Where to start?

Some of us have been doing Lean-Agile-Scrum for awhile now, and we forget that others are just starting.

So, where does one start?

The first answer is to start from where you are. One thing this means is to start with the impediments one has today, and you use Scrum to help tell you, “What is the biggest impediment today?”

There is always a biggest one today, and it is hard to predict what will be the biggest impediment tomorrow. So many different kinds of things can be slowing down the team. So many things can come up in an instant.

Is it useful to work on a less-important impediment? Well, yes, but not nearly as useful as working on the top impediment. THIS IS IMPORTANT: Always work on the top impediment (presuming that it can be improved, or that ‘they’ will allow us to fix it).

Note: Sometimes fixing it is only mitigating the impact — typically that is still very useful.

Why should you start Scrum? (This gets to the core issue of starting with right intention. As any good Buddhist would want us to. Search “Buddha’s Eightfold Path” if interested.)

Well, some people want a work life that is more fun. Some want to get rid of a bad manager. (BTW, I think very few managers are ‘bad’; although I do think lots of managers have been taught badly how to do their work.) Some want money. These are all good reasons.

But I think the best reasons are phrased a bit differently: To make my life better, to make our team’s life better, to make our customers’ lives better. You will note how that starts from the center and moves outward.

And it raises a fundamental question: What does it mean to make someone’s life better? This is a difficult yet important question. You must answer it, although the answer has been given to you a thousand times (but perhaps confusingly).

I think it is bigger than software. Important words, like freedom, love and self-responsibility, are in there, and working as a team and at the same time fulfilling oneself as a person. Perhaps being connected makes us more individuals rather than less. (I am in Romania as I write.) We do not join a collective to lose our individuality, but rather, paradoxically, to become more our own individual selves within the team.

Within the dualism we are used to thinking in, this sounds a paradox, but it is the truer organic reality.

Learning how to do this can be painful, but, as the song says, and as every mother knows, a deeper pleasure is on the other side.

One team recently was going through this pain. One wondered how long it would take. One wondered, “Will they get to the other side?” Still, one has confidence that people learn from scraping their knees.

 

 

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