A voice for discontinuity!

There has been a growing discussion of late for what is being called the “continuous scrum” or the Kanban approach. Some have even talked about how if 4 week sprints are good, and 2 better, then maybe we keep driving down to the limit and use 0 week iterations – essentially, establish a continuous model. The concept behind this is thrilling and the results I have seen suggest teams can notch up their productivity and increase their throughput as well. For a high-performance team, this is like a nitro boost into their engine. They become the reality every truly agile product manager dreams of!

Unfortunately, not every team is a high performance team and not every product manager is truly agile. The risk that needs to be assessed is what happens to teams that don’t quite reach the plateau of High-Performance or are asked to operate in an environment that is anything less than fully agile enabled?

First, a high performance team is a self-optimizing team. In terms of the agile maturity model, it would be a level 5 maturity team – one that can evaluate and self-correct. When moving to a continuous cycle (Zero length Iterations), there is a substantive risk that a team without the ability to self-optimize could, put the project into a PIO -like negative feedback cycle that would cause irreparable damage to the goals and objectives of the effort. Clearly, seasoned pilots and highly experienced coaches are able to put the ship right with an aggressive but calm damping approach, but we often do not have these types of people available.

In a continuous cycle, there are no “fire-stops”. Once a negative feedback cycle becomes instantiated, the team must first recognize the signs and then be able to fight the degeneration themselves; hopefully in time to save the project. In an iterative process, every iteration review produces a fire stop – an opportunity for the team to check point with their customer and their organization. One activity I encourage teams I coach to go through during each of these iteration reviews is to bring out the assumptions documented during the project chartering activity and to ask the Product Owner whether or not any of the assumptions have changed, as it can substantially change priorities and goals if they have.

Bottom line is I do not advocate stepping into a continuous cycle until everyone is convinced that the maturity level of the team is such that this risk is mitigable. Even in those situations, I strongly believe that there should be an operative and equally mature Agile PMO in place in the organization, to act as a check and balance for the corporation. Once a team reaches the level where a continuous cycle is achievable, it would be extremely easy for them to get in a hyper-productive groove and loose sight of corporate goals and objectives which may change outside of the peripheral vision of the team.