Performance Tree

  Agile   Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

As project managers transition to leading agile teams, the journey can feel strange, the references to values such as “purpose” and “courage” frustratingly fuzzy or beside the point. PMO director/program manager turned agile coach Lyssa Adkins has made the journey and believes that metaphors can be powerful allies in setting expectations and inspiring greater performance.

This excerpt is from Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition, published by Pearson/Addison-Wesley Professional, May 2010, ISBN 0321637704, Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc. For a full Table of Contents: www.informit.com/title/0321637704

Teams often get the basics of agile running within the first few sprints. Agile frameworks, designed to be simple, are just that — simple and easy to get started. And the practices, well-coached, are easy to set in motion, too. It doesn’t take long before the rituals built into agile can leave the team feeling like they are caught in a never-ending hamster wheel — always moving from one ritual to the next and from one sprint to the next and the next and the next. They are making progress on the product they create together but spinning in the hamster wheel nonetheless.

Beyond the company results the team is asked to produce, teams need something else to strive …

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