Tools Don’t Make the Team
Today I was involved in a meeting with our team about switching from scrum to kanban. The details of the meeting aren't important, however one person's question stands out in my head. One of our team members asked, "What's to stop the team from always picking up the 'fun' cards and leaving the crappy projects waiting?" My immediate response was, we'll just have a policy, always take cards form the top. Problem solved. Right?
Wrong. You don't have to fix this problem because we have a good team. Good people know what to do and they get it done. They don't need people telling them what to do or how to do it. If you have a problem like the above where people selfishly only work on things that are fun and leave the crap work for others, then you have a problem. No tool is going to magically make people something they are not.
Scrum, Kaban or whatever methodology you choose are really just tools to help your team wrangle in the complexities of business outside of your team. Processes like these help point you in a direction. That's it. They are designed to bring order to the chaos that ensues from this: "We need x,y and z and we need them yesterday. Also, a,b and c would be nice too. No wait, foo is now the most important thing. If we don't have foo, then kittens will die!!1!" Business people don't understand the perils of task switching. They really don't care about best practices or testing. They care about output. (until that output breaks in front of clients, then they suddenly care...)
Since the people outside your little team are guaranteed to be certifiably insane, then we must provide them with constraints.
- Scrum - "We've committed to {x} amount of work for the next {t} week(s). Put it on our backlog and we'll prioritize it for next sprint."
- Kanban - "We can only have {n} things in progress. If we push this into our Todo queue, then we'll need to pull something off. What would you like to delay?"
That's it. The tools here just provide a consistent means to constrain work and set expectations for people outside our circle. If there is no buy in from those outside your group to being constrained, then no tool is going to fix that. If the people within your group suck and they do what they want, then you're doomed too.
With all of that said, a good team can benefit from better tools. But please remember, they are just there to facilitate your goals. Don't fall into the trap of valuing your methods over your work. All wrenches turn bolts, but an impact gun does it faster. The focus isn't how fast we can spin lug nuts, it's how fast we can get in and out of the pits and not have the wheels fly off mid race.
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