Agile: "I thank you!" as mindset

We're used to thank someone when we are relaxed; when we are working to gain some objectives, we start forgetting to thank our colleagues and we're focused on the delivery and not on the informal relation. Formalities are taking over, and titles are governing instead of relations, passion and other emotive behavior typical of people hides.

I see this as one of the big problem on a committed agile team that is highly committed and is releasing often; delivery is every day near the door, and commitment is really high since the first day. A formal title dominates to the relationship, passion is translated into the word work and stress is continuous.

I like to approach this kind of problem by doing a daily debrief in every team I work with: we start the morning by planning the day and believing what is a concrete result for the day, and we close the day by packaging up all the work by committing it to the version control and thinking about what's coming next.

I usually debrief teams every day before teams' player is leaving the office at a fixed our 6.30PM. This lets individuals to relax a little bit, to focus on what is done and to focus on what can be done the next day. This kind of approach is a formal day closure where we brainstorm about the day. It's an informal event differently from the morning daily scrum where there is also the product owner, and it takes no more than 5 minutes each day but gives some benefits like:

• work less than 9 hours a day;
• stay focused during the day to achieve the daily milestone;
• be sure every day everyone can remove every unpleasant thing matured during the day in an informal way.

For me and every person inside the team, this is a good opportunity where all of us can realize the power of individuals from the group perspective and start thinking about each one. I see some thanks fly around only during this kind of informal meeting and, when thanks is a reputation system better than all those you can find around internet.

A daily based thanks opportunity is the best way to achieve self-esteem and then increase the reputation of each one in the team; the more a team is growing the more it increases the reputation of all the people inside it. Reputation is something that builds from small action and models the different attitudes of a person making her confident what the others are thinking about her.

The things I'm presenting here is one of the techniques I'm adopting to make individual to act as a team and to stay focused. This kind of tuning is mandatory to search a group personality and moreover to enrich individual personality. During this type of meetings I'm acting as a facilitator and not as a stakeholder or as a troubleshooter; my role is to help in maturing self-confidence about the work and to stay committed daily.


Team players know I'm not so good to help them, they see me only as a curious person that would like to share the day and to breath the same air: someone outside that can make a team member being a team and can bring fresh air and harmony inside.

I will continue more on the topic of a daily reputation in the next posts.

You as a team: is it so vulnerable?

Project management practices introduce the coordinator of a project who's main responsibility is to manage and facilitate the project flow removing any impediments. Agile introduces the concept of self-organizing teams, where all the people manage themselves.




Project managers iterate on a Planning sheet and even a Gantt chart updating information on it, while Scrum identifies a Sprint Backlog as a driver for the current sprint and the product backlog as driver for the project. While things are pushing with a rhythm, team is delivering and project manager is governing each situation everyone is happy and the project feels good; but, someone in the team can lose the control of what is being delivered. It doesn't matter who is responsible for the matter, but the situation starts making all the rest suffering until crisis. This kind of problems emphasizes and become bigger time over time: like what happens in a domino.This can be still managed at last by the Project Manager that will solve the problem removing any impediments. But, what happen when the domino starts from the Project Manager or involves the Project Manager too? This is a case of the unreliable management, where the perception that a problem is occurring is not emerging and emerges only when the entire project is failing. Traditional software management practices tries to solve this problem by creating an hierarchy inside teams, where on top resides the project manager, than the team leader, and then all the others.

The team leader is clustering around the project manager to maintain good health for the project. This is a good way to establish a balanced monitor in the team management staff. But, what happen where the cluster is itself not reliable? Well, the domino effect occurs again. Agile software development is addressing this lack by promoting the entire team as a project manager and bringing a way to share daily a snapshot of the project feeling. A Sprint backlog is the driver for an iteration (Scrum identifies a sprint as an iteration), a sprint backlog is written by all the team members and is estimated daily. Every day all the team's player must re-estimate the work in progress with the hours remaining for the specified task, and every day the team must respond to the customer (in scrum is the product owner), on what they have done the previous day, what they will do in the current day and which is the problem they're finding on their way. The daily meeting is useful for the team too, because they can observe every day the remaining work to do and they can start anticipating some problems.

What happen if someone in the team is exploding?

The problem is faced in two ways:

1) At least through conversation during the daily scrum, when the exploders is not able to commit a task because his problems;
2) Formally by watching the sprint backlog and seeing the team feeling is not so good. Estimated hours should decrease while the time is passing; if a team is not feeling good, the decrease speed can be less than the expectation.

A daily meeting involves, three actors: the scrum master (who makes thinks happening), the team and the product owner. Every day one of them, can feel how the project is going formally - through the spring backlog - and informally through the daily scrum conversation.

This is the way Scrum and more generally agile is avoiding the Single Point of Failure where a Project Manager and a Team Leader cannot perceive a project failure.

A good Project Manager will discover that she is already doing something similar with her team. Scrum is all about common sense and shares the experience in managing complex situation. The Sprint Backlog is the driver for the sprint and to gain benefits must be updated regularly daily.

The daily estimation can produce a graph (in Scrum called Burndown chart) that visually represent the hours remaining. This can be good to check with only a sight the entire feeling of the team.