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Are you part of a struggling Agile team? Join Mike Cohn and Brian Milner in this episode as they uncover the primary signs of a team in distress. Listen in as they share the common causes of underperforming teams, and what to do to boost morale, enhance collaboration, and transform your Agile team from struggling to thriving! Overview What is the primary sign of a struggling Agile team? It's when the energy in the room feels like a deflated balloon, and laughter is a distant memory. In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software help listeners identify the signs of a struggling Agile team and the common culprits. Listen in as they unveil the key principles of cultivating a positive work environment and the vital importance of addressing CYA behavior. Plus, they share their top-notch tips on boosting team morale and enhancing collaboration, all while preventing unfinished projects and ensuring consistent delivery. Tune in to transform your Agile team from struggling to thriving! Listen Now to Discover: [01:23] - Brian welcomes back Mike Cohn to the show to discuss how to identify the signs that your team is struggling and what to do about it.[01:54] - Common causes of unfinished work.[04:45] - Do developers use Scrum as an excuse to be lazy? No—that’s rare but can be easily corrected.[07:36] - How to manage underperforming teams.[09:04] - Teams that lack excitement and laughter may be struggling. Work should be fun and enjoyable. How to create a positive work environment.[10:32] - How to break the habit of rolling unfinished work forward.[12:44] - The power of small wins to improve job satisfaction.[14:12] - How to boost morale and deliver small wins that create a sense of accomplishment.[14:30] - The Agile Mentors Podcast is brought to you by Mountain Goat Software and their Certified Scrum Training Classes. Whether you want to be a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or even take an advanced certification, all courses are designed to give you the skills that agile teams and organizations value so you’ll stand out in the market. For more information click on the Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule.[15:35] - What CYA is really telling you about your team.[16:59] - The role of managers in creating an environment of openness and collaboration[19:03] - How individualistic behavior—working in isolation, not collaborating—hinders teamwork.[21:08] - Introducing Swarming—a horrible way to work, you’ll get less done—but a great drill to help teams discover new ways to collaborate.[27:54] - Thank you to Mike Cohn for joining us on the show.[28:18] - Please share this episode with others if you found it useful. Send feedback and suggestions for future episodes to podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.[27:54] - If this topic was impactful to you and you want to continue the discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community, where we have a topic discussion for each podcast episode. References and resources mentioned in the show: #70: The Role of a Leader in Agile with Mike Cohn#39: The Art of Writing User Stories with Mike CohnSubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast on Apple PodcastsCertified ScrumMaster Training and Scrum CertificationCertified Scrum Product Owner TrainingAdvanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®Mountain Goat SoftwareCertified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome back Agile Mentors. Very glad to be with you again. My name is Brian Milner as always. And today I have my good friend back with me, Mike Konis here. Welcome back, Mike. Mike (00:11)Hey Brian, thanks for having me back. Brian (00:13)Really, really excited that Mike could join us again. And wanted to talk about something that I think is, maybe it can hit on multiple fronts. And that's really signs that your team is struggling. What are some things that could be going on with your team? And what do they mean? What does it kind of symbolize? What do we do about it? There's lots of common issues I think that teams face. I know Mike, you probably, You do classes all the time as well, and I'm sure you hear kind of the same questions over and over in classes. Yeah. So there's kind of a set of the same issues that seem to rear their head again and again. So we thought we'd maybe make our way through a few of those and just talk through them, and maybe we can find some things here that would help you if one of these things happens to be something you're experiencing. Mike (00:45)Mm-hmm. Brian (01:06)So the first thing, if we're kind of working along in our team and we find out that they're kind of frequently reaching the end of their sprint and stuff's just not done. I know I had this a lot in teams I've worked with where we had carryover, we had stuff that just wasn't finished. I remember even one team early on I had that just kind of told me, hey, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter we don't finish it. We'll just do it next sprint. So what do you think is kind of at the core of something like that, Mike? Mike (01:40)I think there's two common causes for a team not finishing work. And one's kind of an obvious one, which is excess pressure from management, right? Management's pushing them on how much to do. Management is not letting the team have full authority over how much work they bring into a sprint. And that could be a misguided scrum master, misguided product owner, or management outside the team, but somebody is putting some excess pressure on the team. And then the second one, I'm going to call it a second one, but it's, it's pretty related. is over optimism from the team. And the team just thinks they can get that much done. And they have a really hard time learning the lesson that they can't. And I'm thinking of a team I worked with outside of Sacramento, California. Absolutely phenomenal team. Phenomenal team. One of the best I've worked with in my entire career. But I don't know that they ever finished what they said they would. Literally, I don't know if they ever finished. And a lot of it boiled down to the optimism kind of their weed guy. And he was great, phenomenal guy. I've stayed in touch with him for many years. But he just always had the attitude of, yeah, we can do it. We can do the one more thing. And always bringing that in. And so the product owner and I would talk after a planning meeting going, I wonder how many they won't make. It's like, you think it'll be two or you think it'll be three. And after a while, the product owner just had to kind of take an attitude of like, okay, you committed to these many things, but you know, let's not work on this one until all the others are done. We'll kind of keep this one. Brian (02:46)Ha ha. Hahaha. Mike (03:06)kind of on deck or ready to go in next. And that worked better, but it was just their overoptimism. And now the reason I said, I think both of those go together, that somebody's putting pressure on the team or the overoptimism, somebody's putting pressure on the team and I cited management, Scrum Master, product owners, could be the team itself, right? The team is putting more pressure on itself. That's why I think they're related. So I think that's the, those are the two most common reasons for this to happen. Brian (03:24)Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, you know, I get questions a lot of times in classes or when I talk to leaders where they, there seems to be a concern, which I think is completely unfounded, that the developers are going to just goof off. And that, you know, somehow this whole Scrum setup is just a shell game to kind of give developers a chance to just fool around and do whatever they want to do. Mike (03:53)the Brian (03:58)I don't know, I mean, I'll share my personal experience. What I tell those leaders is that, you know, it's actually just the opposite has been my experience. You know, developers want to please the others in the organization. And so when someone comes to them and says, hey, you know, can't you do a little bit more in the sprint than, you know, they're usually not gonna say no. They wanna make people happy. So they'll say yes, you know, so it's over optimism, but like you said, the pressure too, Mike (04:22)Mm-hmm. Brian (04:27)could contribute to that to say, hey, you know, I don't wanna make anyone mad. I don't wanna tell them, no, I can't do this. So I'll make them happy for today. They'll be mad, you know, at the end of the sprint, but for right now, you know, they'll be happy for a few days. Mike (04:41)Yeah, I'd rather have people mad later instead of mad today. I think we have to be careful though. There are some small percentage of teams that will use it as an excuse to be lazy. And I've worked with thousands of teams at this point. I have worked with a few of those right there. They were using scrum as an excuse to be lazy. Like, you mean we get to pick how much we do? Okay. We'll do that little. Right. Um, and normally that's fairly easily corrected. Brian (04:51)Sure. Right. Mike (05:07)because it normally boils down to one or two people on the team that are kind of creating that mindset. And I'll go back to the guy I talked about on the amazing team, right? His name was Todd. And he had an outsized influence on the team, just kind of by his seniority and by his personality. You're kind of a big personality, people liked him. He was the one that would occasionally have like parties at his house and things like that. I was referred to him as the glue that held that team together. And again, an amazing team. But his personality, had an outsized influence, right? And so his optimism drove that team to picking too much. If you had somebody, his evil twin, it's like, oh, let's commit to a little, right? That could have the same influence there. And so when we have that problem, it's often fairly easily fixed. You need to talk to the one person or you move the person onto a different project or out of the company if you have to. Other times the problem is caused when we have two people together, right? It's the combination of these two that make it happen. So... It hasn't ever been a really hard problem to fix, but I do want to acknowledge that is a, it's a, it's a concern. It could happen. Right. But I think what we tell, we would tell leaders is it's pretty rare. Right. And if you have a team using Scrum to, to deliberately go slow, deliberately take it easy, not do a lot of work. Pretty easy to notice. And it's pretty easy to fix, right? You know, fire somebody if you have to. Right. I mean, I hate saying that, but I mean, that's an option. And if we have people that are just, you know, deliberately. Brian (06:15)Yeah. Mike (06:33)underperforming and it's a valid option. So I don't think it happens off but I do want to be fair there that it can happen. Brian (06:41)Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out because I do agree it's kind of a you know, the percentage of it I don't know I don't have any studies to say this but the percentage of it is probably so small that you know It's kind of one of those things again. Are we managing towards the majority? Are we managing towards the small minority? Are we making all our policies around the small minority? Are we making around what the majority would actually do? Mike (07:05)I love that point because I get some criticisms on my blog or YouTube videos or stuff sometimes where people will tell me, yes, but this advice doesn't work for such and such a team. And they're always describing some horrible team, right? You know, this is some totally, you know, where you've got the total command and control manager or the architect that's also the scrub master and abusing their power. It's always just some horrible messed up situation. And somebody will tell me my advice doesn't work for those teams. Brian (07:10)Hehehe Mike (07:32)I'm totally okay with that. I made the decision many, many years ago that I want to offer advice that will help good teams become great. I don't really want, I don't care if they do, but I don't really wanna focus my life on helping really poor performing teams become mediocre. Right? This doesn't motivate me. That doesn't get me excited. I wanna help the good team become world-class, right? And so I'm gonna write things with the assumption that we're... Brian (07:39)Yeah. Mike (07:57)We all have positive intent. We are trying to get better for making a mistake. We're going to own it. We're going to, we're going to go from there, but I don't want to, I don't want to give advice for all the horrible teams to get mediocre. That's it. That just doesn't get me excited. Brian (08:10)Yeah, completely agree to that. It's, you know, there will be other signs. It's not like it's gonna be hidden if you do have a team that's trying to abuse it in that way. It's gonna be fairly obvious that that's happening. Mike (08:23)Yeah, I'll get it asked. You know, leaders will say, how will I know if the team is underperforming? And, um, one of my, um, professors back in graduate school has got him, Peter Drucker, who's often, um, considered like the, you know, the management guru of the 20th century. And, um, he had a term management by walking around, right? You just walk around and you will notice. Right. And, um, you know, we started out, you're talking about, um, struggling agile teams and one of the things I was thinking there, like, what is, like, what is the like primary sign of a struggling? Brian (08:34)Yeah. Hmm. Mike (08:52)agile team. I think one of them for me is they're not having any fun. Um, I love, I love building stuff, right? I love creating products and, um, it should be fun. Um, you've heard me before say that I hate work is called work, right? You know, I get it. We got to call it work, but work should be fun. We spend most, you know, not most, but you know, half a third of our day working, it should be fun. And if you go into a company and nobody's having any fun, you're not hearing any excited voices or laughing ever. That's a sign that the team is struggling. So. Brian (09:25)Yeah, that's a great point. And I completely agree. You know, I get it, right? I mean, it's not recess. Like, there's a limit. There…
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