Innovation vs Maintenance

“We’re innovators, not maintainers.” 🤔

That was one of our main conclusions during the annual company-wide strategic retreat. Meaning, Christiaan Verwijs and I spent a couple of days hiking, thinking, and planning.

When reflecting on the past year(s), what excites us the most are innovative endeavors like:
🚀 Designing the new Scrum.org PSM II class
🚀 Creating various facilitation kits for our webshop
🚀 Developing our variant of the Liberating Structures Immersion Workshop
🚀 Supporting the start of local user groups
🚀 Writing the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide

Innovations like these fuel us with energy!

The flip side is that once innovation becomes a reality, you slowly move into maintenance mode. That’s not our strongest asset. It takes time ⏰, and we rather spent time on new stuff, instead of maintaining existing things. Despite the value, it can deliver.

As a result, we handed over the PSM II steward role to other PSTs. We continuously support others to facilitate their own LS workshops, and we support our community to start their own user groups (instead of doing meetups ourselves).

Currently, I still provide the PSM II class and facilitate LS workshops, but mostly because I see many opportunities to keep innovating these workshops. Once this isn’t possible anymore, it’s time to move on. 🤷‍♂️

The same goes for the development of the Agile/Scrum Team Survey. It’s a fairly new product that offers tons of innovative possibilities. But we’re already slowly starting to think about how to navigate the potential tension between innovation & maintenance. Our dream is to have lots of organizations around the world that use our product, but a pitfall might be to get stuck with maintenance. It’s a wicked situation. 😅

Closing

Anyhow, these are just some thoughts that emerged during this summer period. What fuels you with energy? What drains energy? What struggles do you face in your work?