Agile Culture

Overcoming Cultural Differences in Distributed Agile Teams – A Case Study

Recently I had a discussion with one of my dutch friends who has a company based in India. He mentioned that sometimes it gets very difficult to understand and handle cultural issues with his Indian colleagues. Issues which he mentioned are not new and people from western countries interacting Indian teams must be very well aware of what I’ll mention here. Some examples:

One person speaking on behalf of the entire team and other people either keep silent or just reply in terms of yes and no
Always saying yes to everything even though even customer may already be aware that the task may be difficult to achieve.

As you investigate further, these instances are very common in the team coming from hierarchy centric cultures where only senior and so-called senior people have a say, while the rest just follow what’s asked them to do.
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The Secret Mantra for Agile Success

by ShriKant Vashishtha 3 Comments

People move to Agile, go through required training and start working in projects. After a period of time, if you ask any team member, “what exactly is Agile?”, she’ll start talking about Scrum ceremonies, embracing change, shorter feedback cycle etc. Even after implementing all these aspects, you’ll find issues in that project.

Why?

Agile Thinking : How Can I Help You ?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

One of the key values of Agile is its focus on delivering working software or solution. This approach is the key catalyst of some behavioural, cultural, and structural changes.

The team members contribute to delivering working solution but their individual goals on their own don’t help the user much. For instance, just the UI part of a user-story is of no use to a user. If developers just focus on building the solution but not on the quality aspect, again it doesn’t result into product ready increment.

Essentially cross-functional team members have to collaborate and help each other to deliver the Sprint goal.
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Drive Innovation By Creating Communities of Practice

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my last post, I discussed about sustainable pace and how nation and organisation culture comes in its way. One of the issues often found is people on scrum teams being too focussed and busy on the projects and having no time for their own research, self-study, upgrading themselves on new things etc. This leads to lesser learnings from outside world and limits the growth of people.

[pullquote]

don’t be afraid to fail.

be afraid not to try.

[/pullquote]

Introducing or rather planning slack time on the team gives free time for people to work on their pet projects. Different organisations have done it differently, like:

Giving a break between sprints
Following 80/20 principle, 20% free time for people to think and work on their interest
One free day in a month
Having a small time reserved every sprint

Sustainable Pace: Does Culture Play Any Role At All ?

by Avienaash Shiralige 11 Comments

Striving to bring agility into the organisation to adapt to changing business conditions is leading people to lose sleep and stretch more than before in some organisations. Agile thought leaders definitely envisioned this and hence recognised sustainability as one of the agile principles.

[pullquote] Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. [/pullquote]

To run a long distance you need to find a sustainable pace. But often, companies just don’t get this due to various reasons like:

Pressure from business and management to get most work from least people
Team not having an option to make their own decisions – command and control culture
Teams inability to say NO for non-realistic goals. Service industry firms – they just can’t say NO to unreasonable client demands
Utilisation of people – Planning for 100% utilisation. This makes people work for more than required hours and hence getting burnout
Unable to remove distractions to the team. Lot of unplanned, non-essential meetings taking people’s time. Questioning motives and saying NO is essential here.
Allocating people on multiple projects with allocation distributed 20%,50%,30% etc. This does not work in reality. There is a switching time between two tasks and people take around 15 mins to achieve FLOW (high productive zone)