January’s coming to a close and our Top 10 New Years’ Resolutions are in *, which include: losing weight/diet, going to the gym, and being more healthy. In other words, we want to be “fit”. We want to feel better, we want more energy, we want to sleep better, we want to climb stairs without huffing and puffing. Fitness allows us to do things we couldn’t otherwise do. For example, surfing (trust me, losing 5 pounds and having strong biceps is a game changer here).
Fitness is one of the best analogies I’ve found for Agile. We want to be faster. We want to be able to respond to the Business and also reduce our technical debt. We want better quality. We want to systematically improve. We want to align on a common mission and stop multitasking and context-switching.
“We’ve reached the tipping point. We’re going all-in on Agile. Let’s get everyone trained and launch this agile transformation!”
Fantastic. My question is: how committed are you to this “Agile Resolution”?
Did you know most gym memberships are never used? In fact, gyms intentionally sell 10 times as many memberships as the number of people the facility can hold, because they know most people won’t go! **
Back to Agile. What will we do after we “buy our membership”? Will we really “go to the gym” 3 times a week? Or to bypass the analogy, will our teams really get to “done” each sprint? Will we have a prioritized backlog well in advance of each iteration? Will we focus on the product roadmap and not chase every opportunity? Will we break down our silos and collaborate across the organization? Will we allow our teams to own their commitment? Will we practice Servant Leadership and learn how to better support our teams? Will Business and Technology become true partners, striving to succeed together? Will we remove the nagging, systemic impediments? Will we grow our people?
Well, I should probably be getting to the gym now. But I just noticed this interesting show on PBS. Besides it’s getting kinda late and I’m not really feeling up to it..
* https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/10-top-new-years-resolutions-for-success-happiness-in-2020.html