I’m not the first person to say the agile world has gotten away from itself, and I constantly see teams going through the motions without understanding the real why behind the way they’re working.
It’s about CREATIVE CONSTRAINTS!
That’s it. These are patterns of constraints that have worked well for others in the past, and they are sharing them so you can learn from their experience. One of the best ways to learn is to try working with the same constraints they set up and see what comes out of it for you.
Constraints sounds negative, but they’re really not. In fact they are necessary for success and will contribute to more creativity and better problem solving than if there are no constraints.
Riverbanks are constraints for the flow of the river, without them flooding would happen constantly and the water would be unpredictable.
A specific product or market focus is a constraint, and helps you to zero in on what you’re building.
Let’s try a little experiment, don’t look ahead!
First task:
I want you to tell me a story. That’s it, that’s the ask - what can you come up with in 30 seconds?
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how was that? Easy? hard?
how did that feel? did you like the sky being the limit?
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Second task:
I want you to tell me a story about a princess and a purple elephant
30 seconds, GO
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how was that? different? the same?
what did you like better? what was worse?
was one easier than the other?
For most people the second task is substantially easier. Why? Constraints!
In the first one you have to come up with everything, there’s nothing to get you started. In the second one you have some potential characters, which can lead to ideas for locations, and ultimately makes it easier for you to be creative and come up with a story.
Let’s go back to Scrum. It has some constraints:
we’re going to use short timeboxes
we plan for the iteration in planning
we make a goal and pick work as our ‘commitment’ for the timebox
we have a daily standup
we review our sprint at the end
we reflect and retrospect, taking experiments to improve our ways of working back into our process
we deliver shippable code each iteration
These constraints are meant to relieve your mind of some burden of coming up with the rules yourself, but also creates a nice structure for us to work inside of. We have to plan small. We have lots of opportunities to improve. We need to work together to succeed.
You don’t have to follow Scrum or Kanban Method or any other existing framework, process, or set of tools, but if you don’t you’ll need to be a lot more diligent about identifying and experimenting with various constraints and staying on top of your ways of working to be effective and not just flying by the seat of your pants. Personally I think it’s worth working a little slower and taking more time to talk about how we work and talking about and planning the work, along with spending a lot more time learning together, but that’s not for everyone and Scrum is a very useful starting point for your ways of working.
Just remember doing Scrum isn’t about “DOING SCRUM” it’s about utilizing a set of constraints that have worked for MANY folks before you to maximize your creativity and help you deliver valuable working software that your users will love!