One of the common reason for agile teams to fail is lack of clarity and commitment on Vision.
Teams often focus on getting work done in a high frequency and forgets the whole purpose of what they are targeting to achieve in big picture.Unless the last man in the army believes on what he\she is fighting far, the war cannot be won !
Having a great, credible Product Vision can be a game changer and is a success factor for agile delivery. A vision should be simple, understandable, realistic,challenging , engaging and short.
It gives a sense of direction and purpose for the agile team and glues them together with a common goal
Ken Schwaber – the founding member of Scrum rightly points that “The minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists of a vision and a Product Backlog”
The Product Owner has a great responsibility to ensure he\she radiates and articulates the Vision (the very purpose of assembling the self-sustaining team) to every team member and stakeholders.
It becomes even more critical when you work in a distributed agile setup. If the developers sitting miles away does not understand the very reason on why they are writing the code and what is the business goal they are striving , it is very difficult to align with the stakeholders and be committed.
Few possible way to get this addressed is
- Get maximum stakeholders involved in creating the Vision statement and make them feel as co -owners of the Vision, Gamify !
- Product Owner – takes extra effort to ensure the Vision is clearly documented, articulated to the team , may be using Visual information radiators like Banners \Posters in work place
- The Product Owner is able to tie and relate the Epics and Feature to the Vision and help team connect the dots
- Every major progress in achieving the vision is celebrated and an atmosphere is built that helps the team live and sleep with the Vision.
One of the secret ingredient in differentiating great teams from “work as usual” teams is getting the team live and own the Vision !!
Let us build great Vision and inspire the great teams !!
My Musings ! 