Here is the summary of Mitch Lacey‘s Agile 2009 talk:

A high-performing agile team is tight knit. They have worked hard to become a cohesive unit and have developed a bond. This chemistry can be thrown off balance when someone is added to the team in the middle of a project. It does not matter how flexible, capable, or agile savvy the new team member is. If they have not been involved in the care and nurturing of the team’s culture and is not invested in the same way that the other team members are. When the new team member is not flexible, capable or agile savvy, the effect can be devastating.

I paid more attention to the double use of ‘culture’ in the subject and went. Culture is at the heart of any process, Agile or otherwise. Here are my notes, and here are Mitch’s slides.

  • This only ship criteria that should matter: Are you proud of this?. If the answer is ‘no’, don’t ship it.
  • Bruce Tuckman’s group development model: forming, storming, norming, performing
  • ‘I was doing everything under my perceived control’ – there is often a gap between perception and reality. That gap can be a double-edge sword though.
  • Role of a Scrum Master is to build team to high performing and maintain it
  • Did you solve the problem? Well, depends on the context you are analyzing from
  • What he called Robert Merton’s Strain theory seems to be his Theory of Deviance
    • Societies provide both culturally-valued goals and culturally-valued means to achieve them
    • Strain happens when when the two differ
    • Conformity is the attaining of societal goals by socially accepted means
    • Ritualism is the acceptance of the means but the forfeit of the goals
    • Retreatism is the rejection of both the means and the goals
    • Rebellion is a combination of rejection of societal goals and means and a substitution of other goals and means
    • Innovation is the attaining of goals in unaccepted ways

    Now think in terms of company culture rather than societal culture.

  • Do you really know your company’s goals? The real ones, not just the ones on the corporate website.
  • Without knowing the goals, you are just walking around saying ‘why’
  • If you are doing that, are you doing the best job possible?
  • Interesting metric: time from bug open to bug close
  • Innovators evolve into Rebels
  • The movement to Rebellion often result in / because of new (team level) goals
  • Need to somehow bridge the gap between the group and the deviant. From both directions.
  • Where you are in the Deviance Typology is context sensitive. Might be Rebellion to the organization, but Conformity to the group.
  • As a change agent you control only two things: yourself and your environment
  • How to measure the maturity of your development process: Will you release code into production Friday afternoon at 5? If not, then you need to be fixing stuff.
  • To identify social deviants
    • Understand your company culture
    • Understand the team goals and means. And the alignment of the two.
    • Know the reward structure
    • Be open minded
    • As the team; people who who the bad eggs are. Trust them.
  • Success criteria
    • High quality product
    • Customer feedback
    • Team health
  • Don’t ask a question if you are not willing / can’t take action
  • Social contracts can’t be unbroken