Blue Flower

In my last post, Agile Development in the '80s, I talked about the team I was on in the early '80s that was, in many ways, a Kanban team. I was discussing this with a colleague the other day, and he pointed out that my team lacked one very important attribute of an agile team: sustainability.

In the intervening 30 years, I may have fallen prey to the The Way We Were effect ("What's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.") There were several aspects of the team that were not sustainable.




So why did we do it? I always think about Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, where he talks about "signing up". This isn't like signing a piece of paper, but is the point where the team starts feeling that the project is their project, and they will do whatever is necessary to make it go. We were young, and we were launching a new product. Most of us had come from a systems programming background and now, instead of just maintaining the systems at a data center, we were Building Something New and Great. That was enough to keep us going for the year or so it took us to make the first release of the product, but it was not sustainable.

Getting teams engaged enough that they "sign up" is important, but they have to be able to work at a sustainable pace, or they will eventually burn out and disintegrate.