Working as part of a software development team can be demanding at times, lots of work on the product roadmap and priorities changing from sprint to sprint can lead to frustrations within teams.

One of the best ways I’ve found to keep the mood in the team high and ensure the team are empowered to do their jobs but still deliver value is to allow the team to be agile, be innovative and be fun!

Agile is great but it can sometimes be misinterpreted, when this happens everything becomes about making sure teams are ‘Agile’ and not about delivering quality and value to customers as a result the team feels less empowered and more imprisoned, this will always lead to lower morale.

Agile and the various frameworks that go along with it (scrum, kanban, xp etc) are meant to be guidelines as to how teams can work in order to be efficient at a sustainable rate indefinitely, if teams try to follow these guidelines to the letter of the law then, in my experience, they will fall way short of achieving.

Teams need to be honest with themselves and with stakeholders as to what is realistic in terms of delivering given particular timeframes, but also be given the freedom to work in the best way for them.

If you’re part of a team that spends hours or days discussing process over actually doing work then you are doing something wrong. Instead focus on making achievable sprint goals that are decided on as a team and then focus on delivering those.

Make sure there is always time to reflect on what things are working, or not, then follow up on actions and allow the team to try new things, this way we learn and get better over time. Teams should feel empowered to try new things and be allowed to fail.

I have found allowing the team time to innovate is great way to increase morale and also benefits the team and company by improving the way we work, we had only 1 rule; that any R&D time had to be used to find ways to improve what we do as a team or something that will benefit our customers, this way it keeps things focused, you’ll be surprised at just how creative teams can be when given the opportunity.

There are many ways to allow time for innovation to take place, making sure the team know they are allowed to innovate is a good place to start. I have worked in teams where gold cards are used as a way of allowing team members to work on innovation projects as part of sprint time, how this works should be decided by the team. I’ve also worked in other teams where R&D time is allocated at the end/start of sprint, both worked really well. Other teams might come up with different ways to do this, ask them to come up with some suggestions.