruben Sadoyan

Many Agile coaches have their own list of top failure modes. But now I also want to publish my winning list of things that impact teams and undermine their trust in business and Agile (combined from experience gained observing different teams at different times, so no particular team is meant here).

My tips are written from the Product Owner’s perspective:

  1. Argue in front of team at Sprint Planning. Let them see you were not capable to decide what you want to build them. Moreover, involve them into arguing. This will demonstrate how your (PO) team misses integrity.

  2. Demonstrate that being on time does not matter: interrupt meetings with calls, side talks and questions. Leave the room occasionally and be late regularly. Doing this will make it almost impossible to demand on-time delivery from the team.

  3. Continuously fail to deliver integrity in sprint goal/product backlog. Let stories without details thought through, so that the team feels you had not invested enough time to prepare them. This will also make it easier for the team to fail delivering outcome of these stories to you, will make things more ambiguous, so that no one will understand where is failure or what was wrong and will never learn from it, so that improvement will not be feasible;

  4. Ignore team signals on complex stories (the ones that are above ~13 story-points, the ones that are risky, big, and usually need to be analyzed and split into smaller chunks in advance). Just let big stories that have big doubts, leading to easier underestimations, over-commitments, sprint failures, causing less team confidence, further under-commitments and wastes of all kinds;

  5. Present deadlines ignoring reality “I do not care how you do it, it must be done”. With this “masculine” management style you can always push things forward on your Agile team, so they must obey and no matter what they think and what they are capable of;

  6. Never share the Product Vision and mid-long term roadmap with the team (just keep it secret);

  7. Ignore technical debt (just concentrate on #5);

  8. Bombard team with in-sprint questions and “Can you do it now please?” tasks. Explain them that SCRUM is good but now we need to be more “flexible”. Moreover, assign tasks to team members without talking to entire team. Demonstrate that you were not able to plan things for an iteration, this will ruin team trust and completely undermine their ability to deliver;

  9. Never groom your backlog just leave it to the sprint planning meeting when it is already too late. This will lead to long and stressful discussions, will drain team energy, will lead further to fatigue, wrong estimations, poor planning and sprint failure;

  10. Always try to find something that the team did wrong to point fingers and focus on blaming. This is the proper way to avoid Kaizen and let the team members protect themselves by “storytelling”.

Ruben Sadoyan is as Scrum Master for technical teams at an international online social networking company. Ruben has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. You can read more from Ruben on his blog.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2012 and is filed under Agile Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

Nice post. Always lots to learn when we think about what not to do.

Dan Beverly wrote on July 25, 2012 - 2:14 pm | Visit Link

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