Thursday, October 1, 2015

What to keep an eye on?

Thought of summarizing few points for agile coaches or agents on the field.

Here are few focus areas which might help :

  1. Keep you board neat and clean : Always focus on active work. Make sure inactive work is either moved back in the queue or removed. Make sure that what’s on the board is what the team is actually working on. 
  2. Know the work priorities: As a manager or senior member of the team know, what needs to get done. You should take charge of prioritizing all work that comes to your team. This would require communicating with stakeholders and management. 
  3. Project/feature overview: Make sure you have one board where stakeholders, team members or managements folks can get a complete overview of product features or concepts, teams are working on. Having big picture always help team member across every level. 
  4. Quality: Make sure your team is making small and consistent improvement. Have metrics to track improvements. Always do something, regardless of how small, to improve the current state. People do what you do not what you say you would do. 
  5. Create a helping culture: Think of it as relay race. As leader observe, how the work was passed to other teams or departments.  Was it done at the right time, in the right hand, with the right information? We should make sure we are providing every support and help to other teams effectively and efficiently. Doing it late still takes the same amount of time!.
  6. Always Compare now and before: Look for trends and make them visible to teams and management. It will help you, as leader, to identify improvement areas. Always be vigilant and pick one improvement at a time.  
  7. It's okay: Celebrate! Recognize the team’s/individual member's accomplishments/failures and contributions. There is always something positive. 
Hope it helps
Manisha