I remember the first time it happened to me. I’d been an agile developer for less than a year. We were having our morning stand-up, and something felt off. The room was oddly crowded. The scrum master was having a heated discussion with a developer. Everyone else was sitting heads-down on their laptops, paying no attention. Minutes passed. A creeping suspicion grew into certainty. This wasn’t the agile I’d read about. This wasn’t the Agile Manifesto in action. This wasn’t agile at all. It was faux agile. InfoWorld, June 12, 2017, don’t fall for faux agile.

I always had to point out that our processes would degrade with time if we weren’t actively making them better. Typically, we would slowly fall back into doing what we had done prior to our latest improvement. More than once we reinvigorated a struggling organization by doing nothing more than rediscovering all the great reasons we had changed for in the first place. It seemed that we had generally forgotten the good reasons for what we were now doing and instead grew uninspired and had slid back into the bad management habits we had had for years prior to having improved.

Is your team process looking worn and uninspired and in need of being reinvigorated?