The Agile Prime Directive states “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
This is a wonderful principle to have during Retrospectives, in order to avoid getting stuck in the blame game, and to instead focus on results.
However, lets be very clear, the Agile Prime Directive isn’t an excuse for not delivering. If every sprint you miss your sprint goals, or you’re team constantly suffers from scope creep etc. Then you need to look a bit deeper to understand what is going wrong.
Even if you agree every individual did the best job they could, as a team are you working best together? Are you understanding your teams velocity as best you can? Do you all understand and agree the scope of the project or your sprint goals? Have you got the right mix of individuals and roles in the team to deliver? Is your team and the individuals in it empowered to make decisions?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, this could be impacting your ability to deliver.
The Agile Prime Directive is a good mindset to start conversations in, as we want to create safe and supportive environments for our teams in order to help them achieve their full potential, and recognising that everyone has room to improve is an important part of that. Nowhere in the Agile Prime Directive does it state everyone is perfect, just that they did their best given the skills/ ability and knowledge they had at the time.
However, while it is a good mindset to start with, unfortunately we all know it’s not 100% true. the Agile Prime Directive itself has issues, while it’s a lovely philosophy, and its intent is good; as a manager, and as a human I have to admit even to myself I haven’t ‘done my best’ every single day.
While most of the time we do all try our best and do our best; everyone has bad days. Occasionally on a team there will be someone who isn’t (for whatever reason) doing their best, their focus is elsewhere etc. External life will sometimes effect peoples work, the kids are ill, they have money worries, their relationship has just ended; these things happen. There will be people who don’t work well together, they can be cordial to each other, but don’t deliver their best when working together, personality clash happens. We need to be able to spot and call all out these things, but we obviously need to be able to do so in a positive and supportive way as much as possible.
Open and honest communication is the key to delivery; and having a culture of trust and empowerment is a critical part of that. We need to create environments where people feel supported and able to discuss issues and concerns, and we need to acknowledge that sometimes, for whatever reason, those issues do come down to an individual; and while I’m not suggesting we should ever name and shame in a retrospective, we need to be able to deal with that in an appropriate way.
We need to not only know and understand that even if everyone ‘is doing their best’, they can still do better; but that sometimes we need to be able to recognise and support those individuals and those teams who for whatever reason are not doing or achieving their best.
These issues can’t always just be ‘left to the retro’, while the retro is a great space to start to air and uncover issues, and learn from what has gone well, and what needs to improve; part of leading and managing teams is understanding which conversations need to come out from the retro and be dealt with alongside it.
If we are constantly missing sprint goals or suffering scope creep, we can not simple say ‘but we are all doing our best’, that isn’t good enough. In this instance the participant award is not enough. We are here to deliver outcomes, not just do the best we can.