I gave a talk where I made a claim how happy people build better products than agile teams. Don’t get me wrong, software projects using agile methods are so much better than software projects using waterfall and derivatives like SAFe. (Yes, SAFe is a waterfall)

My point is, without emphasizing the human aspect, the level of perfection in your agile processes is not helping, if your team is unhappy. So, instead of solving the team productivity issues by introducing new agile processes, try making your team happy. Accept the new normal, the team is as close as possible to long-term maximum velocity when they are happy. Sacrifice the illusion of controlling everything in your software project, and you might gain some serious productivity in a long term. It’s worth a try, right?

Please note that my slides are pretty minimal, so just by going through the slide deck might not give the full picture of the talk. I’ve also replaces the videos from my presentation with still screenshots. Sorry about that.

The complete name of the event was EIT ICT Labs Symposium on Trusted Cloud and Future Enterprises, I took the liberty to shortening it to Oulu Agile Seminar :)

UPDATE: After my talk I was pointed out that even though we value solid facts when making new product concepts, the “happiness” is not measured in a way that produces scientifially valid results. That is very true, and after giving it more thought, I still think it’s a good way. See, this is where you place your trust in the people :)

But if there is a better way, most likely, we are going to give it a shot.