What do you do if your Agile team is relying solely on self-evaluation?

Here are three strategies to augment this process: 1. Diversify Feedback Channels: Encourage the team to solicit feedback from various stakeholders, customers, and subject matter experts. Here team can gain valuable insights into its performance, identify blind spots, & align more closely with customer needs. 2. Implement Peer Review Mechanisms: Regular peer evaluations enable team members to provide constructive feedback, fostering mutual accountability & collaboration. 3. Embrace Agile Practices for Continuous Improvement: Integrate Agile rituals such as retrospectives into the team's workflow. This will provide a framework for the team to reflect on its processes, identify what's working well, and pinpoint areas for enhancement.

C'est subjectif et avec des biais cognitifs. L'auto évaluation est intéressante mais rarement suffisante. Quelques éléments objectifs et un regard extérieur qui à plusieurs points de comparaison sur le sujet apportent un complément pour la vue d'ensemble. Quantité ? Qualité ? Valeur ? Motivation ? Organisation ?

While self-evaluation contributes to ownership, it's essential to implement peer review sessions, hold regular retrospectives after each sprint for balanced evaluation and continuous improvement. Seeking external feedback from stakeholders, product owners and other teams provides valuable insights. Regular team training enhances skills and Agile practices. As leaders, setting clear performance expectations and providing necessary resources to achieve them are crucial.

In Agile, self-assessment is super important, but it's also key to get input from outside the team. We make sure to have regular team reflections and bring in feedback from peers or stakeholders. It's all about keeping things balanced and making sure we're always improving as a team.

L'auto-évaluation en agilité peut être utile pour identifier les domaines de force et de faiblesse, mais elle peut également être limitée par des biais personnels ou des lacunes de perception. Combiner l'auto-évaluation avec des retours d'autres membres de l'équipe ou des experts en agilité peut fournir une perspective plus complète et précise.

When an Agile team relies solely on self-evaluation, it's essential to structure this process to provide an in-depth view of their performance, encompassing both subjective and objective assessments. By consolidating these evaluations, the team can generate insights to drive actions for continuous improvement. However, self-evaluation alone might not fully capture the team's performance dynamics. Incorporating external feedback offers a broader perspective, allowing the team to compare external views with their self-assessment. This balanced approach ensures a comprehensive development strategy, highlighting areas for growth and propelling the team towards enhanced agility and effectiveness.

Self-evaluation is important for Agile teams, but relying solely on it can be like batsmen only practicing against their own teammates' bowling. They might miss out on areas they struggle with against different bowlers in actual matches. To get a well-rounded view, combine self-evaluation with feedback from coaches, analysts, and even fans. This can help identify areas where the team is excelling and areas needing improvement. For instance, data analysis might reveal a weakness against fast bowling, prompting the team to practice specific techniques.

In order to achieve the balanced approach to feedback and evaluation, the members or team should opt to go beyond self-evaluation. Use multiple sources of feedback from stakeholders, view and seek different perspectives, and industry standards. One or team may consider various tools and methods available as surveys, reviews or seek for verbal and written feedback.

Feedback is an essential component of personal and organizational development. It is imperative for individuals and entities to incorporate feedback in a manner that facilitates constructive criticism, followed by the establishment of mechanisms for addressing it. This ensures that responses are tailored to the comparison between the previous state and the desired improvement.

In every step of Agile process, for that matter in Scrum product development, each phase of self-evaluations is supported by review & feedback to adhere the principle of "Inspect & Adapt". For example, self-evaluation is and should be supported by external review & feedback for better quality/experience. Self-Evaluation External review & feedback • Backlog Readiness - Backlog Refinement. • Unit Testing - Peer Code Review. • Functional Testing - PO Review - Stakeholder Demo. Teams could use multiple tool like ADO dashboards to showcase the sprint progress, brainstorming sessions to uncover the unknow, large group demo sessions to collect feedback from various user groups to know "right-ways of doing right-things at right-time".

La autoevaluación es una herramienta valiosa para los equipos ágiles, pero no debe ser la única medida del éxito. Aunque puede fomentar la autoorganización, responsabilidad y transparencia, también puede verse limitada por el sesgo, la complacencia y la falta de retroalimentación externa. Yo os animo a utilizar el feedback asertivo que es una forma de comunicación clara, directa y respetuosa que permite a los miembros del equipo expresar sus opiniones, necesidades y sentimientos de manera constructiva. Al integrar el feedback asertivo en el proceso ágil, se puede fomentar una cultura de confianza, respeto y aprendizaje.


Hola aquí presento dos herramientas : Tableros Kanban en herramientas de gestión de proyectos como Jira, Trello o Asana: Utiliza columnas para representar diferentes etapas del flujo de trabajo, como "Por hacer", "En progreso", "Listo para revisar" y "Completado". Los miembros del equipo pueden mover tareas a través de estas columnas, lo que facilita el seguimiento del progreso y la revisión de trabajo. Funcionalidades de revisión de código en plataformas como GitHub, GitLab o Bitbucket: Las herramientas de control de versiones ofrecen funcionalidades para realizar revisiones de código entre pares. Los desarrolladores pueden solicitar revisiones de su código y recibir comentarios específicos antes de fusionarlo con el repositorio principal.

Integrate feedback seamlessly into Agile for constant improvement. Align with Agile values like collaboration and transparency to nurture trust. Embed feedback into ceremonies like sprint planning and reviews. Leverage tech tools for real-time data collection and analysis. Embrace a culture of continuous learning to drive innovation. Agile isn't just a method; it's a mindset of growth.

"Success today requires the agility and drive to constant rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent -Bill Gates". I'd say feedback loops are fundamental to our business agility in post pandemic 'BANI' world. To sustainability stay relevant and competitive, we need to reflect and adapt. Reflection is NOT just about self reflection, we gotta devise mechanisms to collate what our customers, stakeholders, peers have as improvement opportunities & drive kaizens. Self reflection can be mired with biases, complacency, inertia. Got to supplement by 360 feedback, Customer centric views , value delivered. Be humble enough to look at failures as opportunities to learn, get better, not merely by feedback collection, rather instil learnability.

Sprint Review & Retrospective session are the most powerful sessions to evaluate & improve. The feedback gathered in sprint review and actions items derived in retro become a prioritized list to implement in sprint as part of continues improvement. Scrum Masters / Kanban Flow Managers should strive to review action items on regular basis and refresh Agile Values & principles to keep team motivated through generated outcome. Each ceremony should add value to team & business. using the technology & tools like dashboard, velocity charts, burn down will aid to teams confidence while moving in right direction.

Too many organisations have a poor understanding of how to measure value. Surely they employ people to “deliver value” rather than just “do work” so measuring value effectively is essential. Self-assessment and even stakeholder feedback are interesting and can help a team to see where improvement can be made, but the most important measures of team effectiveness are value measures.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗮 𝗖𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: Encourage team members to provide feedback to each other on their performance and areas for improvement. This can create a culture of continuous improvement. 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝗘𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀: Bring in external perspectives, such as an Agile coach or SM, to provide objective feedback and guidance. They can help the team identify blind spots and suggest improvements based on their experience and expertise. 𝗘𝗻𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: Promote a culture of continuous learning and professional development within the team. Encourage team members to attend training, participate in workshops, or read books and articles on Agile practices.

Setup an inter-team peer-review process to benefit from an outside-observer perspective. Three pieces to the puzzle :- 1. Get the yardstick right. 2. Get the collaboration right. 3. It's not a tick-in-the-box. What to evaluate/review? Define a set of checklists/criteria to ensure uniformity. Few aspects to include :- top-5 agile metrics, backlog quality, dev-tool efficiency, agile ceremony cadence/quality, post-retrospective action. How to maintain reviewer-reviewee harmony? A rule like "reviewer must, not only give/capture feedback, but also must take back at least one good point from the reviewee and apply in own team" will go a long way. Finally, it's not mere ritual. Make it monthly, and most importantly act on the findings !

The example from my working experience showed that it may lead to separation of your business unit from the company. It could be not bad thing in case of company’s bankruptcy, for example.

In an Agile environment, customer feedback is always valuable. A happy customer is the backbone of Agile success in an organisation. Get the inputs after every sprint (retrospectives) and incorporate the same in successive sprints.