Many time I wonder
my mother way of working and how she manages my variable
expectations. I keep comparing that to AGILE.
Mother works
without fluctuation:
In order to prepare
us for school, she completes activities such as cooking food for us
etc. She does these activities almost every day and she has limited
time. If any day she gets delayed in any of these activities, I
might be delayed in getting to school.
This equated to
Agile Principle:
“Our highest
priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous
delivery of valuable software.”
The Scrum teams
should be inspired by mothers to deliver working software at the end
of every sprint by continuously managing their work effectively and
with the expected quality. For this, they need to work
collaboratively, with good planning, having a proper Definition of
Done in place. Their objective should be to achieve the sprint goal
always by managing unpredictability through collaboration and
teamwork.
Mother handles
changes with proactiveness
Many times I ask my
mom to change the food menu. Most of the time she will not get upset but
will negotiate with me about the change and how it can fit within the
available time frame.
This equated to
Agile Principle:
Welcome changing
requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness
change for the customer's competitive advantage.
Similarly, Scrum
teams also have to change their mind-set and understand that the
product owner has flexibility in managing the scope as per the
product vision and ROI of the product. This will increase product
success. Of course, they need to remember what the Scrum framework
recommends about the changes, and accordingly they need to respond.
So the changes have to be discussed with an intention of how they can
be adapted without deviating too much from the sprint goal. This is
possible through face-to-face conversation with the product owner.
Mother executes
task effectively:
If I observe the way
my Mother plans and executes the work, it's amazing. She knows the
priorities well, she knows which task takes more time and which tasks
take less time, and she allots time to them accordingly. Even though she does similar work
every day, she does not take it lightly and aims for continuous
improvement.
She cares about the
work that is required to meet the timeboxed duration by pushing the
"less priority" work back.
This equates to Agile Principle: Agile processes promote sustainable development. The
sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant
pace indefinitely.
and simplicity --
the art of maximizing the amount of work not done -- is essential.
Scrum teams also
should know which is the highest-value story and which is of lowest
value, and accordingly they need to deliver them to make sure working
software is delivered at the end of the sprint. They also have to
give equal importance to engineering practices such as continuous
integration and test-driven development, collective code ownership,
refactoring, etc. They always have to strive to deliver rapid value
in terms of working software with technical excellence.
Scrum teams also
have to understand what is required and what is not, and accordingly
they need to push back the things that are not required. They need to
know the requirements that deliver the majority of the revenue from
the product (80-20 rule, or Pareto principle). This needs constant
communication and collaboration among the product owner, team, and
the stakeholders.
Mother takes
regular feedback
My mother asks for
feedback about the food whether I liked it or not. This helps her
improve wherever required.
This highlights the
Agile principle: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to
become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior
accordingly.
So it is essential
for Scrum teams to have regular retrospective meetings to check where
they are good and what needs to be improved so that they can become
high-performance teams over a period of time. It should not be just
like any other meeting; they have to gather the sprint data, generate
insights from the data, and then come up with action items and
prioritize those actions for implementation in upcoming sprints.
Mother don't get
slary
Whatever great work
she does, she does not get paid for it. However, she takes care of
the family.
Although it is hard
to digest, In Gita Krishan told, “Do the duty, but don't look for
result”.
This is true. If one
person do their duty perfectly money will follow automatically.
