5 roadblocks to Agile nirvana
Agile lacks the lustre it once had in the eyes of many software engineers. They've developed cynicism where optimism should thrive.
Roadblocks can sometimes be the cause of cynicism toward Agile.
Let's review 5 such roadblocks that can prevent your team from achieving Agile nirvana. In no particular order of importance, they are:
Singular leadership
Poor team cohesion
Lack of redundancy
Weak learning culture
Low team autonomy
I have broken each roadblock down into more detail below.
🚧 Roadblock #1 - singular leadership1
In other words: one person leads, the rest followCauses
People with direct authority over teams ignoring the key tenet of Agile - self-managing (or at the very least, self-organising) teams
The ill-placed thinking that Agile will still work if teams follow the process (e.g. sprint backlog and sprint review) while keeping authority structure as is
Where it's most likely to happen
Organisations in old-school industries e.g. print publishing
Traditional hierarchies where a "manager" exists
Little native exposure to Agile like in tech companies
Ideas to treat this roadblock
Encourage participation by all in distributed leadership like:
Create and maintain a shared mental model e.g. team charter, vision statement
Make decisions on what needs to be done and how to do it
Track progress to ensure productivity reflects the required output
When Agile nirvana is achieved, it will look like...
Everyone meets and together develops consensus over a co-created agreement on concrete ways the team can achieve or exceed their SLO.
🚧 Roadblock #2 - poor team cohesion
In other words: the team doesn't run as one cohesive unitCauses
Individuals prioritising their own goals over the team's needs
Conflicting perspectives on how work needs to get done
Engineers are not intrinsically motivated toward teamwork
Where it's most likely to happen
Teams where many members are hired at different times without being “brought into the mix”
Cowboy developer culture where it's every wo/man for themselves
Ideas to treat this roadblock
Make everyone accountable for teamwork e.g. contribute to team OKRs
Encourage commenting on each other's work in a constructive manner
Regular social meetups outside of the daily scrum or stand-up
When Agile nirvana is achieved, it will look like...
The team is rewarded as a whole for achieving SLOs consistently across the board with little to no mention of individual performance. They can still give each other kudos, but extrinsic reward (from higher-ups and outsiders) always goes to the team.
🚧 Roadblock #3 - lack of redundancy
In other words: no backup capability when the team's short-staffedCauses
Everyone's been told to or prefers to stay in their lane
Responsibilities have been delineated to the nth degree of speciality
Where it's most likely to happen
Surprisingly, a lot of places, but nowhere in particular
Ideas to treat this roadblock
Run cross-training sessions for learning from more experienced teammates
Implement job rotation for adjacent roles (e.g. every team member should spend 10% of work time on a non-core activity)
Facilitate conversations in the daily scrum for related roles to help each other out
Duplicated roles (i.e. 2 or more members with identical duties) could work, but this is risky as people will step on each other's toes without regular task boundaries being set
When Agile nirvana is achieved, it will look like...
A Chaos Engineer suddenly leaves the company and the remaining members pick up some of the work. They have had some experience with chaos experiments and ask other teams for help. Workloads are adjusted down in the next sprint to keep the cognitive load at a reasonable level.
🚧 Roadblock #4 - weak learning culture
In other words: don't reinvent the wheel, just do the workCauses
Everyone's in a rush to GTD and go home
No learning artefacts were installed beyond those mandatory at the end of sprints
Where it's most likely to happen
Teams that have a habit of hiring "experts" who think they already know the way of the world rather than those with a desire to keep improving
Leadership thinks AARs and post-mortems are not important
Ideas to treat this roadblock
Share stories of failure in well-respected companies to spook the team
Suggest the addition of deeper learning sessions post-incident
Microlearning tools to share improvement ideas with minimal impact on cognitive load
When Agile nirvana is achieved, it will look like...
Every team member commits to sourcing and sharing ideas on how to improve incident analysis. That comes useful when the team gets together to discuss incidents.
🚧 Roadblock #5 - low team autonomy2
In other words: the team's not left alone to do its best workCauses
Other teams use greater political weight to pull away members
Outside stakeholders (like managers 2-levels-up) meddle in how work is done
Where this is most likely to happen
Highly political companies with limited resources
Old-school management wanting to maintain control
Ideas to treat this roadblock
Work to increase the team's visibility e.g. "this <work> is why you need us"
Scrum Master directs outsiders away from the team and onto the Product Owner
Have set office hours for outsiders to book in meetings (because they want meetings)
When Agile nirvana is achieved, it will look like...
The team's keeping on target with their target MTTR without getting bogged down in explanatory meetings or other bureaucracies
Bonus Roadbock — Agile won't add value
In other words: your kind of work doesn't actually need agile
Causes
Trend-hopping executives wanting to emulate Atlassian/Spotify/x's success as an Agile org — "their market cap is higher than ours, so we should do what they do," random bank exec.
Where this is most likely to happen
You're in a space where the inputs required to achieve value are known and clear
Everything can be done per an operational manual
Work is simple or complicated rather than complex. E.g. a plant that assembles engines according to a blueprint (complicated) vs a plant that also designs them (complex)
Ways to treat this roadblock
Implement lean practices instead — these are more appropriate for achieving operational excellence in more routine-like processes
Get that Kanban board out to keep better track of work
Bibliography
5 roadblocks adapted from: Stettina, Christoph & Heijstek, Werner. (2011). Five Agile Factors: Helping Self-management to Self-reflect. Communications in Computer and Information Science. 172. 84-96. 10.1007/978-3-642-22206-1_8.
Moe, Nils & Dingsøyr, Torgeir & Dybå, Tore. (2010). Overcoming Barriers to Self-Management in Software Teams. Software, IEEE. 26. 20 - 26. 10.1109/MS.2009.182.