3 Signs Devoted Agile Development Teams Lack Urgency and What to Do

 Last week, I posted 40 reasons why IT lacks a sense of urgency and followed it up with a 5 minutes with @NYIke video on creating a sense of urgency in agile transformations.

The video is embedded at the bottom of this post. I hope you'll watch it as I provide recommendations on how to address three agile transformation issues:

• Agile isolated in tech teams 
• Little or no planning or estimating
• Scrum responsibilities not assigned

Readers of this blog and those who participated in StarCIO Workshops and Driving Digital Guides know that I share approaches and customizable approaches to address these blocks to agile transformation.

Why Agile Teams Need a Sense of Urgency

Let me tell you about some agile teams that I know from different companies but with similar challenges. 

These teams will tell you that they are agile, practicing, scrum, and have backlogs in either Jira or Azure DevOps. They're good about hosting virtual standups and capturing everyone's feedback from retrospectives. They deliver application releases, and no one believes these teams aren't dedicated or working hard on their priorities. 

These are devoted agile development teams, but they aren't driving themselves toward agile cultures and ways of working.

Only they consistently miss their sprint commitments and debate how to give themselves credit for partially completed stories. Releases are made when the code is ready leaving business stakeholders in the dark on when new capabilities will be available. And they only have just-in-time backlogs, making the roadmap even less predictable. When it comes to closing sprints on time, improving velocity, estimating stories, and prioritizing backlogs, well, it's a tag team approach as to who is responsible.

These agile teams lack a sense of urgency, and it developing one is key to driving change. Without urgency, it's hard to get teams to invest the added effort to complete priorities and improve their agile ways of working.

In this week's video, I share three ways to address agile isolated teams, lack of planning, or unassigned responsibilities. Here are some of the links I share:

• Agile but not agile
• Planning agile backlogs and estimating the right way
• Agile responsibilities: Product management, tech leads, scrum masters, and program managers