Agile Principle #2: Agile Development teams must be empowered
An Agile Development project 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. Any interference with the project team is disruptive and reduces
their motivation to deliver.
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.
However this is a key principle for me. 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.
