7 tips to compensate your agile team…

George Dinwiddie wrote about agile compensation yesterday. I agree with the idea’s he is writing about, I don’t agree with the link he points to. That compensation list is all about personal compensation. In fact some of them kill team momentum. So I wrote my own compensating tips.

A good team compensation:

  1. 1) is Value based

    I think a good compensation is value based: a team is compensated based on the results they deliver.
    Good results ==> good compensation.
    That brings back the discussion “what is a good result?” In a lot projects “what is a good result” is not clearly defined. Team members don’t always bother fighting this. If their money is involved, I’m sure they will demand a better definition. And they will demand it at the start of the project.

  2. 2) encourages team behavior

    No compensation based on personal heroics. Some people write clever code that nobody understands. Some people pull all nighters and don’t show up the next day. Most of that behavior is bad for a project. People should be not rewarded for this kind of behavior.

  3. encourages working for the good of the whole

    People that write unit tests, refactor code, …

  4. 3) helps improvement of the team

    Writing wiki pages explaining hard part of the code, start organizing reading sessions. Sometimes this also means doing nothing so that other team members can learn.

  5. 4) is well understood at the beginning of the project/year.
    So that at the end of the process, people know why they got what they got .
    When they feel accountable for their compensation, they will work on it.
  6. encourages people to stimulate eachother so that other team members get higher rewards .
  7. encourages teams that help other teams while reaching their own goals.

Update: you might also be interested in my post about intrinsic motivation.