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)
[Read more…] about Sustainable Pace: Does Culture Play Any Role At All ?