team

Agile Rituals Improved – Preparation

This article is the second of a series of two on boosting the effectiveness of Agile rituals. The first article emphasizes increasing people participation while this article focuses on meeting preparation.

Preparation is important because a lack of it can result in long, boring, clumsy, ineffective rituals. Among other things, I think this is partly why famed coach Allistair Cockburn sometimes provocatively asks the following in his training: “Agile is less efficient than Waterfall because?” In any case, here are some tips to avoid the self-inflicted wound of sloppiness.

Note: As in part one, this article assumes the reader is familiar with Agile, and that participants have recognized that their rituals need help and are willing to try new work methods.

Tip #1 – To speed up Scrum backlog grooming and planning meetings, have the Product Owner send the stories to be covered 48 hours ahead of the meeting, and set the expectation that team members read them. This pre-screening allows you to skip the deadly read-out and enables the discussion to commence immediately. You’d think that a public backlog would make this automatic, but sometimes the organization needs a little help developing the habit.

Tip #2 – Did you ever witness a public argument between some or all of the members of the servant leadership team (architect, manager, PO, and Scrum Master)? Yeah, me too. It is not pretty. It is also hypocritical because those same people then ask the teams to self-organize, which is something the leaders just demonstrated they couldn’t do themselves. To avoid public arguments that confuse team members, servant leaders must meet before all major rituals and sort out any sticking points.  Private debate and public alignment are the order of the day.

Tip #3 – One person should be in the ritual room 10 minutes ahead of the meeting time to get the technology up and running. Also, don’t ever attempt something in front of a large group without a dry run first. Just don’t do it. Murphy’s law won’t allow it.

Tip #4 – Don’t wait for people to stroll in to get the ritual underway. Get started exactly on time. The majority of participants will appreciate it. Any tardiness will fix itself after a few people have to walk into an active session. This is especially important when customers are present.

Tip #5 – Don’t get delayed by laptops being swapped out in the middle of a presentation. Do exchange and consolidate files ahead of time. Better yet, consider not using slides. That’s just one of the many fantastic communication tips from Training From The Back Of The Room.

Tip #6 – If different computers absolutely must be used during a demo, have people pre-login applications like remote desktop to make toggling a breeze.

Tip #7 – It is not always easy for remote participants to determine that they are causing distracting noises. Background noise, keyboard clicks, coughing, chewing and ringing phone can really diminish the quality of the communication between sites. As the number of participants increases so does the difficulty of maintaining a proper mute/unmute state. Consider using someone with admin rights over the communication tool to help mute unwanted sources of noise and preserve people’s dignity.

Tip #8 – Conversely, pay attention to local sources of noise and position microphones carefully. Food with crinkly wrappers, equipment fan, shifting chairs, and fingers tapping tables can be distracting to local participants and prevent remote attendees from hearing. In fact, establish your own feedback loop by having a local leader call in from a nearby room to experience the event first-hand.

Tip #9 – The pressure of organizing an event can sometimes cause key meeting artifacts or important activities to be overlooked. Do use an agenda checklist for all rituals. A public checklist also subtly cross-trains participants to self-serve.

Tip #10 – Don’t trust that yesterday’s prototype will just work today. The larger the team, the less likely this is. Do use lock and key for physical prototypes, and freeze the assets for digital ones. This is especially important when the ritual is costly to reschedule, such as some customer demonstrations.

As a change agent, you should be mindful that the emerging Agile culture is not torpedoed by clumsiness. In most cases, the only thing missing to achieve effectiveness is the drive to have it. That drive is embodied in a professional level of preparation. We covered several actions that can be taken to have shorter yet more effective Agile rituals, and most have very low barriers to execution. How else do you like to see your teams and leaders prepare?

Works cited

“Perfect Score”, by Evan Shuster, The Noun Project, Web. 30 Mar. 2016.  Modified.

Agile Rituals Improved – Participation

Let’s face it; many Agile teams are disappointed by how much time they spend in rituals. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it shouldn’t be that way. A team can take many actions to shrink the amount of time it spends in rituals while simultaneously increasing their effectiveness and fostering better engagement. Those actions tend to fall in one of two categories: participation and preparation. In this first of a two articles series, I am sharing a few examples of participation-related practices that have worked for me. A subsequent article will look more closely at preparation.

Note: despite some Scrum references, the tips can be applied to rituals from any Agile method. This article, therefore, assumes a certain level of Agile literacy. It does not describe the basics of the various rituals discussed.

Before changing anything, the first step is to ask the participants if they are satisfied with the current state of affairs. If there is no dissatisfaction, there will be no willingness to experiment with solutions. For the purpose of this article, let’s assume that someone has secured buy-in.

The first of the two principal causes of long, boring, ineffective rituals is the dearth of active participants. Here are some tips in no particular order:

Tip #1 – During grooming, don’t let the Product Owner do all the talking. A few days before the ritual, look for team members willing to learn a few stories/epics and take the first crack at answering questions about those during the ritual. A variety of presenters make for more energizing meetings. And you should walk away with at least one person who has a deep understanding of the topic because this technique is an embodiment of: “If you want to master something, teach it.”

Tip #2 – One of the surest ways to lose meeting participants is to have them wait on someone taking notes. This frequently happens in Scrum grooming and planning because the PO is trying to facilitate the meeting, describe the user stories, take notes, and update the backlog in real-time. To cure this, delegate tasks to the Scrum Master and any chickens present in the meeting.

Tip #3 – Story sizing debates derail many a Scrum planning rituals; is this story 3 points or 5 points? There are endless opinions. What participants frequently forget is that sizing is an exercise in estimation and that all estimates are wrong to some degree. Therefore, only the order of magnitude truly matters. For example, teams using the Fibonacci series don’t have to agonize over whether a story is one size up or one size down. The key is to limit the debate to arguments that are likely to sway the estimate by a lot.

Tip #4 – In every group meeting some conversations devolve into back and forth between two or three participants while everyone else waits. To snuff this, devise a mechanism where the crowd signals its desire for the conversation to stop. For example, people can raise a hand, and when two or more hands are up, the debate has to pause while a check for relevancy is performed. In short, don’t let the audience be victimized; empower it to self-regulate.

As a leader, bad meetings are just too expensive; there is the immediate cost of wasted time and the longer cost of reduced employee engagement. Moreover, group meetings are a golden opportunity to influence the organization’s culture. Servant leaders have a responsibility to work toward ameliorating the environment (see the article on the role of the manager). Some of the tips above may be useful in that pursuit. What other tips do you have?

Works cited

“Citizenship”, by Alberto Miranda, The Noun Project, Web. 30 Mar. 2016.  Modified.