I'm sure there are seasoned Delivery Managers or Scrum Masters aplenty that have heard the phrase "I don't know what I'm doing today" during daily stand-ups. This can rob teams of both morale and productivity. Imagine it for yourself. You're a hardworking member of a multi-disciplinary team who's just had a morning brew and is poised for a productive morning but as you sit down at your screen, you have no idea what you should do to add value to the day. How does that make you feel? Raring to go? Looking forward to tomorrow? You’ll feel demotivated, frustrated and at a loss.
As a leader, it's your responsibility to spot the symptoms and right the ship, but how might we go about doing this?
Let's look at some potential causes through a Lean Lens.
How does a team member not know what needs to be done? Surely, it's obvious, especially after we've drawn roadmap after roadmap and had meeting after meeting. If people don't know what to do, shouldn’t they ask?
There are two main causes of avoidable uncertainty: regularly switching priorities and changing requirements. If we look towards manufacturing, where waste is finely tuned out by ways of lean processes, we'll see that these causes create some of the biggest forms of waste: Motion and Excess Processing. Putting these into project terms, Motion can be understood as the constant context switching when priorities are changing, often rapidly. This generates a lot of heat, but very little light. Excess Processing can be seen as all the extra, often undocumented, work a team puts in when the brief isn't clear or changes - again, very little light but plenty of heat.
It takes a skilled leader to identify when a team is floundering, as people often don't want to admit that they are unsure - and you don’t want this uncertainty to only become apparent at the end of a sprint or when delivery dates are missed. Which leads to another form of waste: Unused Talent. Not only does this have an impact on delivery, but can cause personal frustration, lack of engagement and is a waste of good people.
What can we do as delivery managers and team coaches to remedy this?
First up, we need a mechanism for teams to feedback when they need clearer direction. Depending on the personalities involved, this could be a team-effort or a one-to-one. Again, investing a bit of time to go over a person’s set tasks, and really discussing the expected outcome, can identify any issues early on whilst simultaneously helping instil a sense of trust within the team.
If you do find the team really struggling, you may want to batten down the hatches and protect them from outside influence, until things are less turbulent. You can do this by restricting attendance to team meetings and ceremonies, taking a firm line with frequent priority changes, and setting clear, daily, individual goals. I've adopted this approach for some of the largest transactional services in government and, when agreed with the business and other stakeholders, it can really get a team back on track after a short reboot period.
How can we look to prevent unhealthy unknowns?
It's always better to invest time upfront in a controlled manner than to waste more time in a panic further down the line. Work with the business to help create sustainable delivery plans and sensible priorities. Challenge and help create a vision of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that works and truly adds value. I've found that workshopping the epics, features and overall, with stakeholders and service owners really helps to separate the nice-to-haves from what's truly needed.
Similarly, investing time in fully understanding and refining the requirements with the business, pays dividends. They don't have to be long-winded affairs, but taking the initiative to set up kick-off meetings and amigos-sessions will help kick the tires and get features and epics off on the right footing. And most importantly make sure to document the outcome (or record the session, where possible) so you have a reference point to steer you further down the line.
Though Agile delivery works well when you're unsure what needs to be done or how you are going to do it, it shouldn't be used as cover for poor direction.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we apply Agile methodologies into the projects we work on, drop us a note at transformation@TransformUK.com and we’ll put you in contact with one of our experts. We also run ‘Agile for the Real World’ Academies so do get in touch if you’d like to know more and secure one for your team.