Friday 8 January 2016

Agile Thoughts and Ruminations ( work specific blog )

I was just thinking that I haven’t really blogged anything about my work role
Now I’m not saying that I’m any good, in fact with my condition for a lot of the time I just think I’m mediocre !!

Soooooo, some very simple thoughts on Agile as I’m having to try and re-establish my connection with Agile.
There appear to be three elements that I’m struggling with recognising for myself, I think they are key to me getting my ‘Agile MOJO’ back !!

1.       Being more flexible in my attitude and actions.
2.       Knowing & Believing in the Agile mindset
3.       Understanding where I am on the Agile continuum

Now I know that when I was executing my role well, I was I hope flexible in my attitude and my actions.  I was a Scrum Master and I was there to be inward facing and benefit the team by removing impediments, running a lot of the Agile ceremonies and generally just ‘getting it’, that is Agile.  Getting that we needed to be a team that commited to a feasible set of stories and delivered them in a sprint. No blame just the ability to facilitate velocity as an Agile scrum team.     For Agile to work, all the team need to let go, let go of the command and control philosophy that has driven our IT for so many years.  We need to be able to then trust what we as a team commit to and the actions we take to deliver the backlog for our Product Owners.  We need to be able to look retroactively at our prior Sprint/work and have an open, honest and constructive discussion about what works, what didn’t work and what might work.  Basically remaining flexible in our attitude and our actions.   I hope that makes sense.

Now I think I believed in the Agile mindset, which effectivelty for me was believing in the Agile manifesto.  People over Processes etc.  I’m struggling to get fully back to that position in my head because my last 2 projects before I was off unwell had allowed me to question my own contribution and then allowed me to question the agile  mindset as I was struggling with my teams to deliver the backlogs for the Product Owners.  Not just me, but a whole team, though I was laying the blame primarily at myself.  I have been reading a lot of Agile texts to try and reconnect with the Agile manifesto and the Agile mindset, feels like its alluding me but perhaps its just around the corner as I am feeling a tad more optimistic at work.

I would have said that I was quite advanced on the Agile continuum but as I have questioned everything else about myself I have questioned this as well.  Concerned that I have in the past effectively been lying to myself.  I’m worried that I now might make the same decisions that I used to make in Waterfall though those decisions may now be outdated and not fit with Agile, a sort of resorting to a comfort zone in my old IT world.  I need to rely on my own ingenuity to help facilitate projects and work as well as the Agile mindset and believe that I can recover my place on the Agile continuum.  I need to move away from a reliance on ‘tried and true’ to a position of ’inpsect and adapt’ !  It may also be hard as moving away from ‘tried and true’ might seem counter-intuitive.  So my condition means that I blame myself for most things that go wrong on any project, even if it’s not my actions that have resulted in a specific outcome.

One problem I’m always fighting for some reason is my catastrophic thinking so even though I have never been performance managed I seem to always think it’s just around the corner.


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