Continuous Improvement with Iron Man

I love Iron Man in the MCU! His armors are awesome and his character development is superb. He started out as an egotistic and self-centered billionaire/playboy and became a hero who sacrificed his life to save the universe from Thanos. 🤩 As an Agile Coach, Tony Stark’s continuous improvement and evolution deeply resonates with me. You can see that with every new armor version, Iron Man becomes better, based on what he has learned and experienced. If that doesn’t scream kaizen, I don’t know what will!

The world may have seemed to stop during this Covid-19 pandemic with everyone staying at home and streets being empty, but continuous improvement and learning did not. And rightfully so. I think it became even more important, so we can evolve and adapt. In this post, I want to share key learnings I valued during this time of the pandemic.

Focus

Agile and Lean puts emphasis in the value of focusing on the most important thing to work on for the product. Stephen Covey defined the habit of putting first things first as one of the 7 habits of highly effective people. This is one of the values that helped me adjust to the effects of the pandemic. It was easy to feel overwhelmed, and countless of times I had to stop, take a deep breath, and focus. The guiding principle is to do the most important tasks first and accept that you will let go of other activities. You will not be able to do everything you want, but you ensure you are able to do what is important at any given time. When you feel you are veering away from your target, you stop, be still, and then refocus.

Part of being focused is knowing not to take on too many tasks, responsibilities, or activities. It is ok to say “no”, and there are a lot of good, respectful, and kind ways to say it. One key thing is you don’t want to be defensive about it, just be open and say what you have on your plate and what is important to you. Trust that people will understand, especially your family, friends, and even your bosses and colleagues at work. They know you and have trust in you too.

You Work with Humans

Even though Tony Stark comes off as being arrogant and narcissistic, I think he has great compassion for others. He takes care of his teammates, providing them with armor, tools, tech that helps protect them. He provided the team with the Avengers Tower and Avengers facility in Upstate New York. He mentored Spider-Man and deeply cared for him. He had good relationships with his employees – Happy Hogan and Pepper Potts.

One of the Agile values defined in the Agile Manifesto is: “People and interactions over processes and tools.” For me, one application of this value is having compassion for the people you work with. I greatly appreciate the support I got from my boss when I had to adjust my working schedule to help my kids with school-at-home. My peers appreciated the times I caught up with them to see how they were doing and how they were coping with the effects of the pandemic. They were happy to have someone show concern for them. As an Agile Coach, this is one of the services I offer to people I work with. As someone working with an Agile Coach, I think this is one thing you can expect from your coach.

God says in Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind and compassionate to one another…”. This Bible verse speaks to me more and more each day during this pandemic.

Attitude of Gratitude

Modern society doesn’t promote being content with what you have. It is easy to get lost in acquiring new things, getting more and more of what you want. You are blasted with ads of products claiming to be better than the products you currently have. Advancements in technology, always a double-edged sword, can easily make you want to get the latest, the best so far. With the restrictions, lockdowns, and quarantines, the things we thought we could not live without, became less important.

Expressing gratitude for the things I have and appreciating them more are actions that are helping me cope with the challenges of the pandemic. It takes my mind away from things I worry about and focuses it instead on things I should be thankful for. This attitude of gratitude brings much needed positivity. As an Agile Coach, I make it a point to celebrate success and wins with the team. Even a simple “thank you” to show appreciation can go a long way in promoting a positive attitude and strengthening of relationships.

Work in Harmony

When Iron Man first met Thor in the MCU, he learned that Thor’s lightning can power up his armor. In Endgame, we saw how Iron Man used this knowledge when he made the Nano Lightning Refocuser and asked Thor to hit him with lightning so that he can use the energy to blast Thanos. It’s always a treat to see in the movies how the Avengers come together as a team and combine their powers to be stronger.

This past year I have constantly reflected on how respect, trust, and patience are very important for collaboration. Respect your teammates and colleagues: their effort, contributions, insights, skills and experience. Trust them that they will do their best. Be patient when things don’t go as planned or your expectations are not met. The pandemic added numerous challenges and difficulties to the way we work together and in addition had great effects to our lives outside of work. Finding harmony with my colleagues was one critical thing that helped me this past year.

Part of the Journey is the End

I don’t see the end of this pandemic yet, but I do know that it will end and then there will be other challenges in our journey through life. It is my hope that I can learn and adapt like Iron Man. Even in the end, you can see how he prepared his Mark 85 armor to take on enough of the power of the Infinity Stones. That was not part of the plan, but he was ready, he designed his last armor in the MCU with that capability.

I hope these learnings may be of some help to you. Let’s make sure to open ourselves to even more learnings this 2021.

Working with Remote Agile Teams: Retrospectives

Facilitating retrospectives is a tough challenge.  Facilitating retrospectives while working remotely is, most of the time, an even tougher challenge.  In Retrospective Meetings, the body language and non-verbal cues from participants is an important factor in the quality of the discussions and outcome of the meeting.  Not being able to see this, makes it really hard to do retrospectives while working remotely.  If you can have everyone on video in the online meeting for the retrospective, that is great, but even then you still have other challenges to face.

In this post, I share some learnings I have gained from facilitating retrospectives for remote teams.

Setting the stage

A big part of the effort in preparing for a retrospective meeting is understanding the context of the meeting. When you are co-located with the team in an office, it is easy to make observations, have quick chats with team members, and be “in-tune” with what is happening with the team. When working remotely you have to make an extra effort in connecting with the team. In doing so before the retrospective, you can make sure you have a good understanding about concerns the team would want to discuss in the meeting.

Flow of the meeting

When you are in an online meeting, it is easy to get distracted and lose track of what is happening in the meeting. As the facilitator of the retrospective, you need to guide the team through phases of the meeting. This is the flow of the meeting that I use:

1. Review action items and previous discussion items
2. Generate new discussion items
3. Select items to discuss
4. Agree on new action items and improvements to do
5. Closing of the meeting

During the meeting, I make sure to state clearly the phase or step we are in.  Groupmap also helps in directing the flow of the meeting.  In the tool there are visual indicators and UI interactions which helps remind participants about the phases of the meeting.

Facing Challenges

Encouraging active participation, dealing with periods of silence, and good engagement of participants in the meeting are common challenges encountered during retrospective meetings.

I think that in meetings with remote teams it is hard to avoid calling out names of individuals to have them speak. I usually want to avoid doing this, because I think participants should speak up whenever they want to say something and that they can choose to stay silent if they really have nothing to add to the discussion. However, calling out names can help participants take turns talking, like when two or more people start answering a question at the same time during the meeting. Calling out names can also be, sometimes, the only way to encourage participation especially if the team is newly formed and is just starting to get to know one another.

In online meetings without video, long periods of silence can be more uncomfortable as participants can’t see each other. I learned that as a facilitator, you should allow this period of silence to go on without speaking up. This gives the team the space they need so they can push themselves to be more engaged in the meeting. Eventually someone will speak up. Having video and being able to see one another makes dealing with this challenge easier. Everyone can see the body language of one another and the facilitator can also use the non-verbal cues for better handling of the period of silence.

Sometimes the team may not be in the mood for doing a retrospective.  Sometimes they are too busy with their current workload and would want to just focus on that.  In these instances, it may be more helpful to the team to cancel the retrospective.  I have also ended retrospective meetings early when I have observed that the team’s energy is quite low or they are not interested in doing the retrospective.  This does not mean that you would not be having retrospectives anymore, rather the team just needs space and time to overcome the current challenge they are facing.

Same old, same old

Overall having a retrospective meeting with remote teams is almost the same as having it with a co-located team. As a facilitator, you make sure that the team is engaged and actively participating as they discover improvements that they want to make to become a better team.

Challenge of Retrospectives: Preparing for the Meeting

To prepare for a retrospective meeting is no easy feat for the facilitator. It’s the first challenge you face in facilitating a retrospective. My mentor once shared that if the retrospective meeting is the tip of the iceberg, the preparation for it is the huge chunk of ice below the water.  I think it’s the perfect analogy.  If you do not prepare enough then the tip of the iceberg will sink and your retrospective meeting will be a bust.

For facilitating a retrospective meeting for a team you are coaching and observing, the effort of preparation may be easy since you have a good understanding of the context for the meeting, and you can easily prepare the materials you need for the meeting.  You also have the meeting at a regular cadence so preparing for it becomes a routine activity.  It is different when you are preparing to facilitate a retrospective for a group which you don’t regularly observe and interact with.  You would need to put in extra effort to understand the context for the meeting.  You might also need to spend more time in gathering data for materials you may want to use during the retrospective.

There are different activities you will find yourself doing as you get ready for the meeting.

Understand the Context

As the facilitator, you should be able to guide the participants in achieving their goal for the retrospective meeting which in general, is coming up with ideas and action items for improvements they can make in how they do their work.  You won’t be able to do this if you don’t have a good understanding of the context for the retrospective.

What happened during the time period being reviewed in the retrospective?  What challenges did the team face?  What mistakes were made?  What did the team learn? What went wrong? What could have gone better? If you were interacting with the team regularly, you have your memory and observation notes to refer to when answering these questions. If you are facilitating for a group which you do not closely work with, you need to do more to gain an understanding of the context.

Talking with people is a great way to know more about the context for the meeting. You can hear stories from different perspectives, learn about concerns, and you can ask questions about the experiences of the team.

With a good understanding of the context you are better equipped to guide the discussions in the meeting so that the team can achieve their goal.

Prepare Materials

Once you have a good understanding of the context, you are ready to gather and prepare the materials you will use for the retrospective.  The usual items you would make ready are:

• graphs for the metrics you track
• observation notes
• list of action items from the previous retrospective
• summary of discussions from last retrospective

This can all be compiled in a retrospective document which you would then share with the team before the meeting.

You would also want to spend time thinking about the initial set of powerful questions you can ask the team to help them reflect and think about what they could do better. Here is a link to my post about powerful questions.

You should also think about the technique or format you are going to use for the two main activities in the retrospective:

1. generating insights and ideas
2. converging to agreed improvements to be made by the team

For generating insights the usual formats would be asking the team to answer some guide questions. Some examples are

• Start-Stop-Continue
• What went well? + What could have gone better? + What do we want to try?
• the 4 Ls – Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For

Once you have generated discussion items, it is a good idea to prioritize talking about the most important ones first.  One technique you can use is called “Dot voting”, let the participants vote on the items they want to discuss.  When calling for a consensus, you can use the “Fist of five” technique to see who agrees or disagrees with a proposed idea.  Participants would hold up one hand and the number of fingers they have raised shows how much they agree.  There are other techniques you can use and it would help to know about them so you have wide variety you can use.

Meeting Setup

This part of the preparation is probably the easiest.  Make sure to have an invite to the meeting.  For the team I am coaching, we have a recurring Goggle Calendar event for the retrospective meeting which is held once in every 2 weeks. We use Zoom for our meetings so I also have a Zoom meeting instance which we use for every retrospective. The unique link for the Zoom meeting is of course included on the description of the Google Calendar event.

If you are working with a co-located team, then part of this step is making sure a meeting room is reserved and would be ready for the retrospective. You may also want to prepare refreshments for the participants. One thing I miss about having retrospectives in the office is the chance to bring snacks for everyone to enjoy while having the retrospective.

As I am working remotely, I also prepare the GroupMap which will be used and sometimes we would try other online tools which can help us in our retrospective.

Be Neutral

For me, the final part of my preparation for the retrospective is preparing myself for the meeting. As the facilitator of a retrospective, you should be neutral. You could serve the team better by not bringing in your biases and judgement into the discussions. I think this is an important part of getting ready for the retrospective because it sets you up to be a facilitator who can guide the team well in identifying improvements they want to make.  There is much to be said about the facilitator being neutral, enough that it warrants another blog post which I will write soon.

Are you ready?

Since the retrospective meeting is a very important activity for Agile teams, it should not be a surprise that a great deal of effort goes into preparing for the meeting.  While the steps for preparing get repetitive and may get easier, it still helps to be mindful of the things you do to get ready for the retrospective. It is an important part of your responsibility as an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, or facilitator.

 

 

 

 

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.