Overcoming Resistance to Extreme Programming
Benji Webber provides a list of tips for overcoming resistance to Extreme Programming.
To start:
many XP practices are both counterintuitive and require a lot of skill.
It’s important to manage your incentives if you want to encourage collaboration (such as pair programming).
Do you have OKRs for individuals? Are you performance managing individuals’ outcomes? Do you build promotion packets for individuals based on their direct contributions to the company results?
You are incentivising individuals to avoid collaborating and maximise their individual visible contributions.
There’s a paradox for managers that managing individuals and optimising individual performance undermines team impact. You lose out on the impact multiplier that teams can have.
Your tools should also encourage collaboration.
This impact was starkly visible when a team switched from having daily “standup” conversations from around a Jira board, to a freeform custom layout for their workflow on a Miro board. There was an immediate improvement to the quality of conversation around who needed to work with whom on what, towards which outcomes.
Not to pick on Jira (but it’s such a good example of a tool antithetical to agility) Jira encourages each “issue” (everything is a problem) to be “assigned” (not self organised) to an individual (not a group). The default board view focuses on the work and not the team.