Now that we’ve learned some things about fear, what are some practical ways to work around it?

Today, we’ve got two killer listener questions, one to do with procrastination in agile team members, and the other on the difference between Being and Doing Agile. What I love most about these questions is that they go to the heart of our philosophy. That’s this week….

Both of these questions go to the heart of the Badass Agile Philosophy

Agile, Scrum and Kanban, etc are all about minimum rails. Enough process to fix most of your common problems and enough flexibility and simplicity to shape them to fit the uncommon problems

To cure a procrastinator, you might need carrots and sticks to get them in the room initially, but if you focus your daily stand-ups on making and keeping promises to each other, you’re golden. Most people value loyalty or fear losing face in front of others. Also, use the idea of MVP in everything you do. If people are procrastinating to the point where work is not getting started until the 11th hour, break big things into small things and re-focus on an MVP if scope continues to slip. In retrospective, you can commit to improvements. This way, nobody loses face.

Doing Agile is all about the techniques, which are easy enough to learn, but also present two major risks – by focusing on individual techniques, we forget to focus on the bigger picture and underlying principles that help us when situations are less than ordinary, AND we create unnecessary complexity under the assumption that more information is better, when really we ought to be integrating information into a cohesive whole that drives our leadership. Being Agile means applying agile principles to your leadership game – continually inspecting and adapting YOURSELF, applying value-based prioritization and iterative planning, execution and measurement to your leadership game…this not only teaches you how to be a better agilest, but a better leader as well.

What’s the one thing you’ve always been good at?

Knowing your ‘one thing’ allows you to link your passion to your profession, even if they seem completed unrelated

Having that passion allows you to anchor all of your communications in areas where you feel confident and enthusiastic, which reflects in how you show up for your teams.

This is what creates your unique value – your teaching and leading style

How do you handle date and deadline pressures in Agile Environments?

A listener sends us his question on what to do if you are pressured in the early days of a project to commit to specific deliverables on certain dates

Remember that some projects reasonably require delivery commitments – especially those with regulatory, audit, or compliance expectations. These may not make great first experiments in Agility, because Agile requires flexible scope in order to work well with the philosophy

It is also perfectly normal for a business to want to make promises to its customers (and therefore demand them from its delivery teams)

Agile provides a better model that allows for continuous scope negotiation. This requires trust between product owner and team

Attitudes and beliefs, or ‘frames’ have to change in order for the ‘when by’ culture to change