The Agile Manifesto Unfolds by Maik Seyfert

Author:Maik Seyfert
Language: eng
Format: epub

Motivated People

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Now, let’s look at the principle of building projects around motivated individuals. This principle is a key success factor for any Agile software development project, and it is strongly connected to Agile values. In this chapter, you will read why motivated individuals are so important, as well as the specific progressive and hindering factors to this principle.

People, or better, individuals, play a very important role in Agile software development, this is stated in the Agile Manifesto, which outlines its core principles. If you think about software development projects, you will find that each person’s involvement is essential to developing the software. There is no machine (yet) that takes over the job that people do, such as gathering requirements, user testing and validation requirements, developing an architecture, developing software, testing for quality assurance, and so on.

Motivated individuals bring real value to your team, if their full potential is tapped. They will use their creativity for innovative software development and problem solving. People show or uncover their full potential only in an environment that supports them in doing so, an environment in which people are valued as individuals. As such, you need people in your team that are motivated to work in an environment that is based on the Agile Manifesto and its principles and values.

For true Agile software development, you need people who bring all their individual skills and creativity into your software development project. It is more important that you create projects around motivated people with less expertise than around experts who are not motivated to work in an Agile way. The expert knowledge holds further risks for the team, as you will read in further chapters; you don’t need experts with the status of a hero in an Agile team. This is because Agile software development is about how a person thinks. It is primarily about mindset and less about expert knowledge. Experience and knowledge can be gathered if you are a motivated individual.

For motivation, especially retaining motivation over time, it is important to know that failure is positive. Failure provides valuable feedback; failure lets people learn about their work and about their customers. Furthermore, failure is something that happens in all software development projects and cannot be avoided. Look at failures as something that brings you closer to your goals. It is important to note with failures that early failures are easy to resolve rather than failures later on, as so much work will be lost. Failing early leaves a person more motivated to improve. Little time and resources have been wasted. Failing late causes demotivation and costs. With failing late, too much effort is already spent in developing the software, and with that, a lot of waste, for instance, software that will not be needed anymore and can be thrown away. Your teams or projects will always fail in some aspects— just make sure that you fail early.

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