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Running out of ideas to improve

Last post 09:08 pm July 8, 2019 by Timothy Baffa
8 replies
12:42 pm July 5, 2019

Hi,

 

I represent the team in the leadership meetings. I am running out of points to mention under "What worked well" and "points of interest". can someone please help me with some generic pointers.

 

Thanks


01:09 pm July 5, 2019

What is the expected outcome of these meetings?


02:03 pm July 5, 2019

In addition to understanding what the expected outcome is, who attends these meetings? What is your role in them? What is your role on the team? What is the relationship between the team and the attendees of the meeting?


05:40 pm July 5, 2019

The leadership includes all the upper management folks. The intent is to talk about the respective scrum teams and state "What worked well" in the team for a quarter period.

 

The relationship is they are indirectly linked to us. Since we fall under their hierarchy.

Similarly, in retrospective, I am not sure how can I improve things. I am constantly running out of ideas.


08:23 am July 6, 2019

Similarly, in retrospective, I am not sure how can I improve things. I am constantly running out of ideas.

But what are teams ideas for improvement? Should it not dome from them?

Did you bring your "problem" to the team already, and let them develop ownership and courage on the subject of their own improvements?


07:58 am July 8, 2019

 in retrospective, I am not sure how can I improve things. I am constantly running out of ideas.

If you search online, you will even find a webpage that randomly chooses a method for you to try to run a retrospective. What I mean is that there a few methods, and trying something new might get you to a more interesting place / discussion than previous attempts.


08:35 am July 8, 2019

"I am running out of points to mention under "What worked well" and "points of interest". can someone please help me with some generic pointers."

 

Generic? Aren't these supposed to be specific to the team, the development cycle, the challenges faced, and so forth?


04:32 pm July 8, 2019

The leadership includes all the upper management folks. The intent is to talk about the respective scrum teams and state "What worked well" in the team for a quarter period.

You never mentioned what role you play in the Scrum Team so I'm going to assume some things.  I hope that you are either the Product Owner(PO) or the Scrum Master(SM).  In either case you have some specific things you can discuss. 

As PO you would discuss how the team is delivering value and how the stakeholders are receiving it.  Point out how much interaction has occurred between Scrum Team and stakeholders. The more involvement, the better the results. Highlight times where the interaction was especially productive and why.

As SM you would point out activities and opportunities the Development Team has used to improve their ability to deliver value and to become more self-organized. Point out ways that the entire Scrum Team has become more cohesive and how that has resulted in delivering value. 

In the interest of transparency, you should also point out where something had a negative result and what the team has done to mitigate the possibility of it happening in the future.  Reality is that no team will be able to complete avoid negative situations. These would fall under the "points of interest" because it should be interesting to the management that the team realized the negativity and took it upon themselves to come up with mitigation methods. 

Focus everything you say on how it affects the delivery of incremental value. There will always be something to say about the ideas I mentioned above. If not, then your team might be getting complacent which is a signal to me that there is at least one thing to work on. A complacent team is likely to be a team that feels nothing that they do is worthy of improvement.  In today's fast paced economy and technical evolution, I feel that there is always something about anything we do that can be improved.  Complacency often leads to being left behind which for a technical team is not a good place to be. 


09:08 pm July 8, 2019

I am running out of points to mention under "What worked well" and "points of interest". can someone please help me with some generic pointers.

Shouldn't the Scrum Team (PO, SM, Dev Team) be providing that content, minimally through each Sprint Retrospective?   

Why do you feel tasked with providing it, when that data should be quite abundant through the execution of # sprints during that quarter?

 


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