Exploring modern agile principles: Make people awesome
As my interest in Modern Agile grows I’ve been looking for situations at work from which I can learn about how to apply the principles and how to work in a way that makes people awesome.
There is a project team (who aren’t Agile) who seem to have a culture of focusing only on what they need. They don’t seem to be able to hear the needs of anyone else from any of the other teams they work with. I can see how this culture can develop in a team that is so completely focused on hitting deadlines and not having any part of the project slip beyond its allotted schedule, and I can see how this culture is the opposite of the Modern Agile principle of making people awesome. In this situation, the people that work with that project team don’t feel awesome because they aren’t listened to, and are given the message that the project team are able to command their time and effort without being able to feedback on whether they are focusing on the right things at the right time. And I doubt that the project team feel awesome as they probably feel like getting anything done is a struggle against the people who are supposed to be supporting them on the project (of course, they don’t recognise that those people have other work to do outside of the project because they are so focused on their project).
I’m not going to try to suggest a solution to this problem as I don’t think the situation/culture will change, but I definitely want to learn from it. So, I’m going to try to:
– Communicate more clearly,
– ask questions to encourage discussion,
– remember that other people have their own priorities,
– actively listen for implied meaning and ask follow-up questions,
– ask what they need to be successful,
– allow open honest conversations,
– and encourage everyone to be able to positively challenge what anyone says.
I hope that if these practices become part of the projects I’m involved with then we can all help to make each other awesome.