Values and Principles Supported by Flavors of Practices

#1

It is always interesting to hear how people use different flavors of practices to guide teams toward the values and principles of agile and lean. I was have a interesting discussion around self organizing team.

" The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams."

It quickly derailed to a discussion on how we use working agreements with teams to achieve this goal.

Work Agreements is a practice that can be used to help a team become self organizing but is not the only way.

All 5 of the people in the discussion had their spin on working agreements . All five points of view were interesting and right in there own ways.

The power in this multi prospective view is being able to add this to your own experiment backlog to over come obsticals with your teams and orgs.

I would love to hear some more stories on when and how you use working agreement with your teams to enable them to achieve self organization…

#2

I was one of the five in that conversation - and I’ll say again how I view working agreements. My teams all use them. We treat them as living documents and have a “five rule”. No more than five items on the document (some teams have more, so it’s more a suggestion of five I guess). But the idea is to put things the teams aspire for. Such as “be on time to meetings” if they have some issues with that. Or “unit tests on all dev tasks”. You get the idea. Once that agreement becomes part of the culture it is removed and possibly replaced with something new. It allows for continuous inspection and improvement.

#3

Brought up the formal “working agreement” term to my team, they didn’t seem to see any value to it. We already have a version similar to what Ryan talks about that I guess we don’t even realize is a working agreement. There is a dedicated Trello board for team action items that come out of retrospectives. Once it becomes part of the team’s culture it moves to Done. We never gave this the “working agreement” title, it’s just something that expressed itself. We had a lot of ideas on how we can improve and kept bringing up the same ones, at which point it was suggested we find a way to track them.

However, if “unit test every dev task” came up, I would be presented with this :wink:

#4

I was also one of the five! I was actually the one who took the conversation of what is a self organizing team down the working agreements route, but in hindsight, I should have been more careful. For me working agreements is only a small part of a self organizing team,and is more of a tool to empower the team to self organize in the early stages of formation. I typically encourage teams to adopt them in the beginning, mainly because there is value in the team brainstorming “what” rules they should adopt to make them successful, and make each other happy. This is a a great way to coach that Agile emphasizes the team approach, and all team members have a voice.