Is your team Happy or Frustrated?
Participant Survey: Are your teams happy or frustrated?
o Some teams are happy and some are frustrated
o Team flips between happy and frustrated
o Engineers do not say much and so it is hard to judge
What do Happy teams look like? What makes teams Happy?
o Have engaged PO, great SMs
o Teams feel empowered to reject stories
o Good SMs with servant leadership characteristics
o Good retros, continuous improvement. Take one thing from the retro and work on it
What do Frustrated teams look like? What makes teams frustrated?
o Want rigid processes
o Want to be told what to do
o Can be productive
o They have multiple personality disorder
o Process confusion – Scrum + Waterfall
o Interruptions due to a highly specialized team being called on to do outside sprint work
o Micro managed teams (by managers, leads)
o No SM
o New to Agile
o Team members do not know what to do; lack of training and so teams are lost
o User Stories are not well defined
o No one makes decisions
o No one steps up
o Managers do estimating
o Story dependencies lead to team members waiting on others
o POs tell the how
How can you make teams Happy? Remove Frustrations?
o Look for 'engagement' rather than happiness because happiness depends on non-work factors too
o Leverage (R)AMP framework
o Once teams understand roles and how artifacts look like, they become better
o Use retro as a tool for improvement
o Teams may feel safer without managers
o Coach teams to speak up when User Stories are not right or have problems
o Do not commit to work that you do not understand
o Understand the overall picture
o Reinforce Scrum principles
o Teams take time to feel open and safe and share emotional state
o Share facts/trivia to get conversations going
o Prizes, games, candy, …….
How do you get newly formed teams to commit?
o First 5 sprints are hard
o Use anchor stories to do relative sizing
o More prescriptive to start with
o Really understand the story
o OK to fail
o Optimize for the system rather than locally
o Teams take t
Retro as a tool to gauge happiness
o Happiness scores using a tool
o Radar chart with several dimensions including how the team feels
o Retro
o One word – how you feel
o Record emotional state (happiness) for each 10 days of the sprint
o Chart it and then use the chart to have a discussion on retro day on what happened
o Generated lot of interest in the past
What if team says – we don't want fun / don't want to play kindergarten games
o Figure out what is fun for the team
o Hackathons
o Give ownership of engineering processes and ceremonies such as demo
No comments:
Post a Comment