The Importance of Balance in Your Agile Values
The values in the Agile Manifesto are about balance. The importance of balance and the relationship between agile values and effective teams came to mind when I heard an NPR interview with Dame Stephanie Shirley. Dame Shirley played a groundbreaking role as a woman IT entrepreneur, running a company with many female employees in the 1960s.
During the interview Dame Shirley discussed how she structured her company, and many of the values she used would seem familiar to those who know agile software development. Stories like this one remind us that the values that drive agile projects aren’t terribly new or specific to certain kinds of projects.
We often decide to learn about agile software development to have more productive teams that deliver more business value. Agile values support balance and a good culture. Agile methods, more than most other methods, acknowledge that people develop software and that individuals and interactions are more important than tools. There’s synergy here: A good culture can improve productivity, in addition to making the lives of the people on the team more pleasant.
Dame Shirley described how her company emphasized teamwork and collaboration over a command-and-control style of management. A team whose members are focused on achieving a goal by working together is consistent with the ideas of an agile team. Similarly, when she needed to take some time off for personal reasons, she discovered that the organization managed very well without her.
In her words, she thought of herself as “as a sort of gardener,” much like a good ScrumMaster is a servant-leader who facilitates self-organization. These practices led to her building a successful organization, while going against conventional wisdom about how organizations need to be.
The connection between agile values and balancing the various aspects of our lives should not be too surprising. Agile can apply to any complex project; even families and schools can be particularly challenging for an agile implementation. Some have gone as far as to embrace the idea of an agile family.
Achieving balance can be difficult. Agile coaches who travel can find it particularly difficult to balance family and work. If you and the people on your team can find a way to achieve a good work/life balance, you may discover that you can also become better at delivery and have more fun with the process. And it’s worth a try, even if what you are doing seems to go against “the way things should be done.”
Are agile teams better places to work? Have you worked on a team that claimed to be agile but didn’t follow the values you expected? What relationships have you seen between work/life balance and productivity at work?
