Building Connections

I have worked with people I haven’t met personally. I have just seen their pictures on our online HR tool or Skype. I have only talked to them during online meetings. One key thing which enables me to work well with them is I have made an effort to establish a growing personal relationship with them. You can not be a coach to someone who you don’t have a personal connection with.

Make the Effort to Know the Person

How well do you know the people you are working with? This is an important question to answer. Making an effort to know your teammates is vital in being able to work well with them. For one thing, having discussions with people you know is easier than having it with strangers. When you know the person you are talking to well enough, you are able to effectively communicate with him or her. You know what to say and what not to say. You know how to start a conversation and how to approach a sensitive topic.

So how do you do this when working with a remote team? Here are some of the activities I do:

• During daily standup meetings, I encourage having small talk. When working from home you don’t have the chance to engage in “watercooler conversations” or “pantry discussions”. I have found that spending a few minutes during the standup meeting to have casual conversations is helpful in getting to know teammates.
• I have regular 1 on 1 meetings with individuals.  Nothing beats a good heart to heart talk with someone.  Haha! Seriously though, it is very good to engage in having one-to-one conversations with your teammates. It doesn’t have to be formal but it is good if you have an interesting topic prepared for discussion. As an Agile Coach, usual topics I discuss with individuals include: questions about our Lean Agile Process and use of Kanban, continuous improvement activities done by individuals, and of course latest news about Star Wars.
• I have random chats and calls with people. Just like how you would visit a teammate’s cubicle in the office to have a nice casual chat, I start a random chat or a call with someone. I take this opportunity to know more about the person. What common interests do we have? What does he or she think about a certain news? What are the places we have visited? Knowing bits of trivia about the person helps your relationship with them grow.

We be jammin’ mon

After you get to know more about a person, you get to “jam” with them easily. Starting conversations become natural. Navigating sensitive topics becomes less difficult. Asking hard questions becomes not that hard (no pun intended). This is the next level of growth after you get to know more about the people you are working with.

You must have empathy with your teammates. It is good to be able to understand their feelings and also be able to share those feelings with them. One of the habits of highly effective individuals as per Stephen Covey is: “Seek to understand first, then to be understood.” This is an essential habit to form so that you can form great working relationships.

You and me, one on one

I think this is really important so I will repeat myself. Having regular one on one conversations with a person helps a lot in growing your relationship.

As a coach I want to be a sounding board for everyone, someone who can listen to their concerns. The one on one meetings with people give me the opportunity to reach out and listen to them. I also make sure to prepare good topics to discuss so time spent on the meetings turns out to be valuable. I start the conversation by inviting a teammate. This is completely voluntary. I don’t make them feel that they’ll get into trouble if they don’t talk to me. If they prefer to set a scheduled meeting then we go that route. Being mindful of schedules and workload of teams is a must. You can have better discussions if your teammate can focus on the talk rather than having other matters being a distraction.

Repeat

I believe there is always something new to learn about a person. I think growing a good working relationship with a teammate is a never-ending activity. You have to continuously make the effort to maintain the personal connection.

How about you, what do you do to build connections with people you are working with?

Han: “Together again, huh?”
Luke: “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Han: “How we doing?”
Luke: “Same as always.”
Han: “That bad, huh?”
– Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, Star Wars Episode 6 – Return of the Jedi

Global Scrum Gathering Singapore 2017

A Global Scrum Gathering was held at Singapore last July 17 – 19. It was my first time to attend a gathering and visit Singapore. I had a wonderful time learning and having discussions with people who share my passion in being Agile. Global Scrum Gatherings are events organized by the Scrum Alliance (not to be confused with the Rebel Alliance) held at various cities around the world throughout the year.

Key Takeaways

The gathering started with a great Opening Keynote by David Lim, leader of a Singapore expedition to Mount Everest. One of the key takeaways he shared is: “Teamwork is an individual skill.” I have been thinking about this since I heard it from the keynote. I usually say “great teamwork” to the whole team, maybe I should also commend team members individually. It is the skill of individuals (communication, establishing good working relationships) which brings about great teamwork. Each one of us must be passionate about working with others to make teams succeed.

The last slide on David Lim’s Opening Keynote

It was nice to make new friends from the Agile Community at the event. I have been able to share my experiences of being Agile while working mostly with remote teams. People were interested, I think they were like: “Is this guy for real?” Hahaha! This made me eager to get this blog going. I have also heard about various challenges met by Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: a team member doesn’t want to follow Scrum, people are not engaged, getting support from management, pushing for changes in the company, dealing with culture, etc.

I attended the Coach’s Clinic to ask the question: “How can we have engaging retrospective meetings while working remotely from one another?” Dave Bales, from AgileMe, pointed me back to the Agile Manifesto. “People and interactions over processes and tools.” There is no substitute to having good personal relationships with teammates. It all comes down to how well you know the people you are working with.

Some of the key takeaways which I got from the sessions:

 

• The framework should provide guidance but the organization should evolve beyond the guidance.
• The best way to engage people is to invite them. Deciding is very engaging. Give people the choice.
• Because of Neuroplasticity it takes 6-12 months to get the habit as a structural part of our brain, stored in long term memory.
• Communities of Practice helps develop individuals to be cross-functional.
• “Improve evolutionary” – we aim to evolve, we don’t know the end state, constantly changing
• In Kanban, there is no end goal, there is only continuous improvement
• Kanban: When determining how fast the team can get a PBI done, look at the histogram of cycle times of PBIs and go with the desired percentage of confidence to get the estimated cycle time.  Do not go with averages.

Open Space

On the second day of the conference we had Open Space. This was my first time to experience it and I was surprised by the value I got from it. There were two sessions which I really enjoyed attending.  One session was about retrospective meetings and the other was about what to do when things don’t go well. I learned how to better facilitate retrospective meetings and how to ask powerful questions.  I will write another blog post to share lessons learned from these sessions.

 

Conclusion

Attending the gathering let me experience a lot of great firsts. I am very thankful for the support of the company for letting me attend the event. I was very tired! When you are working at home you are not used to interacting with a lot of people so it got very exhausting for me. No pain, no gain! It was all good, and I can not wait to attend my next Global Scrum Gathering!

Home One: Mon Calamari Star Cruiser

Great stories usually have compelling backstories. We met Darth Vader on the first Star Wars movies and then we got to know how he was Anakin Skywalker before he turned to the Dark Side on the prequel trilogy. For Lord of the Rings there was The Hobbit. For Monsters Inc there was Monsters University.

My own photo of a page on DK’s Ultimate Star Wars book.

I have a great story to tell you but I don’t have the cult following which Star Wars or LOTR have. To make you interested in my story I need to share with you my backstory first.

I currently work as an Agile Team Coach for eComEngine. We develop software tools on the cloud for Amazon Sellers to help them with feedback management, restocking for their FBA inventory, and product intelligence.

Like any SAAS company, eComEngine has the following departments; IT, Product Management, Customer Service, Sales and Marketing. All of us work from home. We’re a distributed workforce scattered around the world. We don’t have a head office or any branch offices. Heck we don’t even have a rented space where we can physically meet everyday! We all collaborate online. And it works for us! We rely on various tools to communicate and work with one another: GoTo Meeting, Slack, Skype, Gmail, LeanKit, GroupMap, etc.

The only time I see my teammates in person is when we have our annual company outing in the Philippines. I have yet to see my colleagues from other countries in person. The dev team members in the Philippines would occasionally have meet-ups so we can have lunch or dinner together but that happens only once every six months or so.

I work with three development teams. Each team usually have a Product Owner, Product Managers/BAs, developers, QA and an Agile Team Coach.  Our products each have a dedicated dev team.  Our overlap hours is from 8 am – 2 pm US Eastern Time, that means for us in the Philippines we work from 8 pm – 2 am.

Still with me? Now you can think of the many complexities and challenges we encounter as we work with one another. I want to share with you stories about how we face these challenges and succeed in being Agile.

Thank you for reading. May the Force be with you.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away…

“People and interactions over processes and tools.” This is one of the pillars in being Agile as stated in the Agile Manifesto. For a team who works apart from each other how do you follow this principle? I think I know the answers and I want to share them with you.

I’m Kevin Manansala, an Agile Coach for teams who work remotely. We all work from our homes. We don’t see each other in offices, we don’t even see each other in video calls.

I started my journey in being Agile not in a galaxy far away but here in our beloved planet, Earth. I was a software engineer who got selected to be a Scrum Master. This happened seven years ago. Back then all of us on the Scrum Team were working from our own homes. We would meet and get-together for Sprint Planning and Retrospective meetings. For the rest of the Sprint we work remotely, apart from one another.

I also had the experience of working as a Scrum Master who guides teams co-located on one site while I worked at home. Once a month, I would spend 2-3 days with the team on-site. For the rest of the month I would work from home.

Currently I work as an Agile Coach for teams who are again working remotely, apart from one another. I have to deal with 2 timezones, Philippines and US Eastern Time. I see my teammates during the annual company outing and occasionally when we have a get-together (usually for lunch or dinner).

I have a lot of stories to share from my 7 years worth of experience working with remote Agile teams. I started this blog to contribute to the Agile Community. The usual reactions I get when I describe what I do for work are that of wonder and disbelief. I want to share with you that Agile works even if your are working with remote teams.

It is my goal to make a “Han Solo believer” out of you. After hearing my stories, I hope you’ll take away lessons you can learn from.

“Crazy thing is it’s true. All of it. The Force, the Jedi. All of it. It’s true.” – Han Solo, Star Wars Episode 7 – The Force Awakens.