An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
Category: Agile
One of the things I have to fight the most for and that I think is what allows me to work well: “Regularly get in your team’s shoes”. Call it Genba, or Fingerspitzengefühl but the most important thing is to stay in touch with your team’s day to day reality.
https://www.okayhq.com/blog/status-quo-is-so-hard-to-change-in-engineering-teams
I often get surprised reactions when I say that we don’t do Scrum. After reading about how other technology companies run their projects, it seems that Scrum—which is wasteful and does not fit reality—is on the way out.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.
A crucial part of effective teams is introducing slack like in this case removing the entire concept of a hand-off (which causes misalignment at best).
Once you’ve worked with post-commit reviews, I promise you will not want to go back to the PR way of working again.
Most of my discussions with data scientists have revolved around exactly this point (usually to serious pushback): that they need to be end-to-end to deliver value in an organization.
The JIRA team does not use JIRA and of course why would they if anybody gave them the choice. Also, JIRA is often not used for software engineering anymore but it fits the bill for large scale workflows and compliance trails.
Edge C2 is a nice ideal position to move towards in this article about military agility that contains a bunch of useful elements including an interlinked OODA loop and a visualization of the Trust Equation.
As a bystander you can observe a retrospective and hope to see some of these symptoms listed by Adrian Howard of a good one. But keep in mind that you should be happy to hit some of these and getting all of them right probably means you have reached the summum of team work.