Handing Over the Rituals

This week I stopped running two of the regular rituals that keep our delivery team ticking — on purpose.

Sprint review, show-and-tell, and the fortnightly delivery checkpoint have been mine to run for a while. Not because anyone needed them to be — just because that's how it started, and nobody had got round to changing it. This week I handed all three over to the people who lead our delivery clusters day to day. It's a small structural change, but it moves ownership of the team's rhythm to the people actually closest to the work, rather than it defaulting upward out of habit.

The rest of the week was less visible: getting our quarterly plans properly back to green, and working through the reporting and governance side of some changes to how we run delivery. Unglamorous, but it's the kind of groundwork that makes everything else easier to trust.

I'm off for two weeks starting Monday. Handing the rituals over now, rather than leaving a gap while I'm away, felt like the right order to do it in.

Lesson learned

Ownership of a ritual is still ownership — if you keep running it out of habit, you're quietly still in the loop that you're trying to hand over. Changing who runs the room changes who actually leads it.