1 small team and multiple projects

We have 2 scrum teams at work.  1 is quite large and I believe one day will be split into two teams.  This team works on a single product and a single backlog and naturally fits with scrum very well.

The 2nd team is small, currently only has 5 people not including the testers that come in when needed. Each of the people have different skills sets.  When a project requires their skills a new team is pulled together for the duration of the work.   They seem to work more agile than the other team but have their own challenges. Like managing operation support work as well as project work.  Managing the context switching between projects and the carry over small bugs / warranty period from the previous project’s go live.

Then I was talking to family on the weekend and they have a small business with 7 developers and multiple projects on the go.  They are struggling with their standups taking 45 mins as they want to be able to ‘walk the board’ but the tool they are using doesn’t support that easily.  There is no transparency of the work that the team complete each day and are working on and what needs doing across all the projects.

So off to Google I went and found the following conversations threads and articles:

• https://davidmarquis.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/small-team-multiple-projects-agile-planning/    This is also a good article on planning for the team with multiple projects.  
• https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/6121/multiple-projects-multiple-clients-same-dev-team-advice-appreciated  – talks about Kanban boards for visibility
• “https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/11083/how-can-we-manage-multiple-projects-as-one-small-scrum-team This one has a good conversation around Kanban and scrum process with a single backlog for all project items and short weekly sprints.
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/multiple-scrum-projects-small-teams-gray-agile-areas-jordi-rif%C3%A0/  – this one talks about having really short sprints and focusing on a single project for 2-3 days before switching.  A lot of the feedback was around don’t context switch.  Sprint lengths don’t have to be 2 weeks they can be as short as 3 days. 

• https://medium.com/@anttihavanko/how-to-handle-multiple-projects-with-a-small-team-ebdfde5f6714    – another one on the Kanban board and the team pulling active work items for the sprint and having a theme for the sprint.  This way really requires the product owner or project manager to prioritise and maintain the backlog items. 

Summary:

our team at work might benefit from work streams as we already have the kanban board in the directors office for the overall visibility.  The team might also benefit from going through this on a regular basis to see the upcoming work and big picture.

My families company might benefit from more transparency with a single backlog and a kanban board that they can talk to in their standups each morning.  They might also like to try out shorter sprints, maybe even 3 day ones for a project and work on themes and releases as opposed to projects.

Working on Value

I am now almost 3 months into my Agile Coach role, over 12 months into my Agile Scrum Master journey and almost 2 years into my Agile journey and the nugget I keep coming back to is value.  Providing value to our customers, so how do we measure that, how do we know what is the most valuable.  Its seems so obvious when you actually look at the work and put it into the relevant quadrant as per this picture.  My colleague at work designed and uses this template to priorities her work.

Today I also read an article Here  about the scales model.

The latest book I read also has lots Professional Product Owner of ideas to help the product owner show the vision to the team,  the value and then how to validate.

It was this book that really put this value idea into my head and has me thinking about how we can make sure we are working on the most valuable pieces of work for the organisation and then actually validating that initial assumption. A bit like the benefits realization analysis I used to do in my BA days.  We need to define the value (benefits and other value measures ) up front, then actually check in regularly along the way to make sure it still applies.

My plan for my next project.

1- Set the vision and end goal and share with the team.

2- Clarify who we are doing this for and why.  What Value will we provide.

3 – Decide on how we can measure that value and when we will be able to see it.

4- Measure and track along the way and check in at each retrospective.

Making decisions

I just read this article from six seconds and I loved it, I love the fact that it embraces emotions and the value they play.  I have had a major decision I had to make and I tried to take emotions out of it, but I felt that if I did that I would end up being taken advantage of again.  The logical solution did not protect me.  Allowing myself to take my emotions into the decision making process allows me to protect myself from future situations.   The article comes with a checklist but I made my own with a few tweaks around strengths.

3 options?

1. Think of 3 options to the situation. The first one that you think might be two is actually only one.  Don’t count doing nothing or keeping things the same as an option.  Now try and think of another two out of the box options.

What emotions are involved?

Name and label the emotions you are feeling

Be aware of how these emotions can influence my decision?

I might make rash decisions based on my anger.

I might over analyst based on my sadness.

I might be gullible base on happiness

I might limit my options base on fear.

Pause and focus on what’s important

Pause and breathe deeply for 10-15 seconds.  Think about the most relevant information and try to filter out the irrelevant information.

What would you recommend to a friend in this situation?

Imagine your friend is in this situation. What would you say to them and what would you encourage them to do or what decision would you lead them to?

Identify which of your character strengths you will bring forward now.

Focus on your strengths and what you can use to help you through this decision.

GTD and Scrum

Ive just finished listening to the book Getting things done – the art of stress free productivity by David Allen.

I found it a great book and employed the techniques to great immediate success while reading it.

During the last couple of chapters I got to thinking about how the lists are equivalent to a scrum backlog.

Your next actions are your Sprint backlog. GTD also talks about goals and taking the actions towards your goals.

Daily review, just like a daily scrum.

There is a review at the end of each week and in that you also reflect and adapt and plan for the next week updating your next actions list (Sprint backlog).

GTD is a framework you can modify to fit your life. Just like Scrum is a framework that the scrum team can adapt and own.

Other agile practices aligned with GTD that I found were:

• Having clear goals, into an outcome-oriented sentence. Setting the next action pathways to those goals with a defition of done.

• Getting feedback by reflecting and adapting.

• Focussing on one task at a time.
• Reducing complexity by breaking projects into next actionable step.

• Self managing and organising of your work. Increasing resilience and creativity.

• Lifelong learning to gain mastery- give yourself time for the practices to become habits.

It’s a good book and gave me another insight into Scrum.

Appreciation

We had a staff engagement survey at work recently and have just got the analysis back. One of the items that needed improvement was staff didn’t feel appreciated. So a quick Google search revealed we need to

• be specific with praise and everyday conversations.
• give staff tasks that challenge them and show that we trust them to do a great job.
• Feed them!

Then I stumbled across this post. I liked this as it takes about the 5 language types and how people receive love differently and appreciation to me is on the love spectrum so it would make sense that these language techniques would apply. But that starts getting quite personal.

My other thought is around agile teams. We are trying to communicate that it’s not about the individual it’s about the team. We fail together we succeed together. So is it more about creating a great team and people feeling that team bond and importance and significance in the team that will help them feel more appreciated? Or do we have to do more for the individual.

Let me know your thoughts? What engages you?