In team we trust

Feb-26-2008

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I’ve been spending some time at the ESRI Petroleum User Group meeting this week in Houston. I had the opportunity to speak with several people who were interested in agile practices. One of them posed this question to me: “If you had to use one word to describe why your team found success with scrum, what would it be?”. I thought for a minute. Hmmm…discipline sounds good, and that was almost my answer. Then the right word popped into my head…trust. On our team, there is a complete level of trust amongst all of our team members.

Trust works on several levels within our team. There is the general trust in each other that when we commit to a backlog for an iteration, we will all work as hard as possible to complete those backlog items by the end of the iteration. There also a level of trust that the scrum master and other team members will not judge team members at the daily stand up meeting or the retrospective. This encourages an open communication of project successes and any impediments we are facing. We report impediments not with the expectation of being looked at with suspicion, but being viewed as good. If we can express our impediments openly, we all get better together…and that’s our key to success…trusting each other to raise issues and problems so that we can continually improve. This also creates an atmosphere that is very conducive to true collaboration.

Although it sounds easy, trust is difficult to establish. I shouldn’t really say difficult. It’s that trust is not something you can just implement. It grows over time and requires a mature team. It also requires an organization that is willing to allow individuals to raise issues and problems in a judgement-free environment. This is perhaps the biggest hurdle to trust. Many organizations may be unwilling or unable to allow team members to express problems they uncover in the way a team works, etc., without a penalty. True agile teams and organizations find ways to look at problems, issues, and dysfunctions as opportunities to grow and improve. So, if I can give you one word to work towards as an agile team, it is TRUST.