Agile Zombies

Nowadays companies announce that they are 100% Agile more as a marketing speech than as a strong belief and project teams also tend to follow agile processes as zombies. Nobody, neither the companies nor the project teams, knows what they are doing and that's why the meaning of agile concepts are getting lost.
This post offers a quick list to identify if your company is one of those, if you are being a zombie and if that is so, to solve it quickly.

As in many other areas the first action is to identify the symptoms starting from the context:

• Your company forces to use 10 or more document templates during the process.
• Your planning meetings ends with no realistic plan for the sprint
• Stand-up meetings are a routine where most of the time people say they will keep working on the same task and no blockers are reported
• Retrospective meetings are more a catharsis exercise but no immediate actions are coming from them.

If you are in a middle of a meeting and found any of these symptoms, stop and ask the team why they are doing that meeting. If anyone answer that it's because they are following the process, they are agile zombies!.

So, here is a list of actions to make sure you go back to the basis and get all the agile benefits.

• Check your planning meetings goals. Planning meetings are about to get the best plan possible for the sprint and outputs - at least - must be: a sprint goal, a list of USs and their Story Point estimation.
  If you are not getting all previous items, it is because you are wasting time with formalism. So, rethink your planning sessions to make them focus on those 3 items and create a meeting agenda to be more productive. Next planning session steak to your agenda and try to get all the outputs-
• Check your Stand-ups meetings. Don't spend too much time on what you did yesterday and focus more on your plan for today and impediments.
  Content of this meeting has to be useful for everyone. So make sure everyone is listening and ask to only share the information that the team needs to know to be successful.
• Retrospective meetings are useful when the final result is a plan. Ask the team to come up with a task for every item and assign a person to it. This simple action will prevent you to get only a list of complaints and everybody will get part of  the responsibility to improve.
• Any time during the sprint ask the team: "So, what is the goal of this sprint?" "Why are we doing this sprint?" This will make them to think about the content rather than the process.

Don't be an agile zombie. Process is nothing without a meaning.