AgileTHIS

The last four months or so I have had the incredible pleasure of working with one of the most dedicated and hard working teams I have ever met. Unfortunately not full time. I’ve been trying to balance two assignments at the same time, one being as a project leader for the team and another as an Agile Coach for a large scale Agile transition. During these months I have made some really great decisions and unfortunately some less great. One really crappy decision I made was to keep the two assignments separated by days, i.e. one assigment monday and thursday and the other tuesday, wednesday and every other friday. Seemed to make perfect sense to me way back then (four months ago), since I have had bad experience of working with multiple projects during the same day. What I have learned is that it is totally different being a leader for a team and being a part of a team when it comes to dividing your time between projects. I have experienced the loss of commitment and the transition from an appreciated leader to an annoying manager during those four months and all due to that fatal decision to keep assignments separated by days.

Being sick on the wrong days resulted in me being away from the team for two weeks and it doesn’t take the mind of a genius to realize that it causes problems. My hard earned learning from this is simply that you cannot lead by remote control. You have to be there every day, meeting the team and the customer face to face. if you have to be a part time leader make sure that it is a part of every day, letting it be a part f every week simply isn’t enough.