How do bad practices leave the system?
Agile 2018 did something great around feedback this year. All the
participating speakers were asked to peer review 2 other sessions. I was
fortunate enough to have Chris Edwards give me some awesome feedback using the
4 L's Retrospective format. (Great way to deliver feedback too!)
I bring it up here because he focused on one key point in my talk
that I did not pay much attention to. I had said during the talk that each team
should ask themselves "How do bad practices leave the system?"
Turns out this caught a lot of people’s attention. In fact, when I
bring it up now, I am usually met with a "I don't think we thought of it
that way before..."
I can’t stress how important this is. In fact, I don’t think
I can recall a mechanism for this in any of my prior environments before Hunter.
The phrase “we do this because we have always done it this way” comes to mind.
Even teams that do retrospectives may have an internal bias preventing
them from retrospection on a deeply ingrained process that is taken for granted.
I talk to many people that do Sprints with a 2-week sprint period. Usually when
I ask if they have considered changing their Sprint length, they say no. So, consider
the things that your team holds for granted and retrospect on them.
Even better why not try a “What should we stop doing?” retrospective.
1.
What do we stop doing?
2.
Dot Vote
3.
Stop doing that thing!
Worth a shot, right?
Do you have an example of processes that we should consider
letting go? Let us all know in the comments!
Many things could be questioned :
ReplyDeletewhy the Scrum Master could not be (also) the manager
why the Product Owner should not have a say in the solution
why the PO should be the ONLY responsible for backlog prioritization
why we should always use the AS / I want / So that format for User Stories
Many thing we should at least question, to see if we understand why we are doing it like this, and try to ask "If we did differently, how would we do...?)