How do you get your team to move faster?
I don’t know. Truly. I know what’s worked for some teams and some contexts, and what has failed in others, and I know there aren’t any silver bullets.
I spend my time working with enterprise software teams and helping discover what works for them.
We want methodologies to be the answer, but they’re not. Software is a human discovery and creation process; and it needs context to work. Methodologies lack context.
That’s why I focus on helping teams automate their hand-offs, and automate the mundane. Those parts can be streamlined without requiring a culture shift. And for many teams, speeding those things up results in a considerable boost in productivity. If you’re truly ready to have everyone outside of the team developing the software butt-out of the decisions, then you’re ready to adopt an agile mindset.
All software teams have bottlenecks and constraints. All software teams handle those constraints and bottlenecks differently. Agile teams try to reduce the bottlenecks by allowing only the team delivering the software to make the decisions.
For the rest of us, the teams that haven’t fully embraced an agile mindset, we still operate in this murky middle ground, and that murky middle ground is where the productivity gains lie. What bottlenecks and constraints does your team have? What processes add to those constraints? Do you have a way to automate those?
People do what they don’t love and don’t really want to. That is the main constraint and bottleneck. This is not only in software development. This is true for any industry and work area. So in other words, it is “by design” and you will never change it. If to sum up, you should stop finding a way to speed up the team. Just reduce your expectations and get it as is – slow, inefficient, not performing. Or.. quit and work alone! That is what I have chosen for myself. 🙂