Common (agile) Practices Vs Common (agile) Sense - which one to choose?

Whenever any organization starts with Agile Transformation, they want to document some agile common practices or best practices that worked or would work for the pilot Program. Or they might even search on the Internet to find out what worked for other organizations and “surely” that should work for them as well. They want to document everything and prepare a Playbook which tells you an ideal step-by-step process to become agile.

Let me share something with you. I worked for an organization, where one of the teams had team members distributed throughout the Country and the daily standup could only be done online. I attribute this to the capability of Scrum Master, who was able to keep the team so well engaged, that no one ever felt any disadvantage of not being co-located and gradually team could even do it without the Scrum Master still maintaining the same engagement level. That worked for them but that doesn’t make having a distributed team or having a co-located team - a common practice or a best practice. You might think if distributed teams worked for them it would work for us too - maybe or maybe not. Maybe your Scrum Master is better working with co-located teams, maybe your team members are distributed in different timezones which was not the case with them; there could be so many factors.

But we need to have some foundations! The foundations are the agile values and principles. For everything else, use Common Sense! It works! ALWAYS!

Let me give you another example, I’ve worked with teams who do estimation with story points, there are others who do it with normalized story points, there are still others who use T-Shirt sizing, and still others who won’t do any estimations at all. So, which one to choose? The one which works for you. How would we know what works for us? Well, try them! Experiment with different methods and you will know what works for you! Isn’t that common sense? Didn’t we do that always since childhood? Why are we now looking for Playbooks that would guide us step-by-step and take us through a successful journey of Transformation? Because our organizations are risk-averse. Because experiments may fail and failure is not an option for most of us.

However, the agile playbooks don’t save us either. So, what to do?

Have people who resonate agile values and principles.

Once you do that all you need to do is give your people the environment where they can know why they are doing what they are doing; where they can know that they follow a practice not because it’s written in the Playbook but because it works for them and they have a solid proof of it working for them; that they want to use this practice as it brings them the business results the organization needs.

Empower them so that they are proud of what they do; not because someone told them but because they evaluated it critically using their own common sense.