Ten Dollar Agile

When trying to improve and mature agile practices across a group of teams, it can be overwhelming to tease out what needs to be done due to the variability of the inter, intra and extra-team issues. Additionally, single-team issues are amplified when the number of teams involved increases.??In other words, if you struggle with practicing agile on one team, you will likely struggle 10 times more when you scale to 10 teams.?

Often?it becomes a daunting task to decide where to spend your time, energy, and focus to fix the right stuff at the right time. One interesting way to frame the problem and facilitate a discussion with a group of leaders around maturing their teams’ agile practices involves setting a constraint. For example, I faced this problem at a company where we were trying to figure out where to concentrate our efforts after we had reviewed and created an inventory (or backlog) of practice maturity issues.?I stated “If I only had 10 dollars to spend to help these teams, I would spend 7 dollars on the Product Owner practices and 3 dollars on improving their technical practices.”??This statement was provocative and evoked enthusiastic responses such as “We have to spend something on Scrum Master practices too!”, “Our product owner practices aren’t that bad, we need to spend some of the money elsewhere” and “I disagree, I think we need to spend at least 1 or 2 dollars on scaling practices.”?

The conversation began to feel like an exchange one might hear?at a market where you negotiate a price for some goods being sold. The price point at which I started the negotiation (7 and 3 dollars) was only important in that it provided the initial framework that the group could use to express their ideas and eventually converge on a common understanding of the overall issues, their priority, and how we might take the next steps. The overall 10 dollar amount conveniently translates to percentage of effort/funding.

Using this framework led to interesting discussions as attendees tried to convince each other to pry away a dollar from one area and apply it to another area. You could see genuine, open and honest conversations around prioritization taking place. Its also important to note that the conversation around specific dollar amounts will likely change over time as the organization’s needs change.

Overall, goals and initiatives were framed around an economically finite dollar amount which was important because without that constraint, it was easy to scope out an unending list of improvements that would be nearly impossible to prioritize in a stacked rank (one of agile’s most powerful techniques to deliver the most important stuff first and fast.) I imagined that this is how executives battle over budget items to determine where to spend resources when doing their annual plans.

The main point is that 10-Dollar Agile is a very simple, very easy to understand framework that facilitates discussions around complex issues and moves a team forward towards agreement. Try it yourself! Start your next discussion with “If you have only 10 dollars to spend, what would you spend it on?”??And then let the possibilities emerge.