What are the most important interpersonal skills needed for working on an Agile team?

[Dear Readers, I've been having fun on Quora lately participating in community discussions, and reposting responses to my blog.  Enjoy!]

What are the most important interpersonal skills needed for working on an Agile team?


One of the reasons “Agile” has grown so quickly is because companies, especially in IT, were heaping processes and oversight onto knowledge workers so heavily that it caused a backlash. People were anxious to throw off that oppression, and the popularity of agile represented an opportunity to really change - for the first time.

Managers have been preaching about “empowerment” and “pushing decision making down” for decades, but the processes they have been mandating had the opposite affect.

When Agile started to become popular in the early 2000s, it was because people were hungry for an environment that focuses on people over processes, and part of that was an acknowledgment that certain behavioral characteristic were critical towards achieving a vision of empowerment, autonomy, and self-organization.

Some of those characteristics are:

• Trust people’s good intentions
• Every interaction is about learning
• Do what you have to do to please the customer
• Support your other team members and help them be successful
• Don’t manage people, collaborate with them
• Succeed in small increments
• Be willing to change everything you thought you knew when you learn

So, the interpersonal skills should align with the list above - be a trusting, supportive, and learning team members that doesn’t dig in and insist they know everything. You’ll be fine if you do that!

Jeff Dalton is author of Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders, and is a CMMI SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, AgileCxO Assessor, and Leadership Coach.

What is SSOT in Agile Software Development?

[Dear Readers, I've been having fun on Quora lately participating in community discussions, and reposting responses to my blog.  Enjoy!]

What is SSOT in Agile Software Development?

SSOT = Single Source of Truth. 

It’s not an Agile thing, it’s a data warehousing/DBMS concept that has been around for decades, although lately we’ve been seeing Agile practitioners referring to it as “agile.”  While the creation, maintenance, and operations of the SSOT could be performed in an agile way (and should be), SSOT was not borne Agile movement.

It’s simply the “trusted data source,” or the source data for an organization’s various databases that is subject to a sufficient level of scrutiny, process, and testing to ensure reliability.  In the SSOT, each data element can only be stored one time, eliminating redundancy and chance for errors.

Like good leadership, team cohesion, good customer relationships, and experimentation, it’s been around a lot longer than the Agile manifesto has been around.

Jeff Dalton is author of Great Big Agile: An OS for Agile Leaders, and is a CMMI SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, AgileCxO Assessor, and Leadership Coach.

Adopting Agile frameworks and techniques doesn't make you Agile - does it?

It's undeniable that "agile" is all the rage and is growing exponentially, and that frameworks and techniques that are frequently associated with "agile" (Scrum, XP, TDD, BDD, Planning Poker, et al) are being adopted at a furious pace.  But its growth is horizontal *across projects* and not vertical from projects up to the C-Suite.  This is a problem.

In other words, management isn't really on board.  In most cases, they're still running a "waterfall" operation.  And Agile values? Not so much.

The adoption and projection of Agile values are what provides the necessary culture and state-of-mind that enables true agility.  Without leadership on these, enterprise agile will never happen.  Ever.

So adopting frameworks isn't enough, is it?

I've lost count of the number of companies I've worked with that started out by telling me that they were "agile - sorta."  By that they meant they were working "a little more iteratively" (whatever that means) and holding "daily meetings." Good stuff, for sure, but it's just the beginning.

Most of these companies were diligently trying to adopt agile frameworks and techniques, but they were doing it in a vacuum - without leadership support.  They were doing yeoman's work without leaders fertilizing the crops with a solid demonstration and projection of Agile values - especially high trust, transparency, fail-fast, and collaboration.

"Sure - be agile.  Just make sure to provide a 24 month program plan."

"Sure - be agile.  Just don't bother the customer."

"Great!  We love agile.  Can you fit this new feature into this sprint?"

I wish I could say this is rare problem, but it's not.  I've assessed more than 100 "agile" organizations and 90% of them had leadership that was not actively engaged in agile adoption.

Nothing against the folks who are doing great work at the team level, or the people leading the industry with new and innovative techniques for enterprise agile, SAFe, or DAD  (great stuff, really), but the real impediment is more basic - leaders need to get up to speed on what great agile is, better understand what they're role is in the agile ecosystem, and change the way their leading!

Until they do that, we're pushing rope uphill.

To make matters more complicated, there hasn't been an industry model for them to lean on to check themselves - until now.  Check this one out.

I'll be speaking on the of Agile leadership, values, and more at the upcoming 2017 Agile Leadership Summit in Washington, DC on September 22nd, 2017.  There will be eight great speakers, and networking with other Agile leaders who are looking to address this problem in the industry.  Why don't you join me?  agilecxo.org.

The first keynote is Kevin Fisher, VP at the Nationwide Insurance Advance Development Center.  Kevin is responsible for the capability lift of their 225 Agile teams.  Talk about Enterprise Agile!

The second keynote is our good friend Tom Cagley from SPaMCast.  Tom's interviewed 100s of Agile luminaries, and will be sharing his lessons on Agile leadership.

Register for the Agile Leadership Summit at www.agilecxo.org.

Jeff Dalton is an author, coach, and instructor for Agile leaders.  He is President of Broadsword, a Performance Innovation company, and Chief Evangelist at AgileCxO.org, a resource an development organization that provides models for Agile leaders.