Everyone's Perspective Is Key In Retrospectives

#SridharPeddisetty #Agile #Scrum #Retrospection #Project #Retrospective #Management #BestPractices #ProcessImprovement  

In the early 20th century, an Architect and an Engineer entered a fancy hotel with a roll of blueprints to investigate how to add an elevator to the building. As they were measuring and planning where to knock holes in walls, the Janitor walked up and asked what they were doing. They told him that they would be installing a new elevator in the building. The Janitor quipped, "That's gonna make quite a mess."  Both the Architect and the Engineer assured the Janitor that he would get help cleaning up after they were finished. The Janitor scoffed: "I don't know why you want to go through all that trouble. If it were me I'd put the elevator on the outside of the building and save the fuss." The Engineer looked at the Architect and they were dumbstruck--and the elevator on the outside of a building was born.

Introduction

People with a different perspective can come up with some incredible ideas. Above is an example of an incredible idea, which goes to show that everyone’s inputs are equally important. Even though most of us understand this well, sometimes during retrospective meetings, the Scrum Master or Facilitator fails to have all participants share their thoughts. Not everyone in the team is an extrovert or feels secure enough to share individual opinions in front of others. So the onus lies on the Facilitator of the retrospective meeting to ensure everyone’s perspective is taken. 

Tips on taking everyone’s perspective in retrospectives

Below are 5 tips on how to take everyone’s perspective in a retrospective meeting

Tip#1: Ensure a comfortable setup

Whether doing retrospective with co-located team or a remote team, it’s important to have a meeting setup, which instills comfort for the participants. Personally, I have seen retrospectives done over video conference where some participants are not visible on the screen, which makes it uncomfortable for some to speak while not being visible. Ideally, retrospectives should not include anyone who is not going to contribute. Some members could possibly feel uncomfortable speaking in front of an audience who are not part of the team or does not have anything to contribute in the meeting. 

Tip#2: Share all relevant data ahead of time

Provide an opportunity for participants to be prepared for the retrospective meeting. Normally the tool provides visibility of the goals for a sprint or a release and the actual deliveries. It helps to summarize what was planned, what was achieved and other relevant details in the agenda so that the participants can come prepared with their thoughts to share. It also helps to share the status on action items ahead of time and what has been accomplishment in terms of continuous improvement from the lessons learned from the past retrospective meetings. 

Tip#3: Encourage participants to share thoughts without interruption 

We understand that not all technically skilled resources have good soft skills and some struggle to take time to explain their view point. It’s important to time box but at the same time a good Facilitator understands how to encourage participants to share their perspective. A Facilitator can ensure that someone is actively taking notes for future reference as needed. The Facilitator can also help in ensuring that technical details are understood by the non-technical participants. 

Tip#4: Facilitator should be unbiased  

The Facilitator should direct the conversations to encourage participants remain focused on the objective of the retrospective and ensuring that thoughts are challenged as needed and not the people. No side conversations or comments should be encouraged while a participant is sharing thoughts. The Facilitator should ensure that participants’ thoughts are respected and people can disagree without being disagreeable. 

Tip#5: Encourage consensus on action items

The Facilitator should ensure that there is a consensus on actionable items and identify the owner of the respective action item before wrapping up the meeting. Having a consensus encourages participants to think for themselves as a team. The Facilitator should also summarize main points discussed in the meeting and later follow up with an email or publish in a tool including meeting minutes. 

Summary

The best teamwork comes from the team members who are working independently but toward one goal in unison and working in an environment where everyone’s perspective is encouraged, heard and respected. 

Previous posts you might be interested in

• Active Listening Is Key For A Successful Delivery
• 5 Reasons To Let Your Team Struggle Today
• 20 Guidelines For A Productive Meeting

Everyone's Perspective Is Key In Retrospectives was originally published under Prokarma blog on Oct 26th 2015

Minimum Marketable Features: An Agile Essential

#SridharPeddisetty #Agile #MMF #Strategy #Project #MinimumMarketableFeatures #Management #BestPractices #ProcessImprovement  

"Agile is all about adapting to change; it was built on the foundational principle that business drivers will change and the development teams must be ready to adapt"

Introduction

Organizations no longer compete on product or service but they compete on experience of faster to market with quality results. It is an organization's ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly, which gives it the ultimate competitive advantage. More often than not, it’s seen that most organizations focus on delivering the software and not paying enough attention to the value the software brings to the business. 

What is a Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF)?

A Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF) is the smallest set of functionality that can be delivered, which has value to both the organization delivering it and the end customer using it. MMF is characterized by its three attributes: Minimum, Marketable and Feature.

• Minimum attribute represents the smallest set whether a feature or feature set, which is key for faster time to market 
• Marketable attribute represents the selling of the significant value to the end customer and to the delivering organization 
• Feature attribute represents the perceived value by the end customer and delivering organization. Value may include brand recognition, competitive advantage, revenue generation, cost savings or enhanced customer loyalty.  

How MMF is essential for being Agile?

Agile is an iteratively incremental SDLC methodology in which requirements and solutions evolve through communication and collaboration between self-organizing and cross-functional teams. Agile promotes ‘building the right thing’ through 

• Customer involvement, 
• Adaptive planning, 
• Evolutionary development, 
• Early delivery, 
• Continuous improvement and 
• Encourages rapid & flexible response to change 

in delivering high quality product or service. MMF provides an essential tool to effectively decompose customer needs into finer grain features, which can be delivered more rapidly than waiting for large scale features to be complete. Using the concepts of MMF, decompose the epics into smaller sets of user stories that provide value to end users in shorter development cycles. In Agile SDLC, it’s during the product backlog grooming when the value of requirements or features can be quantified based on how these requirements contribute to the business objectives. During the grooming, using INVEST model to define a user story or MoSCoW for prioritization, various models or methods could be applied that helps to identify the most important features to implement or identifies the MMFs. A release could then be the collection of MMFs, which can be delivered together within the time frame.

Summary

Product innovation is tied to change and often the need for change appears midstream in a project so decomposing the requirements into Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) helps have the edge while improving the time to market. One essential advantage of MMF is the ability to make changes during development without being too disruptive. In other words, MMF helps in adjusting product requirements during development in response to customer feedback. Jim Shore in his Phase Releases article had shared how to use phased delivery to increase project value:

• Group functionality into MMFs that can be released individually.
• Create a release plan that deploys high-value features first.
• Have the entire team focus on one releasable feature at a time.
• Use continuous design to spread out investment in technical infrastructure.
• Deploy releases as soon as possible.

Previous posts you might be interested in:

• Empower Your Team To Own Responsibilities 
• 5 Reasons To Let Your Team Struggle Today
• Trust Your Team But Make Sure To Verify

Minimum Marketable Features: An Agile Essential was originally published under Prokarma blog on Oct 23rd 2015

Trust Your Team But Make Sure To Verify

#SridharPeddisetty, #Leadership, #Management, #Agile, #ScrumMaster, #AgileMethodologies, #AgileProjectManager #ProjectManager. 

One afternoon a wealthy manager was driving in his limousine when he saw two men along the roadside eating grass. Disturbed by the sight, he ordered his driver to stop and he got out to investigate. He asked one man "Why are you eating grass?" "We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass." "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you" the manager said. "But sir, I have a wife and five children with me. They are over there, under that tree". "Bring them along," the manager replied. Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You come with us also." The second man, in a pitiful voice then said, "But sir, I also have a wife and seven children with me!" "Bring them all, as well," the manager answered. They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large as the limousine was. Once underway, one of the poor fellows turned to mr. Manager and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you." The manager replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place; the grass is almost 1 meter high!"

Claus Langfred, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis did a survey to measure levels of trust, self-monitoring, and autonomy among 71 self-managing teams of MBA students. In his survey, he found out these team members trusted each other and tended not to monitor one another much. As a result, they had relatively low awareness of each other’s activities, which affected performance and possibly hampering processes and coordination. 

In an Agile world where we encourage the teams to be self performing, role of a manager is more like a servant leader role. Its an important trait for the Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager to trust the self performing team to execute and deliver on business value but verifying the same with stage gates is essential. Each stage gate could include exit criteria, which the manager can standardize for the team to follow. Each stage within SDLC could also benefit from using SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Processes, Outputs and Customers) model for mapping the deliverables with strategic goals while focusing on continuous improvement. 
Trusting your self performing team is important but its essential to verify that team is performing to its optimal level as a unit and not showing just individual brilliances, which can be counter productive for the end results. 

Stephen Covey has brilliantly put that "Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. Its the foundational principle that holds all relationships"   

How do you trust your team but verify? 

Trust Your Team But Make Sure To Verify was originally published in LinkedIn