How many of you have experienced ? It has been my biggest challenge. Not burndown charts, but daily bouts of sprint burnouts are a bigger problem for me. sprint burnouts How do you achieve agile practices? sustainable Sustainable, so that I have outcomes. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, says that . That’s paraphrasing him, but ask yourself this, how often have you seen, even your brightest coders, experience bouts of productivity loss? If you’ve managed a project, you’ve been hit by one of these, seemingly random productivity hits. predictable systems work better than targets Staring at fast approaching project end-dates, is all too common. In reaction, we set ever tighter sprint cycles. Worse still, are attempts to elongate story points ( ). Something has to give. or some similar metric After has set in, the project starts looking : malaise something like this Sprint burnout is common within a project, let alone across several projects. The likely stems from plain-old . A continuous barrage of successive goals, dulls the mind. Dull mind equals dull performance. languor human behavior It’s easier to develop a life-long healthy habit, like a morning run, then a 20 lbs weight-loss target. So can sprints be more of a habit? Can coding become, just as normal as, say, drinking coffee? Can I use Cialdini’s techniques to improve efficiency? pre-suasion Can delivering value to the customer become autonomic? In a future blog, I will write about some of the to Agile we’ve implemented. Early results are promising. pre-suasion tweaks In the meantime, I would love to hear from you. Is my situation unique? How do you handle this?
