Low Tech Rituals

March 3, 2009 by Janusz Marcin Gorycki

Photo (c) Janusz Gorycki

"Still working the old fashioned way with whiteboards, spreadsheets and outdated software?” – I have stumbled upon an agile consulting company's web site with this slogan on the main page the other day. Efficiency! Speed! High Tech! Aren't we all supposed to be after these? Well – not at all times. So yes – our team maintains the old fashioned habits, uses low-tech, old school corkboards, does the planning sessions playing planning poker with actual playing cards (Piatnik brand if am not mistaken). We even sometimes plot the burndown charts manually, with pen and pencil. And we do it for a reason.

Don't get me wrong – the modern, efficient tools are useful. Hell, my company is making money producing and selling them! But – they are not everything, and they are not always appropriate. Use them as a tool, not as a gospel. There are things more important for your team's and project's success than the use of fancy software.

The quality of the team and the caliber of its members is more important than the efficiency of its processes – nothing controversial about this statement really, this fact has been well documented in some pretty classic books on team management ("Good To Great” by Jim Collins comes to mind). And the old fashioned rituals are crucial in maintaining the team spirit and identity. This is because people happen to be wired in such a way that it makes them feel safe and comfortable if they can devote some time every day to repeatable old habits. And teams become better integrated if they have some common habits that they care to repeat every day – as a team. Liturgies and rituals do matter a lot – and there is no reason for these rituals to be overly efficient. That's not their purpose to be efficient.

I would argue that a lot of the success of the agile methodologies such as Scrum comes from the fact that they offer quite a comprehensive book of team liturgies to choose from: daily standups, planning poker, retrospectives, etc – the goals of these activities can be achieved using other means. The difference is that the way these are designed in Scrum makes them attractive to people – it makes them want to work as a team.

For example – planning poker is just another name for a Wideband Delphi planning method. Known for ages, used with reasonable success by mainstream planners. Boring. But call it a „poker”, give people some props to use, add simple „gamey” rules – and suddenly the boring planning session actually becomes fun! It would be a mistake to suddenly take the cards away from the team and make them use some dehumanized, computerized forms to fill out. It would NOT be fun. People would hate it.

The same with the corkboard with story cards on them. The liturgy of a daily standup where every team member is pinning the story card to a new column on the board is sort of like a „morning prayer” for the team each morning. You are expected to show up every day and stand in the circle for 15 minutes at 10am sharp. No computers in sight, no blinkenlights, no forms to fill in – you perform a team ritual. You should explicitely devote time to this activity and resist the urge to make it "efficient”, so as to not "waste time”. Do the opposite – maintain the quirks, the small inefficiencies. In our case using the corkboard means that the ScrumMaster gets to update our JIRA based on the current status of the board (yes, our low tech rituals are backed by high tech-super efficient technology). This takes a bit of time – but so what? That is a very small price to pay.

There are other things that can be done – one team I know has a special "token of shame” that is to be worn for the whole day by whoever breaks the automated build. The other team is passing a rugby ball to "give voice” to team members during daily standups. You can invent your own if you have not done it already. Our team's recent liturgy is playing table footbal for 15 minutes every day after lunch. Waste of time? No, not really. "Investment” is the more appropriate word. The four guys become better team members if they get to cooperate on something – anything, in a fun environment.

At the end of the day – if you maintain some of the slow and old fashioned rituals, you will end up with a better, more efficient, better motivated, better performing team.

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