Feeling Alone on Your Agile Journey?

Do you feel as if you are waving the agile flag and no one cares? You know what you, your team, and your management needs to do. No one seems to be able to put your suggestions into practice. Worse, sometimes, it looks as if no one cares, except maybe you.

You might feel alone, and you are not unique. You are trying to change your organization. Big Change, such as an agile transition, requires patience and nurturing of very small changes every day.

What can you do?

Tip 1. Define small successes, preferably one small success each week, or even more often. Consider these small success possibilities:
* When a team realizes it has too much work in progress. Recognition is the first step.
* When managers realize they are trying to control who does what.
* When the product owner realizes how to make a story one day or less and still see value.

You noticed I said “recognize” for a couple of these possibilities. People can't change if they don't know they have other options. You can then recognize when people are doing something “right”—even if what they do right is seeing—not yet acting.

As you nurture your agile journey, see if you can catch people doing something right. For me, changing thinking is the first step to changing actions.

Tip 2. Celebrate these successes. When you recognize and retrospect on your work as an agile “helper” (coach, manager, change artist, whatever you are), you gain the value of applying agile to your work.

Consider retrospecting each week, so you can see how to apply agile approaches better to your work, not just your organization's work. Then—and this might be challenging—publish your results. The more transparency you have, the more transparency you can request around the organization.

Tip 3. Decide to learn something new every week as one of your small successes. You might create a roadmap or a backlog of what you want to learn and practice. When you show others what you learn and how you integrate it into your agile practices, you help others act that way, also. Here are ideas for your backlog:
* How can you learn more about teamwork?
* How can you learn more about servant leadership?
* How can you improve something about your coaching or influence?

Find ways to integrate others into your personal agile journey. You will discover you help the organization indirectly. Learn how at the Influential Agile Leader.

More Learning with Johanna

If you are involved in helping in making agile a success for your organization, please join us at the Influential Agile Leader. Gil Broza and I are leading the event April 6-7, 2016 in Boston and May 4-5, 2016 in London. Please join us.

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Johanna