The Agile Mind-Set: Making Agile Processes Work by Gil Broza

Author:Gil Broza [Broza, Gil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: 3P Vantage Media
Published: 2015-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Learning

For a team to deliver appropriate products, they must learn a lot about their business, industry, and technology. Since these keep changing, the team never stops learning about them. Fortunately, this is mostly factual learning. (The many established ways by which individuals and teams engage in it are outside the scope of this book.)

For a team to reach a high level of effectiveness and maintain it, they must also learn about the consequences of their decisions and actions. For instance, was a certain technical implementation choice a good idea? Was the decision to deploy an early version helpful or a mistake? They must also learn about their abilities and limitations, how to work together, and how they respond to change.

This type of learning depends on useful feedback loops. It is amplified when the entire team contributes to the feedback and handles it collaboratively. Scrum, the popular Agile framework, prescribes two such learning opportunities at the end of each sprint (iteration). In the first meeting, called the Review, the team and stakeholders inspect the iteration’s product increment in order to adapt it. In the second, the Retrospective, the team inspects and adapts how they work together. Both meetings are a deliberate pause from product construction, a form of slack (see chapter 4) to concentrate the team’s thinking on what they had chosen to do, what they actually did, and how to do better. Efficient learning contributes to effective value delivery. Teams that keep their cost of change low can welcome the learning.

Teams may review their product increment anytime they want, if they expect to learn something useful. The same goes for the retrospective, which does not have to be a big ceremony or be confined to the end of a cycle. For instance, teams may convene a special retrospective after a production outage or a member’s departure.

Given the number and diversity of participants, these meetings — and other learning opportunities — need facilitation. Facilitation turns a retrospective from group discussion to structured discovery, one that results in action (and doesn’t wither due to silence or get hijacked by dominant personalities). Skilled facilitation affords a team the safety and support to discuss sensitive matters — and every team I’ve ever known made great strides once they allowed themselves to discuss matters beyond the obvious and the superficial.

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