Can you make it right for everybody?

Yes, you can try as hard as you want. Don't we all try to provide an environment that allows people to grow and be their best professionally?

I think this is an important ingredient for a high-performing team. There are limits, however. For instance if you have a team member who isn't particularly keen to actively support changes. Not that I would be surprised by that. People have different personalities and while most are fine with change for a good reason occasionally there are people who resist all kind of change since they may have different preferences and experiences. And that's fine.

If you have a team member with an excellent skill set and huge amount of knowledge and experience that's fantastic. But what if that very person isn't able to proactively work with other team members to help them becoming better as well? What if you have a team member who doesn't attend the first daily stand-up meeting (aka daily Scrum) and comes in late once the meeting is over? What if on day two the same person comes in late but doesn't join the Scrum although it is still on? What if on day three the person is in the Scrum but doesn't participate actively? What if on top of that you observe that it even seems to have a negative impact on the rest of the team?

I think at some point you need to consider your options. Having one-on-one's for coaching is important and helps in most cases. Attempting to consider individual preferences is good, too. But once the overall team performance is affected, you need to act. And don't let anyone hold you hostage. As a leader and coach you need to keep in mind the future of the entire team and the project and objectives the whole team is working on.

An agile environment is not for everybody. There are organizations that work differently and it seems to work for them. Based on my experiences, however, I believe that agile principles work better if properly applied. In some cases this could mean that you may have an individual on your team who has a different perspective, and you should be prepared for that individual moving on. That's just fair and part of the overall change process for the team (and in fact for that individual, too!). Both the individual and the team are most likely better of.

If you have tried everything you can think of and still it doesn't work out, don't feel like a complete failure. You are not! Think of your team and about where you want to take them. And then adapt and move forward. Don't look back unless you want to learn from the past!

Projects - Do you need them?

In some companies projects are an important concept since they represent a piece of work, well defined at the beginning, maybe with a business case outlining the commercial benefits, with a project to sequence the tasks and to track progress, and with known deliveries at certain milestones and at a specific date. So far so good. There might be a problem with that, though.

What if your projects are too large? And by large I don't mean the projects that run for several years. More than a month can already be too large depending on your circumstances.

For example suppose you would like to be in a position so that you adapt as quickly as possible to changes in your environment. Customer's preferences can change. While maybe two years ago best use of limited resources was important maybe today it may be cost reduction to get through the recession.

For instance here in New Zealand the new fiscal year has started at 1 April. Many companies have taken this as an opportunity to rethink their position and options. I have spoken to many friends in different companies and to recruiters. It seems as if quite a few companies have made substantial changes triggered by the planning of the new fiscal year and as part of the approval process for new budgets.

There are many other events that change the environment in which you operate. And it appears as if those changes come in shorter intervals than maybe ten years ago.

A project of 2 months might already be too large as it might force you to lock in your team's capacity for that entire time frame. Then what do you do if something changes and you'd like to direct your team onto a different piece of work? Put the project into the bin?

Maybe there is a different notion, a different concept that you can use. What if you could split up the work required to be done by the team in even smaller chunks. For example in the company I currently work for we have many customers who work with us as a partner. Through this work, based on mutual trust and interest, we gain a lot of insights into how we can improve our products. Many small though very valuable enhancement requests are generated through this process, many of them only a few days work, a couple of weeks at most.

What if you'd look at the set of enhancement requests as a stream of small work items (one item batches) as opposed to projects that combine many such requests (large batches). Moving towards using smaller batches, ideally one item each, works better if you optimize towards processing those. Toyota calls this one-piece flow.

I think that is worth considering. Thinking small instead of massive grand schemes. There is more to that, in particular how you get started, what tools to use, and how to make it work. Stay tuned!

Navigating: What do you mean, captain?

OK, I can't speak for all industries but I can understand that you'd like to hear a few more concrete things you can do navigate these times. Let me share a few things from my software engineering perspective.

One of the options you could look at would be virtualization of parts of your development environment. An area that often proves to benefit is everything that has to do with testing. For instance if you have physical machines to test your application it might be very time consuming to set it up from scratch. You can speed this up by using an image that you can play back on the test machine. With virtualization you can become even more flexible or faster.

Some solutions allow you to create templates of virtual machines. Examples include a server with a specific database server product or a client machine with a particular browser version. If all it takes to select one each and instantiate it you can significantly speed up testing by reducing the setup time. And on top of that some virtualization products have features that allow automating a large variety of setting up virtual machines. And if you don't need them anymore just throw the VMs away. Just like that!

Another area that is worthwhile exploring for becoming leaner is everything that has to do with documents in particular internal documents. Look at all graphs for instance that require manual updating. Is there a graph that can be replaced by a simpler version or by a graph that is automatically generated and updated? Also, in some cases you may be able to simply some documents by replacing some text by tables.

Tools is yet another one. Are there tools that you can upgrade or add that will help your team to off-load more tasks to the tools? Do you use an out-date version control system? How about your automated testing tool? Automation and simplification are key regardless of whether you look at processes, tools, technology, or others. Can you simplify the design or implementation of your product? Can identify a technology that you use in your product that has outlived its usefulness?

There are plenty of options. Keep your mind and eyes open. Observe. Challenge. Put practices under scrutiny. Do they still make sense? Experiment. In small doses. Try out. Maybe you fail. But chances are that what you try will help you to focus even more on what is important in these difficult times.

And at at the same time you will become even more flexible in terms of how to respond to changes in these uncertain times. It's not the changes that hurt. It is how we respond to them.

I'm sure you got my point and are able to translate this into your industry and your specific situation. In particular in difficult times it pays off to have plenty of options for how to navigate through them!

Navigating Difficult Times

I chose the word "navigating" deliberately. The current economic climate is very difficult for many people and companies throughout the world. And chances are that you are affected in some shape or form as well.

It appears that no 'rule' that worked in the past applies to the current situation. Is that really true? I think it doesn't really matter. The important bit is that if you carefully choose an approach that lets you quickly respond to whatever is waiting for you around the next corner then you will be better off in all likelihood.

Some people and companies still try to come up with a grand plan for how to go forward. And as long as that plan is really more like a description of the direction and the principles to be used I think that is fine. But what good would it do to you if you would spend planning time right now on what you would be working on in 12 months time if all that matters is what you are going to do next month, three months from now, or six months from now!

Respond and adapt. Do both as quickly as needed (but not faster!). Instead of locking down your plans for the next 12 months use rolling plans (a planning tool, actually), e.g. for the next 3 months or for the next 6 months. Then update these plans on a regular basis, either monthly or triggered by new relevant information that warrants a revisit of your plans. If your plans cover 3 months they are much easier and faster to adapt to new insights than plans at the same level of detail that cover 12 months. Trying to update plans that cover a larger time frame tends to result in a lot of waste.

Navigating these difficult and uncertain times is definitely easier if you choose an approach that allows for much faster response and adaptation to the changing environment. At the same time you will be much better off once your markets start to improve again.