Malvin Ly

I always strive for my team to be as autonomous as possible. The best way for a team to perform well is to have the responsibility to decide how they work. The process should work for the team, not the other way around.

It really irritates me when I see agile zealots blindly following their step-by-step checklist. For example, some people have forgotten who our customers are. As a developer, my customer is the business. A typical agile zealot will value processes over business value. If it goes against their prescribed set of agile processes, the business must be wrong and we have set them straight right? Absolutely ridiculous.

“But that’s not Scrum”. Well guess what? I don’t care because no process is perfect. The process is not more important than the customer’s satisfaction. These agile zealots always claim to care about people and results more than processes, but they will interject if you don’t follow their checklist to the letter.

Great teams should always have the power to decide how they work, because ultimately they will be responsible for the outcome. Mistakes will be made, but it’s part of the learning process. At the same time, I’m not saying that once a process has been decided upon that it needs to be written in stone. A disciplined team will fine tune their workflow as the project progresses.