Part 2 (The Bad): Top 3 good, bad & ugly patterns in modern agile teams

Here’s my top 3 observations in teams that made me feel sad & bad.

In my first episode on the Good, Bad & Ugly patterns in modern agile teams I was quite elaborate on what I perceived to be a good pattern during my roundabout 2 decades of working with teams in the software industry.

Top 3 bad patterns in modern teams

Coming to the bad stuff, there’s a short note to be made beforehand. It’s about my personal view on the ratio of good vs bad behaviors of modern teams. After all those years working with thousands of people and hundreds of teams, I have seen more bad things than good things. It is not only our bias towards detecting the issue rather than recognising the progress, but more so the impact of the “good patterns” vs the “bad or ugly patterns”.

That being said, I truly believe that mitigating team issues at an early stage are one of the greatest instruments to keep teams alive and performing. Of course that is easier said than done, but hey, that is one of the reasons I coach and consult team leaders and organisations.

Now let’s head over to the bad stuff.

Disregard of Cost of Ownership

TCO — the total cost of ownership — is quite an established term and concept. Known mostly in context of investments and operational cost, it tries to assist in measuring the overall cost of “assets” used during the entire lifespan within the production line or usage in the organisation.

But here’s the thing: Very few managers care about the cost of ownership of teams. I don’t mean this from a narrow economical perspective, but from an overall perspective of steady and sustainable performance. Any employee is an investment, so is any team.

While investments in employees are vaguely in sight of people managers or People & Culture departments, the “investment” to a team is crawling under the radar of most leaders and managers — if it is existing at all. Many of them are just reserving a mostly laughable budget on team events or equipment for teams, disregarding the cost of maintenance on relationships, teamworking skills, emotional balance, team growth / change, or team resilience.

Rise and Fall of Craftsmenship

Another bad general pattern I observed over the years working with modern software teams is the rise and fall of craftsmenship.

There was a time during the early years of agile movement, where mastering your own craft was considered a success factor of Agility. The agile community undoubtedly owes lighthouse figures such as Kent Beck, Martin Fowler and Uncle Bob Martin a lot when it comes to emphasize on craftsmenship. Refactoring Patterns, Pair Programming, Coding Dojos and many more practices have a substantial focus and influence on it.

Well, the flipside of it is that as years went by with the overly enthusiastic interpretation of Agility as being “fast” and “learning from failure”, craftsmenship more and more faded into a perception of perfectionism or overengineering, hindering the Agility of the entire team or organisation.

There’s nothing wrong with a fast pace — if you are able to handle it with control and accuracy. It is very much like executing any other skill. Imagine martial artists, repeating their movements thousands of times with different levels of speed, different combinations and situations. No martial artist will succeed by just executing a movement as quick as possible.

The sad part is that I have seen quite a few teams with great engineers, incredible designers and excellent testers being stuck in mediocracy and “stuttering performances” because of the overly neglect of “doing things right” in favor of overfocusing on “doing the right things”.

Elvis Presley Disorder

The last “bad pattern” observation I would like to share with you is probably something many can relate to, but couldn’t find a term for it. To be frank, I struggled as well to coin a term — until I decided to label it with my own words and just name it the “Elvis Presley Disorder”.

What is the “Elvis Presley Disorder”? Quite simply put, it is the overdose of having conversations over taking action whilst pursuing to take more action than having conversations.

It is a situation I have been part of a few times, and I personally perceived it as paradox and very frustrating. I firmly believe that there are quite a few factors to the behavioral equation that lead to such a paradox result. Still, in most cases, a lack of a legitimated and transparent decision agreement inside and/or outside the team plays a significant role.

An Elvis Presley Disorder is able to destroy team performance and cohesion very fast — and it is one of the dysfunctions where recovery is not only hard but requires effort and endurance.

Next episode: the Ugly

Although it is saddening to experience these kind of “bad patterns”, the good news about it is that all of them are avoidable and all of them are fixable. I personally was able to overcome all of the abovementioned situations while working with teams, yet the harsh truth is that the success rate is not 100%. So, the more teams can avoid to get into these pitfalls, the better.

As if there’s not enough on bad patterns, I even have a few ugly ones in store. If you are keen to get to know my experiences on the ugly general patterns of modern teams, subscribe / follow my CCLABS profile where I will post the last part of these miniseries soon.