Epic “Agile Ownership” Failure

In talking with people in professional and personal conversations, I’ve come to realize the concept of Agile product and service development is hard for us to grasp and practice. I’m speaking from experience as I have to learn and grow each day in order to be better as a practitioner.  How hard can this? It’s laid out in plain, simple language at the Agile Manifesto website.

Individuals and interactions, working software (products and services now), customer collaboration and responding to change are not overly challenging concepts to understand. For me, it seems straightforward. Except, I want to own rather than co-author successful creation.

The principles that support the Agile Manifesto support my premise. They dig deeper into the mental shift that must occur in order to make Agile frameworks effective in their application. As well, they help define behavior opposite of what is needed to build products and services that meet business needs and wants.

I’ve made the mistake of believing that I could “own” creative output on projects I’ve worked on in the past. Big mistake as the only thing I really owned were the risks and issues I help create as a result of being unwilling to co-create better outcomes with my teams. In short, I needed to check my ego and allow the team to craft a better solution than the one I had in mind.

It was humbling to admit that because I wanted to “own” the success of the team, I put the entire project at risk. It wasn’t until I was told by a friend and mentor who I respect that I was crushing the team’s creative spirit that I realized my Agile “ownership failure”.

That conversation hurt!!!

As my friend and colleague Mike Torrence pointed out to me, “No one of us is smarter than ALL of us.” This concept has helped me calibrate my thinking on team dynamics and what role I must play as a member of an Agile team.  If the outcomes are business value, successful products/service, and raving fans, then I have release output ownership go and pivot to outcome ownership.

#Agile #Scrum #SAFe #XP #Kanban #Lean #Flow