Scaled Agile, Inc. Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices do you follow to avoid agile fatigue on your team? How or where did you learn these practices?

In my experience, two intertwining practices keep agile teams from experiencing fatigue: listening to people and incorporating their ideas and needs into outcomes. 

For example, my current team members felt we couldn’t adapt quickly enough because of a strict iteration ceremony cadence. So we found a new way forward. The team still participates in quarterly planning, organization wide iteration demos and dependency coordination with other teams. However, we refine and plan our own work in quick bursts, and each person pulls work from the top of the refined list after they finish something else. 

Another example arose when the team felt they weren’t getting enough time to refactor and maintain systems and remove technical impediments to the flow of value. Each quarter, when we share with leadership the value we’ll contribute to strategic initiatives, we also share the value we’ll achieve by addressing technical debt and maintenance. 

Throughout my career, I learned by experimenting and through the experiments of others, including on teams that wouldn’t call what they do “agility” and from individuals who cooperate without forming traditional teams. Inspiration is everywhere!

How have these practices helped boost team morale and work performance?

Because the team has built its process based on listening to one another and choosing our own path forward, work flows more smoothly. We’ve reduced cycle time by half, released value to customers more frequently and shortened the time spent in meetings. Overall, people seem happier and more engaged when we do meet, and our synchronous conversations generally result in solving more problems.

The other thing that has helped with morale and work performance is the team having a say not just in how we work but in what we do. I know we’ve struck the right balance of team-driven work to strategy-driven work when I see: both kinds of work moving to “done” over time, our systems performing reliably while continuing to adapt to customer needs and the team taking time to dive deep on sticky problems, which they’ll only do if they feel they have the capacity and encouragement.

What advice would you give to other product leaders eager to avoid agile fatigue on their own teams?

I can only say what’s worked for me. It’s not “going agile” that makes work better. It’s taking collaborative action to experiment with and solve the problems a team — or many teams — identifies together. 

The most challenging part of changing things can often be handling obstacles that originate outside the team. To help remove those obstacles, the best product leaders that I know build relationships across the organization and actively establish a good internal reputation for themselves and their teams, so when they need to influence change, the people they’re influencing know and trust them.