This is in continuation of my previous blog titled "when agile becomes fragile - part 1".
My friend, my fellow PM invited me with sarcastic "we are fragile experts". That was scary for me as I had expected things to be far better in terms of maturity in lean, employee satisfaction, other critical value creation steps in development cycle. So I started to pay close attention to how healthy the system felt by listening to its heartbeats more.
1. When the life is precarious for an employee, the area to look for is attrition. How many are leaving the organization? The same friend came to my rescue again. "The people are ready to give the papers straight to my hands when I ask for status of work". The cat is out of bag. It became claret to me that almost everyone is looking to jump out of given an opportunity.
2. How is am employee feeling about it? What's his view of things? In discussion it became apparent that weekend work was norm. If a person didn't turn up on weekend, it resulted in immediate escalation. Why would a person, who had made up his mind to quit, care to turn up and care to bother about escalation?
3. If a team says no to requested story, it was crime. There were mindless threats from management! Where is the empowerment?
4. The agile formalities happened just for the heck of it. Any seriously motivated team wouldn't be struck with kids syndrome.
5. How was the team work? Pathetic. Pressure cooker. To many cooks. These are some of the terms that people used. People were ready to back stab each other for their success. Some teams felt they haven't received recognition for long time in spite of surviving in this environment for long time. There was no fun, no cohesion and no feeling of unity.
6. How was continuous improvement? There was none. There were no retrospectives and how wok there be learnings?
I set about the task of string up things in order then which I will summarise in the days ahead.
