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This article is the second part of the series Your Company Will Never Be Agile. The previous part is Organizational Structure Prevents Companies from Becoming Agile.

Imagine you are a manager in a company that has annual budgets and bonus systems. A team that you are responsible for wants to work in a truly agile fashion (self-organized, re-planning every 2 weeks, working with emerging requirements, …). Do you allow them to do it? Under which conditions do you allow them to?

This article is part of the series Your Company Will Never Be Agile. It is a case study about a company that managed to stay small and agile throughout their history.

This article is the second part of the series Your Company Will Never Be Agile. The previous part is Your Company Will Never Be Agile - Intro.

In order to be good at software development, you need an organization that's optimized for software development Samir Talwar

Your company wants to become agile. Most companies want that. So they hire some consultants, do a couple of re-orgs, call their line managers Scrum Masters, and so on. And then they declare success: Development is a little bit cheaper now. But many of those companies with “successful” agile transitions did not really become agile. They don’t have real business agility or sustainable development or truly self-organized teams.

The ugly truth is: If your company is not already agile, it most likely will not become agile. Not within a reasonable period of time. Sure, you can do all the little rituals that Scrum mandates. You can even fully implement all the extra stuff that SAFe wants you to do. But this does not make you agile. This is not what I am talking about.

After my last article, Intrinsic Motivation and Technical Excellence, a reader of my newsletter told me that something I wrote is apparently diametrically opposed to something Uncle Bob wrote:

[...] when a company employs someone, the company is responsible for training the person to become the employee they want! Intrinsic Motivation and Technical Excellence

Whereas Uncle Bob wrote in The Clean Coder:

In my last article, I wrote about how managers are responsible for creating an environment where intrinsic motivation can happen. Here is one thing that I’m sure would help a lot of companies / teams:

Allow your people to achieve technical excellence!

I sometimes hear managers complain that their people are not intrinsically motivated. “We need people who love what they do, not the people we have, who are only here for the money!” Saying something like that as a manager is a bit ironic because…

You are in charge here. If your people are not intrinsically motivated, it’s your fault.

Earlier in this series, I wrote about what happens when management try to change people’s behavior with KPIs, targets and bonuses. Some will try to game the system, or your KPIs will cause unwanted behavior. If they find the right set of KPIs so that cheating and unwanted behavior become impossible, they’ll probably destroy motivation, morale and teamwork. But what if they find that right set of KPIs and manage to create an environment where everyone stays motivated and nobody quits?

In the last post from this series, “Bonuses and Wasted Resources: The Right Set of KPIs”, I wrote about how it’s really hard (or even impossible) to find a set of KPIs where cheating or wasting resources becomes impossible for the people being measured. But what if management can really find that right set of KPIs, that makes it impossible for people to cheat or waste resources? Now the performance of all employees will improve, right?

Turns out, no, you still have problems. It turns out, most (if not all) people actually want to do good work.

In an earlier article, I wrote about how competition and bonuses encourage cheating and waste. I wrote a personal example, where I eperienced that I cheated and wasted resources during a competition that didn’t even matter to me. I got a lot of positive feedback, including:

Not new, but a nice example of why metrics are bad: http://devteams.at/competition_and_cheating by @dtanzer Jens Schauder (@jensschauder)