Effectiveness is not efficient!

If I allow myself to, I have to spend a lot of time trying to convince people about the essence of agile developing. It's maybe impossible and inappropriate to always point out that agility in development has nothing to do with efficiency. And if I do, I have at least 5 conversations throughout the day. At the end of the day I assume I'll be recognized as a whiner.


First of all, you need to know I currently have a system (SAFE) team, put together with people from multiple sections of the company, almost by force. So everyone in my team has their own backlog for the time being and at some point, they need to work together. Further more, many of them haven't been on a scrum team before, so they are not familiar with the scrum events.
Secondly, in most cases, Scrum is introduced by management based on false pretenses. Scrum should fill the gab between supply and demand. So it looks like they will have better control over the road map, specially on the delivery aspect.

Not efficient!

This morning, at the stand-up, the attendance was downgraded from 8 to 2 people. So I asked the team what their opinion was about the importance of the daily scrum. They say: 'It's not efficient enough, because most of the time, we're not interested in someone else's story and problems. In the meantime, we could do a lot of other important things.'
Also when I tried to explain that they need to work together on single stories, they came with the same verdict: not efficient!

The most valuable drive

Dear readers, please take it from me: it's more valuable to produce a good working, fully expected and well adopted feature by your user, than steering at a good velocity! And the argument that a team prospers from a climbing line on a chart is true, but does not weigh up to experience the happiness of the ones who use your software! That is truly thé most valuable drive to have as a team. Thát will help a team far more creating a valuable product than focusing on efficiency.

Resume

So, why do I want to have the team working on one feature or one user story? And why do I need everybody present at the standup? My team is right: it's not efficient. But I don't care if it is efficient or not. I want my team to be effective! Let me get back to those examples I mentioned;
When you join the standup and hear about subjects you don't care about, know that almost every time something triggers someone. Even maybe in a way you didn't expect or recognized. It will help the team with decision making. Although you're maybe not familiar with the subjects, you are still able to ask good questions!
And working on the same story wideness your bandwidth and gives you new insights and knowledge transfer. So the solutions are getting more colorful, powerful and better founded. As a team, you get slower, but you produce better solutions. Which eventually brings you to less changes and bugs, and therefore gets you faster in the upcoming sprints.

Cheers!