How Agile & Scrum contribute to Team Morale
By Bachan Anand / Filed under Agile, Collaboration, Inspect & Adapt, Scrum, Self Organization, WORK is GOOD / September 28th, 2011
How has using Scrum and Agile as framework helped team work and morale of team members?
We asked this queston to other Agilists on Linkedin.com, and received some profound views and interesting perspectives. We think the readers of our blog could benefit from these insights.
Here are the extracts from the discussion.
1. Nothing helps morale and teamwork like success.
2. The Agile framework has unknown details that keep the team excited about the challenges ahead. The scrum meetings, prioritization and changes add a lot of dynamics to the discussions and keep the progress live and happening. Quick iterations of requirement-development- review-closure cycle and client involvement in each of them keep the adrenalin flow high all through.
3. Project Management team has no option but to share all the contract details of the project, so the team is bound to be highly motivated and involved both individually and as a team.
4. Agile approaches treat each team member with respect. This can be a really big positive change and has a wonderful effect on morale.
5. Some team members view the Agile approach with trepidation; there’s no longer a place to hide. Without the ‘respect’ aspect, that ‘nowhere to hide‘ can be disastrous to the team morale.
6. If things get done right, the effect is very positive. But it can all go bad for the want of a bit of real knowledge about Agile approaches.
7. The autonomy given to the team becomes a significant and ongoing reward for their efforts. Autonomy is something only more senior positions offer in many situations; having such choices and freedom is a major enhancement of morale, if the team members have the courage to use it.
8. Communication!
- Increased alignment and communication between customer and team members
- Transition in role of PM to running interference and reduction in unnecessary artifacts should increase productivity
- Daily information exchange between key players should cut down on expectation gaps and result in timely issue resolution or escalation
- Focus on objective/quantitative progress & velocity reporting metrics should create a “level-playing field”
- Retrospectives & regular refactoring of methods should translate into better productivity and less firefighting
9. Collaboration!
- The team is self-organizing! This help the morale.
- The team can see results quickly and have feedback from customers: that’s also a great benefit for developers
- Testers and developers work together, which usually, at least long term, reduces bugs and helps to spot problems earlier, which makes problems less painful to solve and reduces their impact.
- The full team delivers together, which increases team building and collaboration, and usually people are ready to help each other and share their knowledge.
- Finally, if scrum is well implemented, it allows to reduce the number of meetings (especially the useless ones).
10. The customer is engaged continually in what is being produced, which means that there are no surprises in that regard.
Can you add to this list, from your own experiences?
Contributions by Owen Jay Murphy, Praveen Kumar Kambhampati, Paul Oldfield, Gareth Blake-Coggins, Bernard Kahn, Kiron Bondale, Lorenzo Granai, Chris Browne. You can read the entire discussion here.
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