Distributed and Reluctant team members - Can this be saved?
Hi there,
About two years ago I joined a team of colleagues to work on a common project; e-learning production. The team consists of people whom hail from all corners of the organisation and whom have -on average- 8 hours per week to spend on our project. So already we are working with very little hours. I was, at the time, a member of a Scrum team back at my 'own' department so I used Scrum methodology, for my own needs, to work on this project as well. Initially I just did this for myself to keep my focus on my tasks but the other team members were very interested and so I was asked to introduce and initiate them in to Agile working with the idea to use Scrum. Later, due to time restrictions and the nature of our work, we switched to KanBan.
Slowly but surely the team members got more familiar with Agile and KanBan and we're at the point now where more and more tasks are being put on the KanBan board rather than in various Excel sheets or personal ToDo lists. Due to the fact that each member has only about a day a week to spend on this team project I've limited the Agile activites to a weekly Stand up of 15 minutes and a Retrospective which occurs every three weeks for about an hour and a half. So it's not a by-the-books Scrum or KanBan implementation but a special blend that suits our needs.
There's a few problems that I'm having difficulty solving and I'm wondering if it's even possible:
- Two of the team members (who also happen to be ever so slightly passive agressive and need specific directions before they get to work) work at a different office from the rest of the team. They claim to want to adopt Agile and KanBan but I'm seeing little to no actual progress with them while noticing plenty of passive agressive commentary coming from them. The latter is mostly about the distance and how they feel left out even though they don't seem to value joining our team ceremonies.
- One the more dominant team members (on site) seems to think that their time is better spent working rather than having a Retrospective or the weekly Stand up. Just like the ones at the other office they say they're interested in Agile/KanBan but their actions say otherwise.
So mostly it's an attitude problem which I'm having trouble addressing as nobody seems to want to rock the boat and say what they really think and feel. Can this be saved somehow?
Has management communicated a sense of urgency for agile practice in the organization? How are they convincing people of the need for change? Do they believe one day a week is likely to be enough?
Is it possible you are looking at symptoms of a deeper rooted core challenge?
Does the organisation truly understand the (principles behind) the Agile Manifesto?
Have the courage to share your findings with those accountable for value (product owner, the customer). Do they think value is maximised and delivered early?
Be creative: what about bringing the team together for 7 consecutive days? Cut coordination waste, increase focus, be a real team, bring delivery dramatically forward, have fun together. After that everyone can go back to there other locations/projects and focus not 80 but 100% on that other work there.
I had a very similar situation where I was asked to be Scrum Master for a group of people put together by management to improve working conditions for our Engineering teams as we transitioned to Scrum. Don't read that as the transition steering committee. Read it as a group of people thrown together to do work for which the management staff didn't have time. You can imagine that there was more than 1 reluctant contributor. We also were told to provide no more than 8 hours a week. So here is something I did.
I put up a physical board right in the center of our current Engineering space. It was impossible for anyone not to see it. This was my way of apply some subtle pressure on the people to actually work on things and show progress. Since everyone was contributing their 8 hours at different times during the week, and even spread out in small increments, we did our stand up every day. It usually took about 5 minutes total. For our remote workers, we had a remote conferencing system set up on a TV that rolled. We would put the TV in the middle of our semi-circle facing the board so that they could feel included. We did 4 week sprints because we found that given the limited time available, we couldn't get anything done in less than that time. Our Review, Retro and Planning all occurred on the same day and that was not counted in our 8 hours. It usually took us about 2.5 hours and never more than 3 to complete all 3 ceremonies. All of us spent more time than that in other meetings so it was not considered a burden.
I talked to the management team that was providing the work for the group. I actually walked each one individually to our board at least once a week to review what was going on. And all of them (director and above) were in attendance at our Reviews as stakeholders. Because of that it was quickly identified that the team was actually wasting time because most of the things that we were asked to do were things for which we did not have the authority. And the "stakeholders" weren't willing, or in some cases able, to give us that authority. So most of what we did was research and give proposals to the management team. But this was a pretty expensive effort for that. In the end, the team members and stakeholders thanked me for what I did and came to understand the real benefit of transparency.
So what happened? The directors got together, put together a proposal to have a Research Assistant hired and additional help was provided by bringing in a few college interns at intervals. Will this happen for you? Who knows but making things transparent can have unexpected results.
Good luck.