Do you love working in your team? Does your team do excellent work?

These questions are at the heart of my purpose here: fostering high performance and high enjoyment in our teams. This question keeps me up at night: how do we cultivate all our teams to do great work in a way they enjoy? I won't be satisfied until both are true (demanding, I know).

We are establishing a team health check practice here to support this pursuit. I wrote about health checks in a previous blog. We built the health check using indicators which teams self-assess against. The indicators aim to help us see areas of health and improvement.

Today, we will dive into one indicator and explore how teams can improve within the space. We asked the Agile Practices Group to vote on the most important theme for us in R&D, and "Sustainability" was the top vote. Let's dive in.

Working at a sustainable pace

Here is the indicator:

We plan and deliver at a pace we can sustain rather than frequently relying on last-minute heroics.

Within this theme is an assumption: "last-minute heroics" tend to lead towards poorer quality results (not excellent work) and decrease satisfaction in the team's work and the way of working (not loving how we work). During times of crisis, we often shift into a leader-follow model instead of harnessing the power of the collective. We make short-term trade-offs at the long-term expense of the product and the team. We don't want to rely on last-minute heroics or heroes.

James Shore frames sustainability this way: "We work at a pace that allows us to do our best, most productive work indefinitely." That is what I want for our teams.

It feels good to say, yet it is hard to live. As teams, many factors influence us, and without intervention, we can drift towards mediocrity in both the work we are creating and our way of working.

How do you set yourselves up to deliver at a sustainable pace?

Here are some things I look for when I am observing a team for evidence if things are sustainable or unsustainable:

The list are symptoms. They reveal the impact of a way of working, but they don't tell you the cause. Getting to the causing factors of unsustainable practices is critical for teams to explore in their retros. Some will be out of the team's control (environmental factors) - call these out with all the other CRID (we track constraints, risks, issues, and dependencies across our teams).

Here are some of the gotcha's people called out as negatively impacting their sustainability:

• Not planning time for testing, integrating, and merging.
• Not having a contingency plan (what scope can give) or allowing a buffer to deal with changes.
• Working overtime to get the work planned across the line.
• Delaying quality practices too late and finding bugs they needed help fixing quickly.