This is a topic that I have been exploring with coaches for a while now. It’s basically recognising that sometimes the agility practices, tools and techniques are used against others in the work place to support poor behaviour, low maturity or personal agendas.

The main phrase I hear used is “that’s not agile” and I find this one used generally against stakeholders outside of the agility delivery teams to push back on any information or engagement request that stakeholders have. This is very concerning since the fundamental values of agility talk about interaction, engagement, collaboration and putting the customer first. In my experience, everything is agile if we are working together to create the solution for our clients, customers and teams.

Another one I hear is “there’s no planning in agile” or “we are agile, we don’t document things”. Both of which are not true, nor do they convey the fundamental propositions in agility that are around crafting your own practices and approaches to add maximum value to the organisation. This means that if your organisation needs a plan for funding, resourcing or capability management – then create one! Same if information needs to retained for legal, regulatory or audit purposes – then create them!

At team level, the use of planning poker and story points by different team members to “estimate” the dev component and the testing components of a story separately are also used to create internal team silos – rather than working together this is used to further separate the skills and reduce the advantages of cross functional teams.

Structuring agility ceremonies with a bias towards extravert behaviours, being focused on creating podiums from which on certain people can speak are also another way I see this happen. This directly challenges the fundamental premise of collaborative working practices and psychological safety in the teams.

Metrics (and velocity in particular) being used to “whip” teams to working harder and faster are quite common.