Killing An Agile Team
Have an agile team? Tired of all those high-quality deliverables and happy customers? Well, there are few simple things you can do to make certain that team will “fall in line”.
No-Location
Separate the team. Make certain the customers, developers, testers, and other stakeholders are not anywhere near each other. As face-to-face communication is the most effective method of communicating complex issues, it must be eliminated.
Lengthen The Feedback Loop
By making certain that decisions cannot be made “just in time”, you can prevent real agility. Purposeless delays in deploying to production, ridiculously long testing cycles, and a barely working deployment infrastructure can be a real help here.
Time-Consuming Metrics
A superb way to waste time and kill morale is to forcing agile teams to prove they are agile by collecting metrics that do not really mean anything to the end customer. Extra morale-killing can be achieved by having people track every single task they work on to the hour.
External Organization
Don’t let the team self-organize. Hold back key pieces of information that could allow a team to self-organize, such as organizational changes or time line changes. Be sure to conduct daily meetings that really are just people “reporting up”.
Emasculation
If at all possible, make certain whoever has the ultimate say in what will happen (e.g., the project manager) is completely out of the loop with the day-to-day work. But, don’t let the team have any say in how things are going to get done. Prevent individual and team decision making.
These are just a few simple suggestions. Be creative. You can break their will if you put enough effort into it!