Me, myself and I in the team

It is not once or twice I have been in Sprint Review or Sprint Retrospective meeting where someone has said big smile in his face "I did all my stuff!" when more than half of Sprint Backlog items were not completed. Or in the middle of the Sprint one morning in Daily meeting someone has said "I have completed all my issues, can I pick up something new from Product Backlog?" while others struggle with work they have picked up.

The whole concept "working as a team" is difficult for those who have been rewarded throughout their career for their own contribution. It has been important to be better than others to get promotions and pay raise. And there are always people who simply not are team player. It is all about "Me, myself and I" instead of "we".

It must be awful to be allocated in Scrum team if you don't consider yourself as a team player. One might be wondering why I need to plan my work with others, why I need to tell anyone what I am doing as long I get it done. I might have been one of those long time ago. I haven't been devoted Agilist always.

When I first time ever heard about Agile development my first thought was "it is not going to fly". At that point of time I worked as requirement engineer and when now looking back I thought me and my colleagues to be the most important part of any development as we were the ones telling what need to be done. Few years later I started to work as tester and had another brilliant idea: I am the most important as I am the last barrier and prevent all the bugs going into production.

About seven years ago I started see things from different perspective. Why we don't work together? I started look into Agile framework and found out there are other ways. We can build teams who has all the needed skills and people work together. It took long time for myself to change my thinking but I feel I needed that long journey.

It is no surprise that if teams are formed and they are told "you are now Agile team", they don't know what is coming. It should have been me explaining and helping them in their journey. Everytime someone said "I did all my stuff" I should have understood I haven't done my part, not yet.

Great teamwork starts with people and practices. It simply isn't enough to say "you are a team". What does it mean to work together as a team? What are good practices to introduce to a new team?

When I started to write this post, I had totally something else in my mind than what I have written here. While writing I had time to think, rethink, and reflect and I ended up to conclusion I haven't been very good Scrum Master or Coach. I haven't really considered the background of team members, the environment or the organisation around the team. I have just been thinking selfishly how stupid these people are when they don't see the value of teamwork.