Scripture-based Agile Coaching – Working Enthusiastically

I believe in God. I believe in the gift of salvation given to me through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe God has a purpose for me in my work. He has equipped me with the abilities and skills to do well in my role as an Agile Coach. Still, I find myself struggling daily to keep on working enthusiastically.

Being an Agile Coach is a thankless job. You will not do well as a coach if what you seek is recognition. Our work is the background to the success and accomplishments of the team which is the foreground on spotlight. It is a challenge to quantify and qualify the work being done by a coach. Most of the time the work of the coach is “hidden”.

I have the same struggle with writing on this blog. I can only guess at the impact I am having by sharing my thoughts here on my blog.

The Bible offers numerous verses for motivation so you can keep on working enthusiastically. Here’s one of them:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.

Colossians 3:23 (NIV)

I take heart that at the end of it all, as long as I do my best to use the talents, skills and gifts that God has given me, I will receive the greatest recognition of all time. I will hear God say: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Random Agile Thoughts – Asking Powerful Questions

A key skill that is critical to the success of an Agile Coach is the skill of asking powerful questions. I have written about powerful questions before, in this post. Sometimes the coach can become very good in asking questions that the skill becomes a double-edged sword. Sometimes useful, sometimes dangerous.

One common feedback I get from team members I work with is that I am really good in asking questions that bring out valuable discussions for the team.

The risk here is that the team may become dependent on me asking questions they want to get asked. This could block them from practicing their leadership and critical thinking. They could just wait on me to ask the questions that they want to get asked.

The challenge for the Agile Coach is straddling that thin line between the responsibility to ask the team powerful questions and giving the team space and opportunities to grow by not asking and letting them ask the questions themselves. I think it is every coach’s dream that the team will become so good that it doesn’t need a coach.

I hope this random agile thought helps you to be more Agile. 😊

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.

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

Challenges of Retrospectives

One of the principles stated in the Agile Manifesto is:
“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

To apply this principle, Agile teams hold retrospective meetings at regular intervals (we do them every 2 weeks).  In retrospectives, the team discuss what they have experienced since the last meeting, reflect upon their observations, and agree to do improvements which would allow them to work more efficiently. This sounds simple enough but the retrospective meeting is one of the hardest meetings to facilitate when you’re an Agile Coach or Scrum Master.

Here are the top challenges I encounter when facilitating retrospectives:

Getting active participation

It is hard to a get a good discussion going during the retrospectives when only a small number of participants are speaking. If most of the team is satisfied with just listening, conversations tend to be one-sided, or only 2 persons are actively discussing.  Most of the time, the discussion ends prematurely.

Being comfortable with silence

As a facilitator, you are able to fulfill your responsibilities in the meeting when you let the team do the talking.  You are there to help the team discover for themselves what they want to do to improve. However, silence can be uncomfortable. Especially the silence which comes after you ask a powerful question. As a facilitator, you tend to panic when there is a long lingering silence, because it makes you think the meeting is a waste of time for everyone.

Asking powerful questions

In retrospectives you ask powerful questions to guide the discussion and make the team think hard about how they can improve. Most of the time the powerful questions you should ask is dependent on the responses you get from the team. However, if they are mostly silent during the meeting, you have nothing to work with.

The problems with getting active participation, being comfortable with silence, and asking powerful questions are even harder to face when you are working with remote teams.  You have online meetings which is usually done with voice-only calls.  You can’t see the body language of the participants and you miss out on non-verbal cues. You can’t see people nodding, frowning, glancing at something or someone, fiddling their thumbs, and you are not even sure if they have their full attention in the meeting.

Staying neutral

Good facilitators remain neutral during meetings. This enables the team to take ownership of achieving the goals of the meeting. In order to remain neutral, the facilitator should not have a vested interest on the outcome of the meeting.  This hard to do during retrospectives because as the team coach you feel responsible for making sure the team improves and that they grow to become more efficient in what they do. However retrospectives are more effective when the team itself decides what they want to do to improve.

Keeping meetings fresh

For retrospective meetings you can’t do the same thing over and over again.  The team will get bored and discussions will grow stale.  As the facilitator you have to use a wide variety of meeting formats, techniques and tricks to keep these meetings fresh so that the team is motivated to think about improvements they need to do.

People not wanting to think about how to improve

This may be the hardest challenge because this makes the retrospective meetings a total waste of time for all. Teams can become complacent and high performing teams may think that there is nothing more they can do to improve. It is up to the Coach or Scrum Master to challenge the team and not let the retrospective meeting become a routine that the team thinks they just have to endure.

One attitude which helps me face these challenges is: Being Persistent.  You have to keep at it. As the Scrum Master or Agile Coach of the team you have to “walk the talk”. You have to show the team members that you yourself is continuously improving. Can’t get the engagement you are expecting? Then learn about more ways on how to get the team engaged. Is the team getting tired of doing the same retrospective format every two weeks? Then learn more about new techniques which you can use. Do you need help in figuring out which approaches work best with the team? Then solicit feedback and ask the team members about the changes you can make in the way you facilitate the retrospective meeting. Just keep on doing the good work and making that effort to connect with the team. The alternative, which is to let the team settle for mediocrity of the status-quo and not aim to improve, would be anti-Agile.

In future posts, I plan to discuss what I have learned in facing these challenges and what tools and techniques I have added to my utility belt for overcoming these challenges.