Agile and Lean - Agile and Scrum Blog

Top 10 Retrospective Formats

There are so many books, blogs, and sites describing different retrospective formats, but it’s still one of the most common questions I get in the ScrumMaster classes.

When I started as a ScrumMaster, I was only using one format for about two years – and it worked. We got used to it and I learned how to facilitate it and generate meaningful improvements for the team. When I started coaching different organizations, I realized what variety is available and started practicing different formats. I guess that at that time I became more confident with my facilitation skills and stopped being afraid of experiments.

Don’t forget that the goal of a good retrospective is not to complain but to improve so you need to come up with an actionable improvement for the next Sprint. But let’s start with how structure of a good retrospective works. It’s common practice to do some check-in activity, for example by asking “If you are a weather, what kind of weather are you?” to get the focus of everyone. It doesn’t have to be long but it’s a good energizer. Then you explore the possibilities and gather the data so you can reflect. It usually generates too many ideas, so you need to narrow it down to the topics that are most important for the team i.e. grouping, dot voting, etc. Then you explore the most important topic looking for options “What can we do as a team so that this will never happen/improve”. When you generate several options let the team choose what they like to commit to. Too many actions usually don’t stick, and the team will not do them next Sprint, so don’t aim for too many. One improvement is better than many on a to-do list. If you like to get more details on the process check a talk I gave at several conferences.

Now once we summarized the goal and structure of a good retrospective, let’s have a look at my top ten formats.

Retrospective #1 – Plus and Delta

This retrospective format is the foundation most ScrumMasters start with. Team members take turns saying what they like, what they should continue with, and what they like to improve. It’s simple, everyone has a voice, and you don’t need much preparation.

Retrospective #2 – Star

Another popular retrospective format is called star where you expand the classic format of two questions into five segments and let the team look at the given Sprint from different angles – start, more, continue, less, stop. The team usually writes their suggestions on postits. This retrospective format broadens the perspective and usually generates more topics for the team. It is also easier to get the whole team involved as writing is often easier than having everyone speak.

Retrospective #3 – Speedboat

Once you’re bored with classic retrospective formats, try something more playful. I think the most classic is the speed boat metaphor. The wind in the sails represents what helps us, the anchors represent what is stopping us. And there is no limit to creativity in designing the picture. If you let the team design the picture, it will be even more fun. It encourages the team’s creativity and brings up topics that wouldn’t appear in regular retrospectives.

Retrospective #4 – Three Little Pigs

“Three Little Pigs” is a fairy tale about little pigs that build their houses from different materials. The first pig was lazy and built a straw house to play quickly. The second put a little more energy into building the house and quickly built a house out of sticks and ran off to play. The third worked all day and built a house of bricks. The next day, a wolf walked by, smelled a pig through the straw, and was already looking forward to dinner. He blew up the first house, and the little pig just barely managed to hide the second house, when the wolf broke the sticks with one blow the little pigs ran away to the brick house. When the wolf was unable to break it down, he decided to climb into it through the chimney. But the pigs were ready for that, prepare a pot of boiling water and the wolf never returned…

This retrospective uses the story as a metaphor and has the team compare their system and operation to a house made of straw, sticks, and bricks. This retrospective often helps the team identify longer-term stability, sustainability, and technical debt issues.

Retrospective #5 – Mad Sad Glad

This retrospective tries to look at the way of working through our feelings. Team members describe what makes them mad, sad, or glad. As with the previous formats, you can use postits or just let everyone talk. Not everything is rational and measurable, and it’s good to give space to feelings.

Retrospective #6 – Timeline

Sometimes the team tell you that they don’t remember everything that happened. In that case, you can try drawing a timeline and have them write down the events already during the Sprint. At the beginning of the retrospective, you revise such a timeline and let everyone remember what was happening when the note was written.

Retrospective #7 – ESVP: Explorer – Shopper – Vacationer – Prisoner

Sometimes it happens that the team doesn’t work properly, and they don’t want to participate in the retrospective. ESVP format looks at team dynamics and explore individual team member’s attitude. Explorers are ideal team members. They get involved, are active, come up with ideas, take responsibility. The shoppers are a bit more passive, but when they see something interesting, they get involved and ‘put it in their cart’. The vacationers are cool, glad they don’t need to work. They usually don’t get much involved but are not distracting either. The prisoners don’t want to be here and often are quite aggressive. They can poison the entire event.

At the beginning of the retrospective, let everyone where they are. When you find out that you have most people as prisoners, there is no point in continuing the classic retrospective. Instead, try to look for the root cause and how to help them get out of the prison.

Retrospective #8 – Appreciation

Positivity is the key. Research says that the well-functioning teams have a ratio of positive vs. negative events on average 5:1. Therefore in this retrospective, team members will appreciate the contribution of other team members.

Retrospective #9 – Road to the Beach

One of the more creative forms of retrospectives is based on children’s games. It can take many forms, for example, a trip to the beach representing a metaphor of a Sprint where individual members imagine the Sprint as a trip to the beach and begin to describe it. “On the way to the beach a storm comes,” says the first. And another team member continues: “On the way to the beach a storm came, and we got lost and didn’t know where to go.” And another team member repeats what those before him said and adds another event: “On the way to the beach a storm came, we got lost and we didn’t know where to go and the road was wet and muddy…” and so on. Every event in the journey to the beach is a metaphor for what happened in the Sprint. Sometimes the team needs a change, and this retrospective is fun. Everyone has to guess what each part of the way to the beach meant in reality and also be able to remember the whole story.

Retrospective #10 – Bingo!

This retrospective format is the most creative. Do you like playing Bingo? Well, that’s good news because you can play it with your team at the next retrospective. Together, the team brainstorms the events that happened within the Sprint either on cards or on an online board. When brainstorming on sticky notes, everyone must write down the same set of events. Everyone builds their own Bingo! board – the cards are the same, but everyone chooses the position of the individual cards themselves. One team member shuffles the cards and reads them one by one. The others mark what has already been said wait for “Bingo!”. The team member that got a Bingo! explains to the others how he experienced the mentioned events. Then the cards are shuffled again, and another person reads. It is a very playful form of retrospective, and it strengthens positivity in the team and shows different perspectives.

Why Some Organizations are Laying of “ScrumMasters”

For some time there was a trend of laying off so-called ScrumMasters from mostly big organizations. At first, it looks like Scrum is over. However, I would be careful with such conclusions. When you look closer, they are not really firing real ScrumMasters but some sort of delivery managers as they often call them or as I described them in my previous blog post – Scrum “Project” Masters, Scrum “Ceremonies” Masters, or Scrum “Jira” Masters. And they are also hiring them for such skills and responsibilities so it is no surprise. Those employees are mostly just pretending to be ScrumMasters. The problem is they often lack agile experience, lack coaching and facilitation skills, are not trained, and their managers often expect them to micromanage the delivery as they were always used to having everything under control. In other words, the environment is still so traditional that without strong leadership, desire for change, and experience in changing organizations they burn out and give up. “It would never work at my organization”, they say.

Indeed without them initiating the change, it will never work. Every change needs significant energy to change the status quo. And one of the responsibilities of great ScrumMasters is to work at all three levels of the #ScrumMasterWay concept:

Firstly, at My Team level, they need to be able to build a team from a group of individuals. Help them to be self-managing and cross-functional so they can deliver value end to end. Explain to them the dynamics of Scrum, facilitate events, and help them to take over the ownership and responsibility for their way of working. Once the initial work is done and the team starts picking up, they need to coach them so they constantly look for improvements.

Secondly, at the Relationship level, ScrumMasters need to work with teams that collaborate on bigger products. Helping Product Owners to shift from a delivery mindset to a value mindset, build a real value-driven Backlog, and prioritize. Facilitating larger refinements with multiple teams, stakeholders, customers, and the Product Owner. Supporting Product Owners to take over the responsibility and ownership for the entire product success focusing on return on investment and customer satisfaction, not just delivery.

Finally, at the Entire System level, ScrumMasters need to help the entire organization to embrace agility. In other words, be more adaptive. Loosen their budgeting the planning cycles, and be ok with uncertainty. Implement a fast feedback loop, and don’t be afraid to inspect and adapt. By increasing the transparency step by step they need to build trust in this new way of working. It’s the only way how to sustain the current world of constant changes and be ready to solve complex business problems. Simply help the organizations to be ready for whatever the future brings.

All over ScrumMasters need to start their ScrumMaster journey at the My Team level. Working with small teams, experiencing what difference can Scrum and agility make at the team level. Learning about the dynamics of Scrum, self-management, and cross-functionality. The same skills and experiences are then applied to larger entities of Relationship and Entire System Levels. They learn on the way.

In order to be successful, large traditional organizations need a certain number of ScrumMasters experienced with the entire system level so they can coach the organization on their agile adoption journey. Hiring Scrum “Project” Masters, Scrum “Ceremonies” Masters, or Scrum “Jira” Masters will never help and can only result in “Dark Scrum” that not only doesn’t help the organization achieve their business goals but demotivates everyone and often results in firing those “fake” ScrumMasters. It’s sad, but it’s quite a common step for traditional organizations on their agile journey. Indeed you can skip it, and hire real ScrumMasters and start changing right away, but for many organizations, it’s too radical approach. They still hope they can be successful in dealing with complexity in nowadays constantly changing world without change. I don’t think so. I believe the change is inevitable. But we’ll see what the future brings, and what organizations will struggle, and what organizations will survive.

The Power of Metaphors

One of the tools I have started using more over the years is a metaphor. Many years ago I was taught the Speed Boat retrospective and tried it with teams. It brought great energy and fun, it helped us to uncover different perspectives. But it never occurred to me that I should take the idea to the next level and use it in other situations. So let’s have a look at different situations where metaphor can be useful.

Organizations are often used to look at outputs, measure effort, and compare velocity. One of the shifts that need to happen is from functionality to business value or in other words from output to outcome. And it’s not an easy shift, especially when the organization is still project-oriented, running on the “fixed scope” mindset. One of the reasons I’m using the metaphor with Product Owners is to shake with their business as usual – we deliver requirements – and reset their thinking about the product. I’m leveraging the Three levels of Reality concept I learned from ORSC and guiding them through the Sentient Essence level by exploring a metaphor, through the Dreaming level where the most collaboration at Backlog refinement is happening, to the Consensus Reality level they are used to by setting goals and objectives. The Sentient Essence level is about feelings it’s the spirit of things. It’s where the purpose is born. And the purpose is often forgotten in traditional organizations.

Using a metaphor is also a great icebreaker and team building. You see how different people collaborate, how they react to different perspectives, and look for commonalities. It can help teams to create an identity and become a better team together.

It’s also a great tool for ScrumMasters to reflect on where they like to have the team or the entire organization in six months, a year, or three years.

I’m often starting by letting individuals draw some animal, real or imaginary. Depending on the situation I might help them explore that metaphor more to uncover different aspects of it. Drawing is just one way how to visualize the metaphor. You can ask people to describe it, to create a gesture, song, or dance. There are no limits.

For example “We are like a flock of birds, they can fly fast, but not for long. Some got tired quickly and started falling down but the others continued without noticing. They are strong, they have great eyes, but once they start the journey they don’t like to change the direction.”

Then we compare the individual drawings, looking for similarities and uncovering the differences. And start integrating different perspectives into a coherent picture. It’s different than talking about numbers, goals, and objectives. It brings energy and creativity and I would encourage you to try it. Let me know how it worked for you.

Hiring ScrumMaster?

One of my biggest passions in the agile space is developing great ScrumMasters and helping them to become successful in their role. I become ScrumMaster in 2005 and I didn’t know much about either Agile or Scrum. I did all the mistakes you can ever imagine. I didn’t know anything about coaching or facilitation. Instead of acting as a leader, I was more like a team mom. Later, when I realized the whole potential of the role, and become the real ScrumMaster I decided I need to give back to the community and I dedicated quite a lot of effort trying to explain to individuals and organizations what is ScrumMaster really about and why is having great ScrumMaster related to the success of the agile journey. But no matter how long is this all Agile and Scrum around, despite the effort, there are still companies who are hiring ScrumMasters who cannot be successful. So let’s have a look at the most common misunderstandings.

Scrum “Project” Master

Deadlines are important. So let’s tweak the role a bit and hire a combined role of “Project Manager/ScrumMaster”, “Agile Project Manager” or “Agile Delivery Manager”. They are experienced in planning and making sure we keep up to speed and follow the plan. They usually manage the Sprint Backlog and often micromanage individuals.

Scrum “Manager” Master

We have to be efficient. We need to deliver more functionality faster. Speed is the key to the success. So let’s have the “Scrum Manager” to help people organize. Someone needs to allocate tasks and measure that they are working and not pretending or hiding behind the Scrum process. Someone also needs to check the progress at Daily Scrum. Someone has to make sure there are results. Such environments often take velocity as a key metric and ask Scrum “Manager” Master to create Burndown charts and other reports.

Scrum “Technical” Master

Many organizations are missing traditional Team Leaders. A senior technical person who will guide the rest of the team members, distribute their tasks, helping the Product Owner with the estimates. Decide on the Sprint commitment. So here we are Let’s hire an expert – Scrum “Technical” Master.

Scrum “Ceremonies” Master

This is my ‘favorite’. We have a Scrum Master to make sure the ceremonies are happening. It’s not a valued position as it downgrades into a team assistant who needs to schedule and manage meetings. Therefore it’s not much popular and most organizations would combine it with a developer/tester/business analyst role. In some cases, it turns to “Scrum Police” as the only explanation they are able to come up with is that ‘Scrum defines it this way, follow the rules’.

Scrum “Jira” Master

This is very typical nowadays. ScrumMaster needs to know Jira, update it on regular basis, and generate reports. Such ScrumMasters are often micromanaging individuals, adding complexity through difficult workflow and complicated processes. They are focusing on various different estimates, at the story level using story points which they often link to man days and hours at the task level which are being re-estimated every day to be accurate.

Scrum “Owner” Master

It’s a waste of our time to have two people when in the traditional world we only had one project manager. ScrumMaster can act as a Product Owner at the same time. In their mind, ScrumMaster is some sort of process assistant for 10-15% anyway so why not. Such a person usually doesn’t have enough business knowledge and ends up being a requirements seeker, not looking for value, and not deciding on priorities. They take a backlog as a to-do list where everything needs to be done.

Scrum “Flock” Master

Finally, some organizations have one ScrumMaster for many teams. No matter how experienced are they, they usually burn down. They don’t have enough time to focus on all teams, so they end up being everywhere and nowhere, and therefore their impact is very limited.

Maybe you find yourself in multiple dysfunctions at the same time. That often happens. But no matter how different they are, they all share one common outcome. They don’t work and you end up with “fake Scrum” or even “Dark Scrum” and no ScrumMaster.

So what’s the real ScrumMaster role about? For the beginning, you can start with the assessment below. Take it as just a start. There is more to be a great ScrumMaster, but if you have the following top 10 points right, you are at a great place already.

My primary measure of success is team self-management
My team is continuously improving their way of working
There are no roles in the team
The team is cross-functional and able to deliver end-to-end value
We measure value, not an effort
I can coach and facilitate conversations and collaboration
I’m not responsible for a delivery
I’m able to work at all three levels of the #ScrumMasterWay concept (My Team, Relationships, and Entire System)
I’m a leader, helping others to grow and supporting organizations on their agile journey
I love Agile and Scrum, and I’m an active part of the Agile community

If you are interested about a real ScrumMaster, check out my book The Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay.

Agile is a Change

It’s more than 20 years since Agile Manifesto and some organizations still take Agile as another process or tool. But it can’t be farther from reality. We try to explain that it’s not about “doing” agile but “being” agile. That it’s about changing the way of working and thinking, the overall mindset. But companies are often looking for shortcuts and searching for simple solutions. Rename some processes, create a new role, or buy a different tool. Though that could be useful, it’s not the core of the change.

But let’s start with who should be driving the transformation and who should be implementing Scrum in the organization. Surprisingly for many people, it’s not some manager but someone who has their own experience with agile, scrum, self-management, and end-to-end cross-functional teams – the ScrumMaster. Indeed that person should be an experienced agile coach who is ready to demonstrate leadership and take ownership of a change, working at the Entire System level of the #ScrumMasterWay concept.

There are many concepts that they should be familiar from System Coaching (i.e. ORCS) to classical change management i.e. (Kotter’s Eight Steps of successful change). But in a nutshell, you can start a change with the following steps:

Why – create a sense of urgency – Why is it important to the organization? What will happen if we don’t change? Unless you can create a sense of urgency, the change is unlikely to be successful. Do others see it the same way? Do they feel the same need?
Who – find your allies – Identify the supporting team that will support you and helps you to implement the change. It can be the group of ScrumMasters, but it’s not limited to this group. You are looking for enthusiasts who would be willing to invest their time and name into promoting the change.
Vision / Dream for a change – Do you have a dream of the future? In a year from now, where would you like to be with this organization/group/team?
Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. And then again. Communicate. It’s a new way of working so one presentation will not kill it.
Celebrate success – don’t forget that it’s not processes and practices but the success that scales. Make it visible and don’t forget to celebrate each successful step. Instead of focusing too much on what we are struggling with, start with what is working well and make sure it sticks. The rest will be improved step by step.

Sustainable Agility

One of the very common questions people ask is why companies are failing their agile transformations and what do we need to do to create sustainable agility? Let’s start with the most common mistakes. The first one is starting the change without creating a sense of urgency. If you don’t know why you need to change and what happens if you don’t change, there is only a little chance to be successful. Unless you know why you are changing the way you work (to be more agile, Scrum, or Kanban), then don’t do it. Neither Agile, Scrum, nor Kanban is your goal. They are just some sort of a ‘walking sticks’ helping you on your journey to success. You need to have a higher purpose defined which will be stronger than people’s individual goals and therefore unify them along the way. There needs to be a strong sense of urgency in the environment. Being different or implementing agile is not enough. There is another reason why the real strategic reasons need to be defined and that’s because those are exactly the metrics you need to measure to know if your transformation was successful. For example, if the real business reason for a change was to increase flexibility and fasten your learning, that’s how you can measure the success of the agile transformation. Neither velocity nor number of retrospectives matters.

The second most appealing way how to fail is to copy what someone is doing. Take their current way of working as a strict process and call it the only right way. When it worked somewhere else, why shall we take a hard time trying to invent it ourselves when we can just apply it as it is. Let’s rename it to some fancy name and fix it. It usually starts with a big push from the top and has often wrong expectations from such a change. Being Agile is going to be hard, you might not see the results right away, and renaming a few roles and departments would not be enough. You need to experiment and develop your own way of working. Only then you get the right habits and mindsets. MyCompanyAgile, nor Agile2.0 will help you.

To create your own flavor of the way of working, you need to start from the bottom, get experience from the teams, learn on the way through your own failures, do experiments, and have the courage to do things differently. Turn the organization around and build it based on the cross-functional teams who can actually deliver value end to end. Be business value driven, customer-centric. At some time, when you get used to this way of working at the team level and can imagine what needs to change in the business, systems architecture, and multiple team picture and you might need to get ready for the next step of scaling (implementing the agile way of working to larger products and ecosystems) and eventually the overall system of business agility (changing the way an organization operates, it’s structure, culture, and organizational design).

In summary – reflect, create a sense of urgency, experiment to find your own way, start small at the team level, and only once it works scale it through the entire organization. There is no silver bullet, you need to create your own way of working.

Agile Mindset

We talk about changing agile mindset for years now, and it’s hard to describe. People who are far from being Agile are often saying “That’s what we are already doing, so what is this buzz about Agile about?” or “This will never work in reality, Agile is only for unicorns.” So let’s see how that agile mindset is changing.

Delivery Focus

At the beginning of the Agile journey, it’s all about output. The delivery is the key. People care about efficiency, measuring velocity, estimating effort and complexity using Story points, T-shirt sizes, drawing Burndown charts. “How can we deliver faster?” is the most common question. People want to measure everything. They still believe the work which needs to be done can be analyzed and planned, so they create mini ‘stories’ aka business requirements with all the details specified, often using acceptance criteria to add even more details and make it even closer to detail specification as they’ve been always creating. They also believe that we only need to follow the plan and deliver everything as described as soon as possible to be successful. Nice and simple world. But that’s not what Agile is about so you can freely forget most of the practices mentioned above. They might be better than some other from pure traditional world, but most of them have nothing to do with being Agile. It’s just ‘fake Agile’. On the other hand, most of the people couldn’t learn how to dance overnight, so a bit of ‘fake Agile’ might be a good step towards the mindset change. To be fair there are some aspect teams need to master at this level, mostly going back to the XP (Extreme Programming) like continuous integration, shared code, TDD, regular refactoring, and pair programming or mob programming. Without those, nothing else will work.

Strategy Focus

The more you apply the agility, and aspects like self-organization to raise empowerment, cross-functionality to be business value driven, and frequent product reviews to be customer-centric, the more your focus turn from delivery to the vision: Why are we doing it? For whom? What makes it different? What is the value? How are we going to change the world? People start to see that delivery is important, but just as a prerequisite. And it’s definitely not about delivering faster (when there is a risk we go to the wrong direction). Instead, it’s about maximizing value, which actually can be achieved by delivering less features than you were used to do before. 80% of the value is only in 20% of functionality, and it’s not distributed linearly. The million-dollar question is how can we know this item brings value. The answer is surprisingly simple: Feedback. You can start with the implementation of Scrum. Short Sprints help teams to focus value delivery through defining Sprint Goals, cross-functional teams enable fast feedback on the value delivered from customers through regular Sprint Reviews, and good Product Owner brings decent business knowledge and creates a relationship with customers so the feedback makes sense. Practices like User Stories and Story Mapping, which are by definition customer-centric and value-driven (if used how they are supposed to be) are useful concepts to start a conversation about the business value. At this stage, people believe that if they have a good vision, and understand the customer well, they are going to be successful. Sounds great, the only weak point is that often that’s not enough in nowadays constantly changing the world.

Impact Focus

Finally, the last stage of the Agile mindset change is acknowledging that we don’t know where the value is, we can’t analyze it, we can’t plan it. All we can do is to iterate and inspect and adapt. This stage is finally where we stop pretending we know where the value is, and start heavily experimenting. Note, that 80% experiments must fail by definition, so you need to run very small tiny reality checks which are expected to be opportunities for learning. Teams learn fast from day to day failures, always looking for better ways, and when every experiment goes as they expected they take is as an indicator of lack of transparency, honesty, and relevant feedback. All over radical transparency is their best friend, empowerment doesn’t stop at the at the team level but goes through the entire organization, and emergent leadership is the key engine to creativity and innovations. The organization is purpose driven and do whatever it takes to achieve it. The delivery at this mindset stage is needed but is quite unimportant. It’s like walking. You would say you need to walk to get somewhere. But if you don’t know where the ‘somewhere’ is, walking no matter how fast only makes you tired. At this stage, it’s not even about a strategy that much as the strategy is emergent and changes depending on the feedback. It’s all about if the outcome we produce created impact. If you know what do you want to achieve, you can measure if it’s happening. The sooner the better. Impact Mapping is a good tool to start. You don’t implement functionality because you know how to implement it, nor because someone believes or say it is a good thing to be done. You do it, to achieve your goal. If you have any evidence that the impact you need to achieve it is happening, you continue. If not, you stop and find another assumption to test. If you think about it, this is a very different way of prioritization, working, and thinking. That’s the real agile mindset. Once you embrace such a way of working, you are truly Agile.

Onboarding and Recruiting

It’s important to realize that the employee experience starts already before the day one during the recruiting process. In agile organizations where hard skills and past experience are not that important we often focus on cultural mix, mindset and ability to learn instead. We used to have a hard programming test for our candidates. It was so hard than our regular employee would not pass it. And it didn’t tell us much as what we really need, were people who can collaborate, learn new things fast, and were flexible. So instead, we started to ask them about what are they passionate about, what they did, what they like to do. We changed the whole process to allow people find their roles, not hire for fixed roles. You can imagine how hard it was for recruiting agencies. Give us the position description, how many years of experience they need, master degree, what technologies they asked us. But we didn’t really care. We were looking for flexibility, and people willing to grow and co-create their roles.

Another important aspect is diversity. For team dynamic is good to have a mix of different profiles. For some roles we did MBTI, and TKI during their onboarding to help team understand people’s typical behavior during decision making, and conflicts. And you can be more creative than that. Very agile organizations are often inviting candidates to join them for a day so they can experience how it is to be part of the organization, and also hear from the team perspective, what is the candidate like. Recruiting is like dating. Some other agile organizations are even doing team hiring event, where they invite all candidates for the role – for example ScrumMaster or Product Owner to spend a day together and simulate the typical day. It’s transparent for both sides, and very revealing about the way how they react in different situations. In general contact before the day one is always encouraged.

Onboarding then can start by pair working, where the new person is not only introduced to the processes and products but also to the people and teams. We always have focused on the values and culture during the onboarding. Some organizations are creating a handbook for new employees to share with them who they are, but I believe becoming part of a team and a larger ecosystem and getting a mentor who can help people start is always worth of. It helps new people to create relationships and become integral part of the system. Time invested into people development always pays back.

Positions and Career Path in Agile Organization

Considering the shift from siloed based departments with subject matter experts focusing on their specialization in traditional organizations to more general cross-functional teams where members combine different skills to maximize the value in agile organizations, there is a trend to generalize positions and flatten the career path as the hierarchy got less important. Agile organizations are moving from fixed detailed positions to t-shaped skill positions or even no-positions at all, with emergent roles depending on the actual need. They abandon the skills based positions and creating a competence based model where employees are deciding what is their journey going to be. We optimize for flexibility and career mobility. The reason for such shift is again dealing with VUCA challenges as the world becomes too volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous for pre-defined skilled based roles. Agile organizations need flexibility. They need to react fast on any changes in the business environment, are there new competitors offering different value, are there new technologies emerging, are there new challenges in the market, those are just a few questions you can ask. But there is no doubt that the world is not the same anymore. To deal with changes and support the people growth, Agile organizations invest in developing coaching and mentoring programs, and encouraging the internal workshops led by employees where they teach each other.

From my experience, from organizational design perspective, the hardest to imagine is the flat structure where leadership is emergent, and no fixed positions even exists. People are developing roles for themselves based on the current situation and needs, teams are forming around business challenges and adjourning once the challenge is solved. It’s a liquid structure. Very flexible, and very purpose driven. It’s one of those things you need to experience to be able to believe in it. And that’s a chicken – egg problem. What helped me was the experience from our Scrum teams, where I could see how self-organization works at the team level. And then applying it to large ecosystem was simply just using the same skills I was used to apply at the team level. In such environment where people take over the ownership and responsibility for doing their best to maximize the value and achieve the purpose, the detailed positions become irrelevant as teams are cross-functional and individuals t-shaped skilled. Then you can freely remove them, as they are not needed anymore. Quite straightforward. The culture and mindset goes first, the practices will follow.

Now if my last paragraph was way too far for you, the first small step you can start with even in very traditional environment is to shift from managing individuals to team collaboration. The more they collaborate, they develop the T-shaped skills for each individual. It still doesn’t mean that every single person can do everything the same way as anybody else, but they can actually help each other, they can review and test each other’s work, and they understand the whole little by little. T-shirt are not taking too much effort and are creating a ground for forming cross-functional teams. Once you have a cross-functional team, as first step, you can shift from skill-based roles which are not applicable anymore – like tester, software developer, UX designer, business analyst, etc. to general roles – i.e. team member, engineer or as Scrum call is ‘developer’ (note in Scrum we don’t mean ‘software developer’ but ‘product developer’).

It’s not that hard. Collaboration is fun and t-shaped skills are going really fast. On that journey, detailed positions becomes very soon redundant, and soon after, the career path will reflect the dynamics of the organizational design. People in such organizations are not motivated by given career ladder. They care about their opportunity for growth and personal development.

Time to Change Performance Review and Rewards System

I wrote here about the need of changing the HR in agile organizations. Agile HR helps organizations to adapt their culture to be more creative and collaborative and less control and compete oriented. They are here to create best employee experience from the first contact, through day one, support their growth, motivation, and increasing their value to the organization. And once you embrace such collaborative and creative culture, it’s time to redesign the performance review and overall evaluation process. The individual KPIs created by managers for upcoming year becomes irrelevant as the people are inspecting and adapting not only of what they deliver, but also what their roles are as those are changing depending on the needs. Some organizations are going towards team created and measured goals (like OKRs) but the others are removing any fixed goals with exchange to the radical transparency and strong evolutionary purpose. That’s where we talk about team organizations.

If you are not there yet, any type of the 360s, like Comparative Agility, Agility Health radar etc. can be a good start. It helps to start with receiving feedback and learning based on that. We are shifting from management feedback and ranking to self-assessment, peer-feedback, and coaching for growth with regular check-ins. I remember that the biggest shift happened where we stopped evaluating and started coaching people. Help them to design their own journey. We made organizational goals transparent and let teams and individuals to create their own goals. Together with a strong sense of the ownership, it helped to feed the motivation.

Finally the last step is to change the rewards and bonus system. It’s only possible if you already created a culture based on collaboration, transparency and purpose driven. Removing the detailed positions goes hand in hand with changing the evaluation system. The peer feedback is flowing there and back on a daily basis, most of the teams would be running their regular retrospective to improve, and help each other to grow. Most of the agile organizations are shifting towards higher base salary with no variable part as they realize that money are more demotivating factor at the end of the day. In creative complex world incentives for tasks are not really working. So that organizations are decoupling financial rewards from individual performance. If there is any bonus it’s more at the overall organizational level, split to the teams and allowing them to distribute it themselves, then given by the KIPs evaluations or decided by management. Some organizations go further on and make salaries fully transparent to everybody. Such level of transparency is a good review system as any inconsistency is visible to everyone.

Agile organizations focus on rewarding people behavior, and learning, over just doing your job. They realize that flexible working hours, self-selection of work, unlimited vacation, work from any place on the world, etc. are better motivation factors than your salary and bonus.

It’s all very different world. And it will not shift overnight. So start small, and inspect and adapt from there. The very first step is to get awareness about what culture you have in the organization and what is the desired culture. You might need a good communication, facilitation, and coaching skill to be able to help your organization to reflect that way, but that’s only the beginning. It’s all about changing mindset. Grow that mindset first, the different practices will follow.

In a summary, Agile HR helps organizations to change their culture to be more creative and collaborative and less control and compete oriented – we build organizations around motivated individuals, involving them in co-creating their journey. Agile HR focuses on the best employee experience from the first contact, through Day one, support their growth, motivation, and increasing their value to the organization. It’s not about processes but a different culture, different mindset.