Agile Teams & Performance Appraisal

It is that part of the year for a lot of people at various organizations where managers provide feedback and rate individuals on their performance during the previous year. I am sure we have seen the “Bell Curve” at some point in time of our work lives or may be part of school grading systems (Some schools also use the bell curve to grade students).

Through my experience in Lean & Agile I have come to believe that Lean & Agile values more:

- Cross functional Teams as against functionally silo teams.
- Self-organizing Teams as against directed teams.
- Empowered Teams as against Teams working under command and control.
- High Performing teams as against top performers.

I have always looked at the above as the Manifestos for High Performing Agile Teams.

A lot of organizations are still challenged with the superficial problem of how we fit Lean and Agile teams on “The Bell Curve”.  Ideally I would like teams to be graded rather than individuals and this should work provided team members are fine to be graded as teams.

If you have tried something similar or are already thinking about it I would like to learn from your experiences in solving this problem.

Please share your thoughts.

Agile teams are the taxi drivers on the delivery highways.

I was reading this very interesting article by Darren Smith, General Manager @ Thoughtworks about The Agile Taxi Driver.

In this article the author goes on to explain how both the customer and the teams (Taxi Driver) are both equally responsible for delivering on schedule with good quality and within the designated budget. It is a mutual responsibility both for the customer and the development teams to talk to each other and ensure course correction so that we delivery on time and budget with quality.

This story inspires me to draw an analogy on behaviors between teams and product owners where the teams are the Taxi Drivers and the Product Owners are the immediate customers. A lot of times teams tend to do just exactly what the Product Owner asks them to do and there is nothing wrong with that. What we tend to miss out is the aspect of collaboration / discussion / interaction with the Product owners regularly.

PO's are best placed to make priority calls because they have the business context from which to decide. However, it is important for teams to expose factors that the PO's might not have considered as early as possible so that the PO can make the right decision. An example of this is teams clustering related user stories. This info if available to the PO in advance could help the PO make better priority decision to include related user stories in a sprint for better flow efficiency and throughput.

The intent is not to take the decision out of the PO / customer's hands; instead to help the PO / customer make the best decision given all of the relevant information at the time.

Read @ Darren Smith, General Manager @ Thoughtworks about The Agile Taxi Driver and share your thoughts and comments.