At your latest release, when everyone is emoticons the team on Slack, Teams, and Workspace you are all congratulating everyone on a job well done, high-fiving each other on what it took to get there — the last bugs that were squashed, the last task closed off the board, the final bit of documentation to go out, ending with that last press release.
It’s time to celebrate the people that made your delivery happen and get it across the finish line.
Except it wasn’t just about the people, there was a “thing” there, a current that was running underneath the release the entire time, weaving its way between and within everyone’s work.
Whispers of “Put some time on it”, “Don’t forget to write what you are doing”, “Tag QA in that latest bug”, “Tell them the board is overloaded”, “Don’t take on too much”, “It’s not a bug unless it’s logged” — were said to your team throughout the entire delivery.
These statements just didn’t come out of the ether, they came from the delivery process that your team and your organization put in place to build software and get it out the door.
And if you’re doing it right, your process should be invisible, behind the scenes, ingrained in everything that you do. Whether you have an existing process that’s become too convoluted or you’re putting in a new process, the goal to create an Agile Invisibility Cloak is always the same.
Keep It Simple
Yes, it’s a big release, and yes you have a lot of work to do and yes it all needs to get done. When you’re the Army of One, the process for delivery is inherently invisible, it’s in your head, whatever you want it to be, is what it is, so all that is needed is for you to implement it as you see fit and tweak as you need to do. You are beholden to your own schedule and it's impossible to fail.
But when you’re part of, when you’re leading a team, the goal is to keep the team involved, and in the know as to what you are doing and what they themselves are doing. You need to stay in sync and the only way to do that is to keep things simple so that the team can grasp things with a quick glance as to what is happening at X point in time in the delivery.
