Frustration Backlog Management!

Lean and Agile Way of Working has become new norm in multiple industries. Many organizations move in to lean agile way of working without realizing “WHY” factor. This leads to chaos and builds frustration backlog! Next would be firefighting and hiring so called magicians(Agile Coaches) to do this Frustration Backlog Management.

Few common reasons stated for doing Agile(which I have heard as a coach / consultant):

·      “Let’s go Agile because everyone is doing Agile otherwise we are going to fail”

·      “Somehow we need to get it done”,

·      “ It’s another methodology, what a big deal, lets adjust people, process and tools and rollout”,

·      “ We need it to just showcase to clients that we have an Agile Framework”

These thoughts and approaches would result in Agilebut , Scrumbut, Agilelike, Agilefall, ScrumFall kind of agile adaption without paying much attention towards Agile Values and Principles. This results in building of painful “Frustration Backlog” which in turn leads to pool of practitioners who would say “I Hate Agile”.

Is your organization / team going through similar phase / state? What is that you/we can do to minimize this frustration backlog?

I had an opportunity to facilitate few sessions along with Ashish Kumar as part of well-known agile conferences in India. Participants shared very insightful perspectives about their frustrations. I have summarized some of these frustrations and possible reasons / gaps in realizing values and principles in few slides. Idea is to do problem discovery exercise so that actions can be taken to reap maximum benefits of Agile transformation journey. Slides can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/ManjunathaMSRao/frustration-backlog-management.

Happy to have further conversation on this topic.