Another great video, Mike! While creativity can occur free from constraints, I completely agree that constraints _enhance_ creativity. In my time as a Scrum Master, whenever someone asked to drop a constraint placed on us by Scrum, I'd push to understand their reasoning. Why did they feel the constraint was a problem? In almost all cases, the constraint itself wasn't the problem but it revealed an underlying organizational problem that needed addressing. Don't want to exit Sprint Planning with a fleshed out plan for the sprint as required, we'll just select items to deliver and figure out "the How" as we go? Turns out Product Management regularly failed to clearly define their backlog items and the team had insufficient time to refine them. So we experimented with adding multiple refinement meetings each week and suddenly our Sprint Planning sessions became shorter, more efficient, and started resulting in fully fleshed out plans to deliver a product increment each Sprint. Constraints help.
Thanks. And I love your example. My experience is the same as yours. It's often easier to change something about agile than it is to change behavior. So teams just drop parts of agile and think they'll get all the benefits.
Another great video, Mike! While creativity can occur free from constraints, I completely agree that constraints _enhance_ creativity. In my time as a Scrum Master, whenever someone asked to drop a constraint placed on us by Scrum, I'd push to understand their reasoning. Why did they feel the constraint was a problem? In almost all cases, the constraint itself wasn't the problem but it revealed an underlying organizational problem that needed addressing. Don't want to exit Sprint Planning with a fleshed out plan for the sprint as required, we'll just select items to deliver and figure out "the How" as we go? Turns out Product Management regularly failed to clearly define their backlog items and the team had insufficient time to refine them. So we experimented with adding multiple refinement meetings each week and suddenly our Sprint Planning sessions became shorter, more efficient, and started resulting in fully fleshed out plans to deliver a product increment each Sprint. Constraints help.
Thanks. And I love your example. My experience is the same as yours. It's often easier to change something about agile than it is to change behavior. So teams just drop parts of agile and think they'll get all the benefits.