If there is something I look back to from this year, it is doing changes that are impossible. I've been going against the dominant structures, making small changes and enabling a team where continuous change, always for the better is taking root.
Saying it has taken root would be overpromising. Because the journey is only in the beginning. But we have done something good. We have moved to more frequent releases. We have established programmatic tests (over test automation), and we have a nice feedback cycle that captures insights of things we miss into those tests. The journey has not been easy.
When I wanted to drop scrum as the dominant agile framework of how management around us wanted things planned early this year, the conversations took some weeks up until a point of inviting trust. I made sure we were worthy of that trust, collecting metrics and helping the team hit targets. I spent time making sure the progress was visible, and that there was progress.
Yet, I felt constrained.
In early October this year, I scheduled a meeting to drive through yet another change I knew was right for the team. I made notes of what was said.
This would result in:
- uncontrolled, uncoordinated work
- slower progress, confusion with priorities and requirements
- business case and business value forgotten
Again inviting that trust, I got to do something unusual for the context at hand: I got to stop using Jira for planning and tracking of work. The first temporary yes was four weeks, and those were four of our clearest, most value delivering weeks. What started off as temporary, turned to *for now*.
Calling it No Jira Experiment is a bit of an overpromise. Our product owner uses Jira on epic level tickets and creates this light illusion of visibility to our work in that. Unlike before, now with just few things he is moving around, the statuses are correctly represented. The epics have a documented acceptance criteria by the time they are accepted. Documentation is the output, not the input.
While there is no tickets of details, the high level is better.
At the same time, we have just completed our most complicated everyone involved feature. We've created light lists of unfinished work, and are just about to delete all the evidence of the 50+ things we needed to list. Because our future is better when we see the documentation we wanted to leave behind, not the documentation that presents what emerged while the work was being discovered. The commit messages were more meaningful representing the work now done, not the work planned some weeks before.
It was not uncontrolled or uncoordinated. It was faster, with clarity of priorities and requirements. And we did not forget business case or business value.
It is far from perfect, or even good enough for longer term, we have a lot to work on. But it is so much better than following a ticket-centric process, faking that we know the shape of the work forcing an ineffective shape because that seems to be expected and asked for.
