Hi guys, I am sure that most of you at some point have had performance issues in your teams as well as team spirit issues. This post will be part of a series of posts where I want to talk about how to help a team to get back on track. For this series I will have a development team (Scrum Team) in mind, but this idea can be applied to any dysfunctional team. The ideas used in this post came from different sources: my own experience and the experience of my team, as well as from a course given by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd that I took some weeks ago.
An important aspect that Lyssa and Michael emphasized at the course was that when you have a problem caused by the poor implementation of Agile you should address it directly, the Agile values should be reaffirmed and the system should be revealed to himself.
The problems should be addressed “directly”: you should state the problem as you see it and then ask the team what they want to do about it. “Reaffirmation of Agile” means you should retrain some of the Agile values or principles that are not present anymore. “Showing the system to himself” means showing the system to the people involved through observation of what is going on, one good exercise to achieve this can be found HERE.
I wanted to give you some background information because I believe that it will be extremely difficult to tackle a problem using any kind of activity if your team does not see that problem and, most importantly, if they are not interested in solving it. With the assumption that people will try to solve the issues, I present below activities that can be seen as a possible way to restore the energy and good practices in the team. These exercises can be used in a two-day team building exercise.
In my humble opinion, the first thing that we must ensure in order to have a successful team is to establish a common goal for all members of the team. In my case I am talking about a development team, so I believe the common goal is to deliver a high quality product to the customer. In this situation the Product Owner has a key role as the master of the product vision and the responsible for sharing that vision as well as for making sure that everyone understands what product should be built. I am going a bit further by saying that the Product Owner is the ultimate responsible for creating the common goal for the team.
A possible exercise would be to ask the Product Owner to prepare a press release and then to present it to the team. With this exercise the team will be able to see the big picture and understand WHY they should work in a team and WHAT they need to accomplish as a team. In my opinion, this exercise is important for two reasons, on the one hand, if everyone in the team knows what they need to do the exercise is reaffirming the common goal, while on the other, if the team members do not have a clear idea what their common goal is, having this exercise will help them to create the necessary common goal. The exercise should take 2 hours, which should be enough for the Product Owner to explain the vision and to answer any possible questions.
Hopefully, with the above exercise the team will have a common goal and can move towards the next step. Some weeks ago I read a book called The five dysfunctions of a team . The second exercise is based on this book, but this is something that I will explain in my next post.
Hope to see you soon in my next blog,
