The Working Genius Assessment

My long-time mentor and friend Lynn Rogala introduced me to the Working Genius Assessment. It is a model created by Patrick Lencioni, author of the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The assessment gives you insight about your working genius types and help you understand what activities give you joy and fulfillment. The model also tells you about your weaknesses and what drains your energy or frustrates you.

When you share your Working Genius Assessment results with the people you work with, and they share their results with you, you get more value from the assessment. The model is designed to help people learn how to work better with one another. The types of Working Geniuses represents the different activities done by teams to accomplish an objective, from start to finish.

I have the Woking Geniuses of Galvanizing and Tenacity.

• Galvanizing – The natural gift of rallying, inspiring and organizing others to take action.
• Tenacity – The natural gift of pushing projects or tasks to completion to achieve results.

At work I have earned the reputation of being the “Jiminy Cricket” of the organization, making sure we are staying true to our objectives and following through with what we said we are going to do. Other times people say I am a trickster and trouble-maker, like Loki, asking tough questions or making trouble to get people to do something or rally them to new ways of doing work.

You can learn more about the model here – https://www.workinggenius.com.

If you are wanting to take the assessment, Lynn is a Certified Working Genius Assessment Facilitator and you can book an appointment with her using this link. If you want to know more about Lynn, here is her LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnrogala/. Please note that I am not getting any commission for this. I am putting my Working Genius of Galvanizing in action and just sharing something I have found to be helpful.

Passionate Product Leadership

Last July I attended Jeff Patton’s Passionate Product Leadership Workshop. It was a live online training course which ran for 4 days and each session was 4 hours long. Zoom and Mural were used for the workshop. It as an amazing, superb learning experience! Jeff is an excellent teacher. You can read more about him here: from this page.

I was presented with the opportunity to take this course and at first I was hesitant to take it. I was thinking how this will help me become a better Agile Coach. Fortunately, I have a great mentor, Daniel my boss, who reminded me of my aspiration to be an “enterprise level” coach. And so I took the course and I learned how to help my company be better in the area of Product Leadership. I engaged more with the Product Managers and shared what I have learned to everyone in the company: from Development Teams to our Marketing Team and to the Customer Success department as well

Key Takeaways from the Workshop

There are three important questions that everyone involved in product development should be asking at every step of the process:

• Is it valuable?
• Is it feasible?
• Is it usable?

Anytime you do not have a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, you should be thinking and discussing a change in your plans. Anytime your team spends significant time arguing about any of these questions, you should pause and rethink your strategy.

The answers to these questions come from different perspectives on the product. This leads to the next key takeaway, it is good to have a triad of leaders in product development. The triad consists of: a leader on the business side of product management, a technology leader, and a user experience leader. Actually it doesn’t have to be a trio of leaders, this could take form as a “core product team” consisting of people who collaborate to make decisions.

To make smart decisions, the Core Product Team needs all the valuable inputs it can use. Another key takeaway is, everyone contributes what they can to the product development process. Silos should be broken down and collaboration among people from different departments should be encouraged. Product Managers should not lock themselves in a room while they “design the product and write specifications”. Development teams should not just wait to be handed requirements before they contribute to the product.

More to come…

I have more learnings to share and I will do so in other posts. I am grateful to have attended Jeff Patton’s workshop and I am eagerly sharing and applying what I have learned. Without a doubt, the knowledge and wisdom I have gained is helping me become a better Agile Coach.

Thoughts on Asynchronous Communication

Lately I have been reading about Asynchronous Communication. It is an interesting topic to me because it plays an importantly role in working remotely. What is Asynchronous Communication? Here is a definition I really like:

Asynchronous communication is the art of communicating and moving projects forward without the need for additional stakeholders to be available at the same time your communique is sent.

Embracing Asynchronous Communication by GitLab

Examples of Asynchronous Communication

A number of activities we do regularly, falls into the category of Asynchronous Communication. In addition, advancements in technology have been making them easier to do. We do these activities to avoid long and draining meetings, control our focus, manage timezone differences, and work with more flexibility in how we allocate our working hours.

Collaborating in Documents

Google has made it easy for us to share documents with others. Software like Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides, make it easy for us to help one another in writing documents. These tools allow us to give others, editor or commenter access to documents we share with them. This is one form of Asynchronous Communication.

We do this when we want to get feedback for what we have written. We share the document and grant commenter privileges and our colleagues can read it at their own time and post comments on the document for us. We do not need to come together for a meeting, we just set expectations on when we want to get the feedback.

We do this when we write a document together with our co-workers. We share edit privileges and everyone contributes to the content being written. Again, we do not have to be in a meeting to do this together. Each contributor takes the responsibility of reading what has been written so far, checking the history of the document, editing what they want to change, and adding more content. Each person can do this at their own pace just as long as it falls within the expectations of the group on when they want to finish the document. In other cases, writing may never be “done”, the document evolves over time.

Chatting

Chatting can be a form of Asynchronous Communication. When you send a message with the expectation that it is ok if the recipient does not respond immediately, that is Asynchronous Communication. Sometimes people would also say that they are busy and they will get back to the chat message as soon as they can. This century, chatting has become a natural form of communication for everyone.

An important behavior to develop is managing when we respond to chats. You can manage the way you are notified by your chat tools. Working agreements can be set to have a shared understanding about responding to chats. You can set the appropriate status (like busy) in your profile. It is very important as well to just have only one chat tool used by the company / organization. You don’t want the burden of using and managing multiple tools.

Emails

I think it is unfortunate how email got a bad rep over the years. It doesn’t help that the marketing for collaboration tools commonly say “they should replace email”, “better than email”, “don’t bother with emails”. I consider email to still be an important form of Asynchronous Communication. I think if you manage your inbox properly you can leverage the advantages of using email.

I find emails helpful in collaborating on straightforward tasks or mini-projects. One recent experience I have in using emails for this kind of effort, is when my fellow Agile Coach and I were tasked with finding a good online Kanban tool. Our boss gave us the details of the task and instructions in an email. We did not have questions because it was all clear and the criteria for a “good tool” were well-defined. We were also given candidates to look at. I responded thru email to accept the task and give an estimate of how long it will take me to finish my assessment. My fellow Agile Coach responded in the same way. The next email we sent individually included the results of our assessments. From the results there was clearly a winner among the tools and we have made our pick. We did not meet, we just exchanged emails.

Training Videos

For teaching and sharing knowledge, training videos have become indispensable. The investment in making the videos can easily be paid off by the reusability of the training provided by the videos. It feels good when you have control over how you go through the training sessions. When you feel you need to review a part of the training, you can just rewatch it. Sure you lose the ability to interact with the trainer and other participants but most of the time you don’t need that. Most of the time you just need to digest the knowledge from the videos and apply it in your work. For internal trainings, the trainers could make time for conversations with the participants easily as they work together.

Pros and Cons of Asynchronous Communication

Let’s start with a list of advantages first:

• You can manage when you would allocate the time to digest information and make a response – as long as it is within the agreed expectations of people you work with
• You can avoid unnecessary meetings, freeing you from scheduling challenges and conflicts
• You can avoid disruptions – for you, as well as for your colleagues
• You have a recorded history of changes and exchanges, most tools you would use for Asynchronous Communication provides this feature

And then here are some disadvantages I can think of:

• Things will “fall through the cracks“ if you and your workmates don’t have discipline to follow-through with agreements on Asynchronous Communication
• You might misuse Asynchronous Communication
• Requires managing and organizing of numerous files, online resources, and tools
• You may forget to respond, participate and provide feedback

The disadvantages I listed can be overcome if you and your colleagues have a shared understanding of working agreements, ownership for the success of your group, and a great sense of responsibility.

Closing thoughts

There are many other forms of Asynchronous Communication besides the ones I have discussed here in this post. The ones I wrote about are the forms I commonly use. Perhaps on another post I’ll talk about the other forms I know of.

Asynchronous Communication does not mean to eliminate meetings. It helps us in avoiding unnecessary meetings and saving time and effort. It makes us ask if we really a need a meeting, and consider other forms of communication which may be better suited for the need that we have.

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Planning and Backlog Grooming

The team I am currently coaching follows Lean Software Development and uses Kanban. For us the weekly planning meeting involves discussing the Product Backlog Items (PBIs) we have ready for implementation, and agreeing on what we think we can get done for the week. We hold backlog grooming meetings as needed, when there are PBIs to be estimated by the team. At the least we have a grooming meeting once per week. On this second blog for the “Working with Agile Teams Remotely” series I am writing, I will share what it is like for us to do planning and grooming meetings.

The Tools

We use Zoom for our online meeting. Sharing your video is encouraged but not required. Screen sharing is done as needed, usually it is the Product Owner who is sharing his screen as he explains details of PBIs. As I said in my previous post, we do not experience any issues in audio quality while we are doing screen sharing so it really helps in having a good understanding of what is being discussed in the meeting. Sometimes we would record the meeting so that team members can review it when they need to refresh their memory on what has been discussed. Zoom has a nice feature which allows you to record the meeting on the cloud. This way it is readily available to the team to view it and you don’t have to bother with uploading / downloading a video file.

Our Kanban board is on our instance of LeanKit. It is expected that everyone in the planning meeting is looking at the board on LeanKit as needed. Information about the PBI is stored on the card representing it on our Kanban board. This substitutes for being able to stand in front of a physical board, discussing the plan for the week.

For estimating PBIs we play Planning Poker.  We do this on planningpoker.com which is easy to use and easy to customize according to your needs. You only need an account for the moderator of the game and the rest of the players just have to click on a link to join a game. The tool has all the features you need to play a proper Planning Poker game with a team.

Challenges

One of the main challenges in doing planning and grooming meetings with a remote team is maintaining the focus of the members. It is easy to get distracted and get disengaged from the meeting, especially if you are not sharing video. Ideally when you meet in person, the attendees of the meeting would not bring their laptops to the meeting and you can easily see if they are paying attention to what is being discussed. If you are in an online meeting, the attendees may be viewing something else on their own screens or maybe getting distracted and spacing out because of other distractions in their home offices.

You may also get challenged by looping discussions. Sometimes expressing ideas in online meetings can be more difficult compared to in-person meetings. You lack the visual cues which can help you in explaining. There is also no easy way of breaking up a conversation. When you are in the same room, a simple gesture like raising your hand can signal the need to break the discussion. In an online meeting you have no choice but to speak up and break up the conversation as politely and as nicely as you can.

These challenges do get easier as you gain more experience in holding this kind of meetings with remote teams. It’s part of the growth of the team, the more meetings you do with them, the better the next ones will be.

 

Working with Agile Teams Remotely: Meetings

What is it like to be Agile while working remotely? I am an Agile Coach working at home and I work with teams having members who also work from their homes.  I have been working on this kind of environment and working setup for 8 years. In my current job, I am on my fourth year of being an Agile Coach. I have also worked as a Scrum Master for co-located teams so I have some experience working in an office setting.  In the early years of my professional career, I have worked as a software engineer, as part of a development team in an office setting.

When you are used to applying Agile principles and following Agile frameworks, I think that gives you the versatility to work in any environment and be successful. I would like to share my perspective on what it is like to be Agile while working with remote teams.  On this first blog for this series, I’ll talk about meetings in general.

Meetings

For me, scheduling a meeting involves creating a Google calendar event and inviting people to that event.  Google Calendar has nice features which helps you pick a good time for the meeting you are creating.  You can see the appointments people have on their calendars and you can even ask the app to find a good time slot for a meeting by telling it who you want to invite.  The app allows you to schedule recurring meetings and this is what I do for standups, retrospectives, and planning meetings.  I also make sure to set the correct timezone as I work with people in different countries.

We use Zoom for our online meetings.  Instead of reserving a meeting room, I would just create a Zoom meeting instance.  Going in the meeting room is done by clicking on a Zoom meeting URL.  I would usually post the link on the Skype group chat of the team two minutes before the start of the meeting.  I also post the Zoom URL on the Google Calendar event for the meeting so the attendees can access the link from there as well.

I am impressed with Zoom’s implementation on streaming video, voice and screen share during meetings.  Internet speed is not great here in the Philippines but somehow on Zoom meetings we get great quality for voice.  Greater still is that with Zoom, we can share video and do screen sharing without lags and problems with audio. This really helps in overcoming the challenges of communicating with your colleagues. It brings you closer to how the meeting would be if you are all in a room together. We would share video so that we can see each other rather than just hearing the voices of people we work with. Screen sharing is used to enhance discussions.  In Zoom you can view a gallery of the video of participants and see the screen share at the same time, it’s like being in a room and having something presented via a projector.

Daily Standups

When we have the daily standups, we are actually just sitting down in our own home offices. Hahaha! We use Zoom for the meeting. Instead of looking at a physical board, we have our virtual Kanban board on our LeanKit instance. LeanKit allows us to coordinate our work and represent it on a Kanban board that we can all access and use.

What’s Next?

On my next blog post for this series, I’ll share more about retrospectives and how we do it remotely.

 

Challenge of Retrospectives: Powerful Questions

Retrospective meetings allow teams to discover improvements they can make by reviewing what happened in the past.  The facilitator of the meeting, usually the Scrum Master or the team’s Agile coach, helps the team’s reflection by asking them thought-provoking questions.  These kind of questions help the team think more about what they have experienced.  These are hard questions to ask but would draw out the ideas for the improvements which the team should do.  If the question starts a good discussion, this would lead the team to discover how they can be more effective.  These kind of questions are appropriately named as “powerful questions”.

Characteristics of Powerful Questions

Below are the characteristics of powerful questions which, I think, facilitators should keep in mind:

• Open-ended – the question is not answerable by a single word like “yes” or “no”
• The answer to the question requires explanation
• The question is thought-provoking and therefore usually elicits silence as the initial response
• Inversely proportional to the previous point, forming the question is thought-provoking as well for the facilitator

In most situations, when you ask a question and get awkward silence as a response, you have asked a powerful question.  The small percentage of exceptional cases would be when the team is totally disengaged in the retrospective meeting, which is a whole other problem for you to solve as the facilitator.

How to Use Powerful Questions

A Retrospective of the Retrospective

It is good for you, as a facilitator, to review how you facilitate a retrospective meeting (or any other meeting for that matter) because it allows you to learn how you can improve.  Think about the discussions which happened during the retrospective and reflect upon the questions you asked the team.  Are they powerful questions? What other powerful questions could you have asked?  Do you think you reacted well to the flow of the discussion and asked the appropriate follow-up questions?

It is also helpful to ask a fellow coach or Scrum Master to review the meeting for you and provide you with feedback. By doing this you can avoid being blindsided by any biases you may have.

Practice Makes Powerful Questions

Powerful questions must be carefully formed but you also have to do some quick thinking depending on the discussion. You can prepare your initial set of questions, basing it on your observations from what happened before the retrospective meeting, but your follow-up questions is based on the responses of the team and the flow of the discussion so you need to formulate questions in a timely manner.

You can practice forming powerful questions in 1-on-1 coaching conversations.  As a coach I would regularly have quick discussions with individuals to check-in with how they are doing. This provides an opportunity for me to practice asking powerful questions which depends on the flow of the discussion I have with a team member.

Prepare Your Utility Belt of Questions

When preparing to facilitate a retrospective meeting, you should make a list of questions based on your observations on how the team did their work in the time period before the upcoming retrospective.  When you have done this a number of times, you will have a collection of powerful questions which you can reuse depending on team behavioral patterns and common scenarios.

Some of the most used phrases in powerful questions are:

• What do you think could have gone better in…
• Why did we do it this way?
• How can we avoid…
• Moving forward, how can we be better at…

With Great Power…

Powerful questions should lead the team to discover how they can learn from mistakes and be more effective in doing their work and in performing as a team.  Although powerful questions are usually difficult to answer and would cause awkward silence during the meeting, teams would do well with a facilitator who would present them with challenging questions to stimulate their growth.

 

 

 

Great Practices for Remote Work

I’m preparing to share about the topic of “Great Practices for Working Remotely” in an internal webinar for our company and I though it would also be good if I can write a blog post and share the tips and tricks here.

I have been working from home for about 7 years now and I believe I have been doing great given the good feedback regarding my performance from bosses I have worked with and also the opportunities I have been presented with.

Here are some tips and tricks I have learned over the years.  Most of them are self-explanatory so I won’t make this blog longer than it needs to be by yapping away to explain something obvious.

Tips and Tricks

• Make sure you have a good internet connection.
• Set up your home office.
• Know your timezone differences.
• Know the work schedules of your colleagues.
• Know where to find contact resources and information about your workmates.
• Having a quick call on Skype (or on other tools) is better than just chatting.
• Screen sharing is a must to achieve a shared understanding about what you are discussing with another person.
• Practice on how you can effectively express yourself. The goal is you want to be understood clearly when you speak.
• Be part of the community.  Connect with people.

Recommended Practices for Great Online Meetings

• Make sure you have a good internet connection
• Saying “yes”, “no”, “uh-huh”, “hmmm”, “I see”, “I understand” really helps the conversation going.  These simple words replaces the non-verbal cues we don’t see when we are in voice-only meetings / calls.
• Practice Active Listening
• Get rid of distractions
• If sharing video is possible, it would be great to see the people you are talking to
• It is ok to ask for time to think before you share your thoughts

Utility Belt for Working Remotely

• GroupMap (https://www.groupmap.com/) – great for online brainstorming
• appear.in (https://appear.in/) – for video calls
• draw.io (https://www.draw.io/) – for drawing diagrams and sharing them
• join.me (https://www.join.me/) – great for screen sharing
• Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms

I also wrote a blog post about tools which help teams working remotely in being Agile.  This post provides more commentary on the different tools I have used.  Here is the post – One Tool to Rule Them All.

One Tool to Rule Them All

Processes and tools may be valued less compared to individuals and interactions as stated in the Agile Manifesto, but when you are working with remote teams they still play a crucial role. I am often asked about the tools which I use to support being Agile while working remotely so I thought of describing the tools here on this blog.

LeanKit

We use LeanKit for our online Kanban board. I like how you can easily configure your board in LeanKit so that you can make sure to have a good visualization of your process and how work flows through it. I am amazed at how the tool can render a huge Kanban board, with lots of cards on it, and make it easy to view. The tool also offers helpful reporting pages so you can gain insight on how to improve and make changes to your process. The tool’s Speed report will give you data about throughput and cycle times and the Flow report page will let you see the cumulative flow diagram, helping you observe how work flows through your process.

There are still a number of improvements to the tool which I would like to see. The searching feature can certainly be made to be better by making it easier to look for cards which have been archived, perhaps by providing more search filters. A visual indication on the card when there is a new comment posted on it would be helpful. The linking of cards feature to be made more accessible, it is currently restricted to higher level account types.

Atlassian Tools – JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo

JIRA was the first online project management tool I have been able to use. Over the years Atlassian have made steady progress in improving their suite of tools. The integration of their tools work well and makes linking of project resources easy to manage. I was happy that they deployed their tool on the cloud, previously you would have to install JIRA and Confluence instances on your own web server.

Slack, Skype, Google Hangouts… oh my!

You got to have that one messenger tool which you use to chat with your teammates. It would be great if your messenger tool would allow you to have online calls with people or groups of people. Skype is the tool which I have used the most. I also use Slack for its capability to retain a good amount of history of messages, plus it allows you to share files, links, videos and pictures easily.

Most of the messenger tools available right now, all have the features you would expect to need.

Planningpoker.com

It is very fun to play Planning Poker with the team while you are all together in a room. When you are doing this on an online meeting, it is still somehow fun and Planningpoker.com helps you enjoy it more. The tool has a nice and clean UI. The moderator of the game should have an account while the other players don’t need accounts. A link provided by the moderator will let you open the tool on your browser and join the game. There are various pointing scales you can use such as: Fibonacci series, t-shirt sizes, etc. There is also an option to create your own customized scale (if you have the proper account type). There are settings you can tweak like allowing players to freely change their vote and if you want to auto-flip cards once everyone has selected their estimate.

GroupMap

I have been introduced to GroupMap by one of my workmates. During that time he was new to the team and recommended this tool for our retrospective meetings. GroupMap offers a cool way of brainstorming on ideas while all of you are remote. It is an online tool that you can use to create an idea map which you will edit collaboratively with others. We use this mostly on retrospective meetings where we have maps with sections for common retro questions. As a team we answer the questions, list down items, see what others have written, post comment on items, and have our discussion around them. The tool has settings you can tweak like: the different steps of your map (brainstorm, vote, group, action items). For each step you can select options such as if everyone can see items written by one another, or how many votes do each participant get. It is quite easy to learn how to use the tool and it has nice friendly UI. I am very happy to get to know this tool and be able to add it to my utility belt.

GoTo Meeting

Our go-to online meeting app (no pun intended). We use this for almost every team meetings: standups, backlog grooming, retrospectives, etc. GTM, as we call it, provides a reliable online meeting tool, giving you clear audio and nice screen sharing features. For screen sharing you can choose to share your entire screen or select specific windows to share (useful for hiding side chats you got going, hehe). You can also mark-up the screen being shared to annotate it as needed, which is very nice for when you want to highlight something on the screen. Attendees don’t need to have accounts to join the meeting, they just need to click on the URL for joining a meeting, which is shared by the organizer. The organizer should have an account with LogMeIn, the provider of GTM.

On occasion I would have trouble with GTM but it is mostly because of my poor internet connection during those times. Although sometimes GTM servers seem to be unresponsive and it is troublesome to start meetings and get in them.

One tool to bring them all…

There is no “one tool” which will fit all your needs in being Agile while working remotely. It is great that there are a multitude of options to choose from. Pick the set of tools which you, and the teams you work with, are most comfortable with. That way you can focus on continuously improving to become more Agile.