Being Agile vs Agility
OR How I learned to think the other way around
Hello my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct,
I worked in the past years at several companies in Germany as a Software Engineer and a Scrum Master. My last employer was a big automotive supplier. There I lasted for nearly 8 years. Of this 8 years I worked in total 1 year and a six months as a Scrum Master. I liked the projects and the people there, so I thought I will stay there forever. The last project I was involved, proved me wrong.
We had plenty of developers and several teams, that were developing a product together. In total there were around 60 people who were involved. Those were Managers, Business Owners, Developers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners and many more. We worked in an agile manner and strived for changes and fast feedback. The people were pretty motivated and always did their best. The project itself had already a history as I joined 2 years ago.
In the time I joined the project, we started with the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe. Before SAFe the colleagues worked somehow, I don’t really know that. Nevertheless I did not care about the history of the structure because our team still proceeded using Scrum or whatever it was, we called Scrum.
Seeing this I really liked the SaFe at first. The project had pretty good Scrum Masters in place. We started to work together and it felt at the beginning to be the right scaling framework. Every time we held a PI Planning we were highly motivated and used the time to come up with a plan. All colleagues participated and at the end of our Planning we had a plan. The time passed by and we performed the next Planning. We realized: we are not “fast enough”. With each PI we could observe how our motivation was decreasing. The pressure was growing, and at this pace we would not be able to meet our deadlines. By knowing we are not able to meet the deadlines we still proceeded this way and did some Plannings more. The psychological safety was completely gone and everyone just tried to perform his tasks until the decision was made to stop doing SAFe. It was one of the best steps so far because we tried a different structure that was used before.
You might remember I wrote “I did not care about the history” of the project. I realized that this is something, I completely forgot to count in. We all were excited about SAFe, but we were not able to deliver value in time, thats what we thought. With the new old structure that is called “Task Force”, we were able to hit our milestones with some quality shortages. Anyway the time of the Task Force was hard for everyone. One huge change that we made: We removed Scrum Masters and installed so called Tech Leads. Some Scrum Masters have changed the projects, others the departments, some stayed at the project with a different role and me, I left the company completely.
From the day I lost my team on January 2021 I thought I have failed as a Scrum Master. During the Task Force I got the confirmation as my former team colleagues just called me, if they had questions or needed somebody to talk to. With some of them I am still in contact even I am not their Scrum Master anymore. I don’t think I was a bad Scrum Master.
First I am still struggling if we had the understanding SAFe is the right tool for us. The project has its own tasks and they should be done until particular deadline that was negotiated by the managers and that was never backed by developers with estimations. There was never a question whether we can do it or not. We had to! Regardless of things said here, I truly believe that all the people involved will be successful with the product and I wish them all the best.
Second I think we as a Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should have the understanding for the tools we use. Frameworks might be helpful, but by knowing why we are doing some events like Review, Daily Standup or the most hated by all ”Retrospectives”, we can achieve much more.
This is my story and a first post on medium. I will continue writing about the so called tools and why they exist and what problems do they solve.
Hello my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct.
