How ‘The Planet as a Stakeholder’ started
Climate change is a significant threat to the future of life on earth and as I was looking for ways to do something meaningful about this, the idea started to grow that at work, in my own Agile teams, we could also take the sustainability perspective.
I dove into the subject of sustainable IT and started with a ‘Planet as a Stakeholder Retrospective’ for my Scrum Team in which we went over the Principles of Green Software Engineering. We discussed what steps our team could take to reduce the carbon footprint of our services.
Taking the sustainability perspective was a new approach for the team, but everyone agreed on its importance. During that session, the team estimated that optimizing our landscape and decommissioning legacy components could reduce our footprint by a significant percentage.
That made me wonder: What if all Agile teams would have this conversation? I started to develop workshops about ‘the Planet as a Stakeholder’, and help teams to take a new perspective: to look at their IT services through the sustainability lens and define steps to start reducing their IT carbon footprint.
*Inspired by Jutta Eckstein’s notion of ‘prioritizing the planet as one of the stakeholders’ in the Agile Sustainability Survey.