Cultivating Autonomy and Trust in Agile Environments
To ensure productivity and motivate programmers, it’s best to choose a release cadence that works for your team, whether it’s once a month or when a set of features is finished. Market what you already have instead of what’s in the pipeline, and avoid relying too heavily on long-term road-maps, which often change. Don’t force programmers to commit to completing certain features by a specific date, as it can negatively affect morale. Less process is usually better, as programmers are often self-managing and self-motivated. Allow each programmer to track tasks with their preferred tool and maintain a flat organizational structure to help them thrive.
“wall of confusion” in which development throws poor quality code over the wall to operations, and operations puts in place painful change management processes as a way to inhibit change.
For Agile teams to deliver valuable software, they must trust programmers to make decisions and give them autonomy in their work. Clear communication of project goals and objectives is needed. Agile teams should review the project’s progress, reflect on the decisions made by the programmers, and adjust.
The current team experience in most companies is negative and superficial. It discourages self-reflection and undermines the safety and trust within teams. A better approach would be to encourage constructive feedback, set a good example, deliver difficult news, acknowledge genuine successes, and have fun. Embracing failure and learning opportunities is also essential. Engage the team in defining success and establishing measurable goals, allowing them to choose the most relevant metrics to their work.
