Zarar's blog

Symptoms of a System in Stasis

Here's an unordered list of symptoms that might indicate more profound issues with an organizational culture - one that's preventing it from delivering on its true potential.

  1. You're "doing agile" by using some sort of iterative development pattern, and have gained enough efficiencies compared to any other way of working that you've ceased trying to systematically improve the development process. There are important milestones to hit and probing the development process doesn't appear like a way to hit those since all the juice out of the lemon is perceived to have been squeezed.
  2. Retrospectives happen as a formality more than an inquiry of how the team is working within and across the organization. Only limited options of change are on the table, most are off limits. Improvement ideas are not stifled or suppressed, but everyone knows the Overton Window of what's up for debate.
  3. Standardization is seen to increase efficiency and considered as a productivity gaining approach. Deviation from the common process is generally viewed as a defect to be corrected rather than a possibly novel paradigm-shift .
  4. Process metrics dominate value metrics. Greater focus is given to team velocity metrics than to customer outcome metrics. The latter is seen to drive the former, with no evidence supporting this perceived causality.
  5. The team is subdivided into skill-sets based on technologies, creating hand-offs within the team leading to longer queues and wait times. This forces managers to to allocate work based more on individual skill availability than overall team capacity.
  6. Work is started more often than it is finished, leading to a pile of zombie initiatives where managers grapple with the sunk cost fallacy as they try to extract positive interpretations out of negative outcomes.
  7. The cost of organizational change/restructuring is seen as too high, but at the same time there's acknowledgement that the current structure is not conducive to delivering the value everyone agrees needs to be delivered. Nobody wants to tackle this math as it's politically explosive.
  8. Competitor offerings are seen as a proxy for what customers desire more than a direct line of communication with the customer. The team's communication with customers is mediated by multiple layers of organization constructs, making it difficult to discern their actual needs.
  9. Work fills the time allocated to it (Parkinson's Law) with most projects being relatively on-time, thus providing little incentive to interrogate the system in which they are delivered.
  10. Most ideas for the next project come from above, not from the software development team, which is seen as a CPU to execute work, more than a source of ideas on what to do next. Work is pushed to the team rather than pulled by the team.