Live up to the potential of Scrum (agile)

How many Scrum adoptions come close to the potential of the practice?

Why specify, design and build little used features only to spend more money to maintain them and create obstacles to future enhancements? Why use the Scrum process to further alienate the knowledge worker from the work? Why pretend there aren't unintended consequences of the software we build.

Empower product people and teams to set priorities and connect them with the people who will use or are otherwise impacted by it. Use retrospection and team empowerment to foster growth, collaboration, and creativity. Use participatory governance to craft policies that enable rewarding lives outside the workplace. Build reliable software that delivers monetary value and makes people's lives better.

1. Talk to diverse user communities about prospective features in the roadmap. Allow that to influence priorities and the execution.
2. Collect feedback from those communities through incremental releases and act on it.
3. Focus on the retrospective practice. Ensure retros are well-facilitated, occur in a safe space, and that leaders address the blockers teams raise.
4. Teach people how to collaborate. Teach them how to give feedback. Value and reward tolerance, empathy, generosity, teaching and learning.
5. Treat governance as if it were a product in an agile lifecycle. Engage the people affected by a potential policy change. Make costs and choices transparent and ask for feedback. Experiment in safe boundaries. Retrospect to learn and adapt.

Mastery of craft and professionalism entails taking responsibility. Grasping our practice is in the service of something. Creating both material value and human good. Respecting co-workers. Telling the truth to stakeholders. Striving to improve. Caring about the people affected by the software we help build.

#AgileTransformation, #ScrumPrinciples, #AgileGovernance, #TechnologyLeadership