Dec 23rd, 2021
Best Practices
Attention to Success
Written by: Craig Vosper, Chief Delivery Officer
Being that the theme of this month’s newsletter is looking back on the year gone by, I wanted to emphasize the practice of looking back on everything we do. This was a major point of emphasis during my time in the Army, and we prioritize it here at Clientek as well. Reflection is truly the only way for an individual or organization to get better at anything they do.
As an Agile coach, it became easy for me to gauge the maturity of most teams. Those that took retros seriously were often teams that were high performing, while those that did not, had significant issues with delivery and performance.
One key lesson that I will be taking away from this year is to spend more time discussing the things our teams do well. It’s easy for us to identify the things that go wrong – pointing out over commitments or missed dependencies that led to a delay. These sorts of mistakes tend to come with escalations, requiring leadership to get engaged and making them all the easier to mention.
But what I’ve struggled to do this year is to spend sufficient time talking about their outstanding performance. Like the fact that our teams have delivered on 97% of all their sprint commitments, or that our average sprint days late is a remarkably low 0.16 days per sprint!
Our teams, and I’m guessing many of your teams as well, have kicked some serious butt this year. It’s essential that we highlight that, discussing how we’ve gotten here and ensuring that we carry that success with us into the new year.