Agile Development Teams Must Be Empowered

An agile development team must include all the necessary team members to make decisions, and make them on a timely basis.

Active user involvement is one of the key principles to enable this, so the user or user representative from the business must be closely involved on a daily basis.

The project team must be empowered to make decisions in order to ensure that it is their responsibility to deliver the product and that they have complete ownership.

The team must establish and clarify the requirements together, prioritise them together, agree to the tasks required to deliver them together, and estimate the effort involved together.

It may seem expedient to skip this level of team involvement at the beginning. It’s tempting to get a subset of the team to do this (maybe just the product owner and analyst), because it’s much more efficient. Somehow we’ve all been trained over the years that we must be 100% efficient (or more!) and having the whole team involved in these kick-off steps seems a very expensive way to do things.

It ensures the buy-in and commitment from the entire project team from the outset; something that later pays dividends. When challenges arise throughout the project, the team feels a real sense of ownership. And then it’s doesn’t seem so expensive.

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