If you are not taking into account all the other work your team is doing, you are setting an unrealistic expectation of delivery for what your team is working on. If the work they are doing is not accounted for in what they see, then they will feel stressed, then burnt out by all that is on their plate. Sprint Capacities only work when your team is 100% only doing development work, as soon as…
No, you didn’t get the award, it went to someone else. No, you didn’t get the promotion, that went to someone else as well. No, you didn’t get the thing you were after all the work you put into it and now you have to start all over again. It’s easy to feel like a failure, and it’s easy to give in to those feelings but what we need from you now is to put…
That last bug that came back with another issue. That demo that worked all the way through but blew up right at the end. That sales pitch that was perfect but missed on crucial detail. We can agonize over all the losses, and near-misses, and be almost there or we can get to work on making it happen, bringing it together, and trying again. You are only so close for a little while, and then…
Team apathy doesn’t hit all at once, it starts slow and builds until one day you wonder how you got here. But there are signs that it might be happening on your team. People start working on “stuff” with no real goal in mind – priority, and severity go out the door. Things become “hard to explain” or “it’s all in their head” – generally because they don’t want to write it down. Customer tickets…
The myth in Agile is that it is meant to make you go faster. It’s not. It’s about working on the right thing, at the right time and delivering value to your customer. It’s about avoiding statements like… “We shipped, but no one is using it.” “No one wanted all this extra stuff.” “It doesn’t do what we thought it was going to do.” Agile is about feedback and validation loops to ensure the right…