I am currently working with a relatively new Scrum team (5 Sprints/weeks young) that needs to rewrite their Personal Development Plans (PDPs) in order to better support Scrum and the team. PDPs are still the deliverables of individuals required by the organization and likely will be for some time. The organization is still in the early days of Agile adoption (pilots) and they are large. So, instead of giving them a sermon on why metrics for managed individuals are bad, I am going to help them take the step towards Agility that they are ready to take.

The Plan:

Facilitate a team workshop to create an initial Skills Matrix;
work as a team to develop a PDP for each individual team member that directly supports the team’s high-performance Goal (already established)—
- in other words, when considering an appropriate PDP per individual, the team will start with the team’s performance Goal and build the individual PDP from there;
develop a plan as a team for how the team will support each team member to fulfill his/her individual PDP—
- in other words, all individual PDPs will be part of the team’s plan for team improvement;
Internally publish the plan (share with management).

I’ll follow up with another post to let everyone know how it goes.