Tom Breur
18 January 2015
Agile practices revolve
around the notion of decreasing cycle time to gather learning and feedback faster. By increasing the fidelity and
bandwidth of information to the team, you help them be more effective. How does
this work?
You increase bandwidth (among others) by colocation:
peers are always handy and available. The fact that they are within earshot
also (dramatically) improves the odds of catching something relevant by “sheer
coincidence.” Serendipity might offer something you can learn from, or you
might be in earshot a topic that you know something about. Then you may
volunteer to contribute to the discussion.
You increase fidelity by having an empowered (!)
Customer (XP) or
Product Owner (Scrum)
inside the team. Having this person physically present of course contributes to
bandwidth. You want a Product Owner (or Customer) who is truly “in the know”
and empowered, so that he can make decisions by himself on the spot (without
having them overturned, later…). That way, you always have access to the
current state of affairs (i.e. priorities) both within the project, as well as
the broader stakeholder landscape.
Most teams are lacking
either one, or the other. When Agile doesn’t seem to “work” as well as it should,
it’s often either bandwidth or fidelity that’s the culprit. I would consider this
your structural bottleneck. Have you identified yours?
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