Talk, don't report!

English is not my native language. Even though I think I am pretty good in English I have my weak points. One of them is my ability to handle numbers. For some odd reason it takes time for me to translate in my head numbers from English to Finnish. And other way around - when I talk, I always think numbers in Finnish and translate them in my head into English. 

But at the same time when this is my weak point I can utilize it. Quite often when I have started to work with new Scrum Team I have noticed in Daily meetings team members are not talking what they are working. 

Instead of telling "I have started building database connection. I discussed with system team and we found out that ..." I hear "I continue with JIRA-123". 

Instead of "I have deployed code to test environment. All unit tests passed and this change can be tested further as soon as we have a connection to external test environment" I hear "JIRA-223 is now ready to be tested."

Every time when I ask them to start talking instead of reporting I hear WHY. Quite often team members have been totally fine with this approach and don't understand why they should be telling anything more than JIRA issue id. So, I have learned - I don't ask them talk or stop to report. I just ask them to stop using numbers and explain them why it is difficult for me to understand what it is going on. In the beginning they change they way of talking in daily to make me, their Scrum Master, happier but in the long run they have noticed and mentioned sometime later during Retrospective that actually Daily meetings give more value to them with this habit. Amazing! Specifically I remember how I struggled with teamV and how quickly they learned not to use numbers and if I ever referred something with JIRA issue id team reminded me all together "NO NUMBERS!"

Another antipattern I have seen with teams is to utilize JIRA board during meeting in the way that only those team members talk who have issues assigned to them. When Daily meeting starts team member who is assigned to top issue In Progress tells what he has been doing. In that way they have run through In Progress issues - only persons talking are the ones to whom issues are assigned. 

This happened also when I joined teamG. After a few Daily meetings I realized that there are many team members who don't ever say anything during the meeting. JIRA as tool allows issues to be assigned only one person at the time. Especially our business experts and qa specialist worked in pairs and also often issues were assigned to developers. They got totally surprised when I one morning said:

"Today we do this differently. I have this ball here. I now throw the ball and the one who catch it start talking. When you are ready you throw the ball the next one."

Silence. Then the person with ball said "I don't anything assigned to me in the board." 

"BINGO! Exactly. You don't have anything assigned to you but we are interested to hear what you have been doing, what you plan to do and is there anything preventing you to do so."

This was beginning for something amazing. This team started to talk and we started to get things done quicker, we found out impediments faster and team members started to support each other much more than earlier.  The impact was even bigger I ever imagined when introducing this practice to the team. 

Daily meeting is not a status meeting. Team members are not reporting anything to me. Daily meeting is the possibility to share and learn. When I hear any team member saying "I don't have anything to report" I put note to myself in my notebook. Next time I have 1:1 meeting with that team member I take this up and explain what is the purpose of the meeting and why they should never consider to be obligated report anything to me. 

 

 

Me, myself and I in the team

It is not once or twice I have been in Sprint Review or Sprint Retrospective meeting where someone has said big smile in his face "I did all my stuff!" when more than half of Sprint Backlog items were not completed. Or in the middle of the Sprint one morning in Daily meeting someone has said "I have completed all my issues, can I pick up something new from Product Backlog?" while others struggle with work they have picked up.

The whole concept "working as a team" is difficult for those who have been rewarded throughout their career for their own contribution. It has been important to be better than others to get promotions and pay raise. And there are always people who simply not are team player. It is all about "Me, myself and I" instead of "we".

It must be awful to be allocated in Scrum team if you don't consider yourself as a team player. One might be wondering why I need to plan my work with others, why I need to tell anyone what I am doing as long I get it done. I might have been one of those long time ago. I haven't been devoted Agilist always.

When I first time ever heard about Agile development my first thought was "it is not going to fly". At that point of time I worked as requirement engineer and when now looking back I thought me and my colleagues to be the most important part of any development as we were the ones telling what need to be done. Few years later I started to work as tester and had another brilliant idea: I am the most important as I am the last barrier and prevent all the bugs going into production.

About seven years ago I started see things from different perspective. Why we don't work together? I started look into Agile framework and found out there are other ways. We can build teams who has all the needed skills and people work together. It took long time for myself to change my thinking but I feel I needed that long journey.

It is no surprise that if teams are formed and they are told "you are now Agile team", they don't know what is coming. It should have been me explaining and helping them in their journey. Everytime someone said "I did all my stuff" I should have understood I haven't done my part, not yet.

Great teamwork starts with people and practices. It simply isn't enough to say "you are a team". What does it mean to work together as a team? What are good practices to introduce to a new team?

When I started to write this post, I had totally something else in my mind than what I have written here. While writing I had time to think, rethink, and reflect and I ended up to conclusion I haven't been very good Scrum Master or Coach. I haven't really considered the background of team members, the environment or the organisation around the team. I have just been thinking selfishly how stupid these people are when they don't see the value of teamwork.