Project Management

Getting People to Do the Right Thing

Gil Broza specializes in increasing organizational agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Dozens of companies seeking transformations, makeovers or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern and respectful support for customizing agile in their contexts. His book "The Agile Mind-Set" helps practitioners go beyond process and adopt a true agile approach to work. His book "The Human Side of Agile" is a practical book on leading agile teams to greatness. These days, several of the world's largest organizations are having him train hundreds of their managers in technology and business (up to VP level) on practical agile leadership. Get Gil's popular 20-session mini-program "Something Happened on the Way to Agile" free at OnTheWayToAgile.com.

Every aspect of product development can be done better or worse. That includes being a team player, writing code, communicating requirements, testing functionality...you name it. But how do you ensure that people do the best thing? And, can you even do that? That is, can you somehow force good practice? And what can you expect to happen by doing so?

Let’s examine the thorny topic of forcing desirable behavior on people...

What doesn’t seem to work
About half the companies I visit have a rule: Everything in a team’s iteration must be a user story. Furthermore, its heading must be expressed in this template:

“As a someone (e.g. Sales Manager) I would like to be able to something (e.g. see weekly data on product returns) so that I can do something (e.g., educate engineering to better prioritize fixes).”

The idea is well-intended: cover the who, what and why. This approach has helped produce some good stories; other times, people write bizarre, confusing or unhelpful titles. Examples include “As a Scrum team I want a build so that I can deploy” and “As a team member I want to have this story as a placeholder for abnormal conditions found during testing of X.”

A 2008 article titled “Object Calisthenics” offered a method for improving developers’ OOP (object-oriented programming) skills …


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A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

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