At the last meeting of our monthly agile get togethers (which was really nice) we talked about a bunch of things; one being how to help teams keep using techniques that are helpful and reflect on what they do so that they may find new helpful techniques.

At my current short assignment I am helping a team with their process and their work and we have been talking about these things, so the discussion was very useful to me. The reward of task completion and (if you have a quick feedback cycle via some receiving customer standing by) delivery is huge and it can be hard to provide an alternative mechanism that rewards refactoring and design investments.

One type of tool I find useful to get a grip on group dynamics are the personality catalogs a'la DISC. There is a correlation between the personality types of such models and preferred rewards, "Drivers" are more focused on task completion and delivery, for example. However, the model notes a tendency or potential factor, it is not static - the challenge is to affect this focus in a beneficial direction, usually so that more design effort is undertaken.

There is little point in enforcing policies by means of negative reinforcement. At AgileOresund we discussed how to stimulate a feeling of professionalism / "professional pride" so that there will be more care taken in how things are accomplished than just that they are accomplished.

I feel that this can be approached via a general belief and support of the individual, and a stimulation of his/her personal goals. These goals are often in line with the goals of the organization, and create a much greater drive. A dialogue aimed at this is often neglected in companies today: Many companies I've been to lack leaders who have the ability to create a solid and effective conversation of this type. In contrast, the "actual" leaders (may be team leads or just in terms of the socially context, due to age and experience) are sometimes not interested and/or do not have time and do not prioritize this important conversation. I feel that this is a loss for everyone - the companies, the industry as a whole and the individuals.

Another perspective on this discussion is the model of developers that microsoft uses, and there has just recently been some controversy around how it was recently expressed at a blog. Microsoft uses a set of persona that represent different developers. In a recent post - an discussion of code production and tools - quality and needs were presented based on one of the persona, Mort. Mort is the least technically interested developer, that merely wants to get the job done, and the code he produces does not fit in a complex codebase that will need to be maintained over a long period of time, and so on, it is posited. There follows (and it is still active) a heated and fairly interesting discussion, where people mostly disagree with how the original poster related Mort and his view of the world to agile practices.  Regardless, using these persona as an analysis tool in this way feels clumsy to me, I don't think that it is what they were intended for. 

Yet it does send a thought to my rewards analysis: If we accept the persona model as useful, and think about the Mort persona in a typical scenario, I think that Morts in general will be aware that they are not the "alpha geeks". Morts may feel a sense of distance and lack of engagement due to this. Thus, they pursue other types of rewards and recognition, which may be task completion. If so, it seems logical that they value it over investing effort in design, and other technical aspects of the work, that do not contribute "directly" to creating the functionality in a visible way. They may feel that they cannot gain recognition for creating the best design for the tasks, but they can complete the tasks quickly.

Naturally, creating an open and positive work environment is of course necessary.

  Again, in order to counter this is (in addition to pursuing and maintaining humility and openness at all costs, as has been recommended forever) I believe in working with the individual and pushing them to create a vision for themselves, get aware of their ambitions and formulate a direction of where they want to go. Most often, that will be in line with where the organization wants to go. I believe very much in the drive and the passion that we all have, if awakened, if nourished -  all it takes is someone to believe in it.