Burn

Chris,

"Nowhere to run, pointless to hide
Just lay there and scream pretending to try
pretending
intending to burn, pretending to fight it
everyone learns faster on fire,
things took a turn, lost all desire
you live and you burn"

Alkaline Trio (Burn)

I've been thinking and having some PTSD on your behalf on this upcoming re-org you mentioned. It got me remembering all the times it's happened to me. I can't think of a job that I've had where one hasn't happened in the tenure I was there. Most of the time it involved me getting let go.

This constant flux in leadership at companies is one of the reasons I don't trust Scrum as a framework out of the box. It's too rigid with how it's supposed to work, and most companies double down on it's just not rigid enough and move on to SAFe. Or worse some other scrum at scale debacle that hog ties the teams into not being able to focus on their customers.

There are systems inside Agile that are softer on implementation — XP is a good example where the make up of the team is expressed in passing but not prescriptive. I usually champion Kanban as a style of working and have talked about it here at a bit of length. I'm also just a fan of taking and porting over some of the thoughts of the Toyota Production System itself, seeing what works and what doesn't. If not the Toyota Production System, let's take something else that is working for someone and port it over; it's never a matter of following the plan as much as figuring out what's working for the given situation.

I've mulled on what I can do about this problem cause it wreaks havoc on my teams, the product, the entire process. There are two people whose opinion I take into consideration on their advice for this.

Simon Sinek when asked about culture change and leadership points out in an offhand way that you can be a leader to those around you not to those above you. Which makes a lot of sense you have no buy-in with the managing up. Managing up is mostly framing things so that you don't hurt their feelings. Which the eye roll on that having to be a thing gives me headaches sometimes. If you focus though on the people you can help and those you can make lasting changes for then the world can become a little bit better of a place.

The other person whose words of wisdom I live by is Mom. "The only person you can change is yourself and you've got to really want to cause it's hard as heck." She's been in the business and seen the problems, she's still hearing stories from me about how they've not changed. I think she just gets a little exasperated and rolls her eyes and thanks whatever that she's not in that situation anymore.

I mentioned the part of the Tuckman model adjourning and I don't think I did a good job emphasizing how important that part is. When these changes happen, it is crucial to take the time to review the overall workings of the team. Retrospectives are process focused and time boxed to a given sprint or project. Doing something more like a post mortem where you're less focused on start stop continue and more focused on what we did right, what was out of our control, and what lessons were learned is better. I'd do these before a new team member jumps on board, if only because that team you were working with is now going to change. Like all conversations this doesn't need to be formal and probably would work out better done asynchronously at first to let people generate ideas of their personal stakes in the team.

The key is adjourning isn't just the final part of the team but that all things end and that point is a good time for lessons learned. I can give you books on this and studies that show it's a good time for change but I'm not sure you're in a place for homework. Just rest assured the science backs up the idea of there are certain points where you can change the course of things and certain points where it's much harder. These times of change do help people have a point where they can self reflect and make some changes in the way that they work. It may be that I've been predominantly in my career a change agent but I think this is the point of management that you're supposed to make better workers who in turn make better work.

I aim for adjourning to be a natural part of the SDLC. If I had my way work even tech work would be seasonal and allow for different projects to be worked on throughout the year. I can go into that in another article and still have room to rant.

With all this flux coming around though and you being where you are having to prove yourself I'm curious. What are your goals? Do you have definitive actions KPIs, OKRs, other three letter acronyms for short "SMART" goals? I know you've been on the wait and see and trying to break down some of the cruft in the team, but what do you want to build? What are you setting up to measure?

I hope that helps.