Tag: Team

5 Strategies for Better PM-BA Relationships

Written by Susan Martin on September 26, 2012. Posted in Articles.

The relationship between the Project Manager and the Business Analyst is so important to the strength of a project and its overall outcome that it should not be left up to chance. In an ideal world, a project’s PM and BA:

Have worked together with mutual respect and trust
Share a common understanding of project methodology , the requirements process and critical success factors
Consider each other as peers
Have a deep understanding and appreciation of the other’s role and tasks
Are comfortable communicating and negotiating with each other

Some of these conditions cannot be created. They are determined by the individual PMs and BAs involved. But the bottom line is that in order for a project to succeed, and future projects to be do well, the PM and BA need to have a healthy relationship that can handle turbulence and disagreement in an open but respectful manner.

Produce a Good Pair

Given the importance of the rapport between the PM and the BA on project team performance, how can an organization nurture this key ingredient of project success? Here are five basic strategies you can employ:

Train and cross training PMs and BAs on methodology and roles. Each should understand the responsibilities of the other and agree on how to attain outcomes.
Build two-person teams of PMs and BAs who can work together more than once so they can get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Reward collaboration and cultivate PMs and BAs who exhibit the best characteristics of their respective roles.
Chose PMs and BAs who naturally understand the value of compromise and work actively together to manage risk.
Develop a mindset where professionals over-communicate to ensure that nothing gets missed.

Amid the training and collaborative exercises, be sure to pay close attention to the interdependencies of the two professionals. One of the major strategic areas of overlap between the PM and BA roles, for example, is the area of scope definition and management. These professionals should be deeply involved in discussions such as this which are deceptively straightforward, but end up playing havoc on schedules and budgets.

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8 Conversation Tips for Checking Your Understanding

Written by Gil Broza on September 11, 2012. Posted in Articles.

Think back to a time when you observed two colleagues in an important conversation. Did it appear like a true exchange of information and ideas, or was one person:

Interrupting the other?
Putting words in the other’s mouth?
Raising her voice if the other did not seem to understand something?
Checking her mobile phone?
Giving her planned answer, regardless of what her colleague said?

The two sides probably didn’t gain anything useful from this exchange. In fact, they likely hurt their relationship somewhat, because the impatient listener was not respecting the interaction. Her conversation partner might have felt frustrated, ignored, looked down upon, or annoyed.
The active listening technique is much more than basic manners (e.g., don’t interrupt, don’t raise your voice). With active listening, you demonstrate that you’re listening and verify what you think you heard. Use it to improve your conversations’ results, to enhance your ability to influence and negotiate, and to sustain long-term relationships.

In active listening, you focus attention on what the other person says, with both his words and his body language. The central tactic is that of feeding back the message. It comes in three degrees: repeating (using the exact words you heard), paraphrasing (using similar words), and reflecting (using your own words).

Suppose you are having a conversation with Vijay, a team member:

Vijay: “Our defect count has been trending up this year. I don’t think it’s a matter of testing better and discovering more defects; we’re simply introducing more than we’re fixing.”

You (repeating): “So you’re saying we’re introducing more defects than we’re fixing, and that makes our defect count trend up?”

You just demonstrated that you’ve paid attention to Vijay’s words, which invites him to contribute further:

Vijay: “I think that’s the reason. The code we develop each iteration is not perfect, but we’re so busy building new features, we don’t dedicate enough time to fixing defects from that iteration or previous ones.”

You might respond to Vijay’s concern at this point. If his argument isn’t clear to you, or you have doubts about its validity, you could feed it back to him:

You (paraphrasing): “Let me see if I understand. We’re paying so much attention to coding new features that we don’t have time to clean them up, which makes the defect count go up. Right?”

Or:

You (reflecting): “Hmm. So you’re saying that new development is out of balance with defect fixing, which is why our quality is going down?”

Repeating retains the most of Vijay’s original intent, while paraphrasing retains less, and reflecting may even lose it entirely. When you reflect a message, you inject your beliefs into it. In this case, you’ve posited that defects trending up means quality going down, and that maintaining quality requires a balance between new development and fixing. This might be quite different from Vijay’s intent, which is why it’s so important to voice your interpretation of his words before responding to them.

Active listening is suitable for many kinds of conversations. It is particularly powerful in emotionally charged situations, where it is extremely important that the other party know you are engaged, that she feel heard, and that you know what she is saying and thus are not responding to the wrong message.

To get the best results from active listening:

Minimize distractions. Your phone, email, and open door are obvious invitations to interruption. If something repeatedly tugs at you (such as your mobile phone vibrating), turn it off and say that you’re doing that. If it’s the other person’s, ask him respectfully to turn down the notification.

Face the speaker. Eye contact (not staring) is best. If it makes you uncomfortable, at least have your body roughly angled toward the other person. Move away from your computer or other electronics. While looking downward or averting your eyes is hardly an optimal response, at least she will feel less slighted than if you were still typing on your computer.

Stay focused on the conversation. If your mind keeps trying to pull you toward other mental pursuits, don’t just check out mentally. Either force yourself to focus or gracefully back out of the conversation. You could say, “I’d like to give this matter the attention it deserves, and I’m having trouble concentrating right now. Can we resume this conversation in ?”

Supplement your words with simple acknowledgments Nod for acceptance. Smile. Talk with your hands. Say “Uh-huh,” “OK,” “Hmm…,” or “Right.” Use “Interesting!” and “Really?” sparingly, since they have the potential to sound fake.

Use preambles. Before you feed back the message, say something that signals the feedback. “What I’m hearing is…,” “So are you saying that…,” “Sounds like you’re referring to…,” “If I understand you correctly….”

If you don’t understand what they said, slowly repeat it word for word. That will help you comprehend what the other person said or it will encourage him to rephrase.

Don’t prepare your counterargument before the other person has finished talking (even if she says more than you think is needed). Otherwise, you’re clearly showing that what she says isn’t all that important to you.

Offer the occasional recap. It can be quite useful to summarize your understanding of the conversation to that point. Don’t worry about taking longer to interact; making sure that you’re both agreeing to the same thing can be more valuable.

About the book and the author

The book The Human Side of Agile: How to Help Your Team Deliver, from which this article is excerpted, will be released tomorrow, September 12th. With this book, Gil Broza has created a practical, universal guide to navigating the least manageable, understood, and appreciated asset in an Agile environment: its human side. Even if your customers are reasonably happy and your developers seem to be doing okay, you know your team is capable of more: delivering great products and staying ahead of ever-changing demands. You want to feel good about using Agile and to create the conditions for great results, but the skills you honed in traditional environments don’t always apply to the role of Agile team leader. The Human Side of Agile fills this gap, guiding you to:

· Establish yourself as a confident and capable leader who adds value

· Build and lead an engaged team that can handle almost any challenge

· Cultivate collaboration and a continuous improvement mind-set

· Reap the full benefits of Agile in the real world with real people

Gil Broza has mentored more than 1,500 professionals in 40 companies within the last 10 years who then delighted their customers, shipped working software on time, and rediscovered passion for their work. Gil offers much-needed services (beyond basic education) to help ScrumMasters and other Agile team leaders grow in their roles. In addition, he provides workshops, consulting, facilitation services, and enablement programs to fix lackluster Agile attempts and support ongoing Agile improvement efforts.

Click on www.TheHumanSideOfAgile.com to discover the “virtual loot bag” you’ll receive from Gil’s network of collaborators and experts for ordering your copy on the 12^th.

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What Are the Stages of Team Evolution?

Written by Gil Broza on August 7, 2012. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on What Are the Stages of Team Evolution?

Almost half a century ago, the American psychologist Bruce Tuckman published a theory of team evolution.[i] Agile software development teams did not exist at the time, but Tuckman’s Group Development model applies well to them. According to the model, a team has to proceed through a certain sequence of stages on the way to the desirable stage, performing.

In the initial stage, forming, members learn what the team is supposed to accomplish. They get to know each other and their first-draft idea of roles and responsibilities. In this stage, most of the work is still individual, and some members try extra hard to look good. The forming stage is generally short-lived, overshadowed by the realities of the next stage.

In the second stage, storming, the team experiences conflict and difference of opinion. Some of the decisions they need to make draw out tensions and emotions. There might be some jockeying for influence and leadership. In a new Agile team, the first several iteration planning sessions tend to include disagreements about estimation approaches, the extent of detail in user stories, and task assignments.

If the team can pull itself out of storming, whether on its own or with your guidance as the Agile team leader (ATL), it reaches the third stage, norming. Members understand the rules of engagement. They establish, follow, and adapt agreements. Everyone understands the team’s goals the same way and cooperates to achieve them. They know and follow their process.
The fourth stage, performing, is the big deal. A performing team doesn’t just hum along — it buzzes. Its members are motivated and delighted to be there. They don’t have to speak with the same voice, but they don’t let conflict turn into confrontation. Consensus and self-organization are easy for them. They don’t worry about making their team work anymore; that has been taken care of, and now they focus on results. They don’t merely cooperate, they collaborate.

The following diagram[ii] shows the change in the team’s effectiveness in the various stages. Note that the qualitative effectiveness level in norming is similar to that of forming. In forming, they are a group of individuals who apply themselves; in norming, the added value of their teamwork may still not compensate for the energy they spend on being a team.

This model has several important implications for you. The team is at risk of never reaching norming. Team growth is evolutionary, and success is not inevitable. Even with the most suitable people using the best methods with good support, there is no guarantee they will graduate from the storming stage. Some teams may appear to have normed, but in reality they put on a happy face, stifle all conflict and differences, and defer to their product owner and managers.

Three teams were working on a single program. To be cross-functional, each team had been formed with half of the Batch Team (back-end) specialists and half of the Online Team specialists, in line with the main technological divide. Each half was further divided into programmers and testers, working in handoff fashion. Iteration planning sessions were muted and ineffective; retrospectives were louder but resulted in little traction. After a year of using Scrum, they struggled mightily to figure out roles and collective ownership — self-organization was all but moot. Few people seemed happy.

Expect conflict. If you put intelligent, capable people together and ask them to share responsibility for a goal, how likely are they to agree on the means to get there? How likely are they to exhibit a healthy balance of leadership and followership? Conflict is necessary for the elaborate dance of team growth. It is not inherently detrimental, unless it is allowed to devolve into confrontation and one-upmanship.

The road to low performance is paved with good intentions. Whenever you add people to a team, even temporarily (such as contractors), you knock the team down a stage or two as they adjust to their new composition. New permanent members require an investment of time, energy, and goodwill from veteran members. If you redeploy a valued member to seed or help another team, the remaining members will restorm to fill the void and adjust their leader-follower patterns. (You can mitigate the effect by seeking their agreement to the move.) If you remove a noncontributing member, the team will have to adjust the norms they had established to accommodate that person. All these changes in team composition spell a drop in performance, which might last longer than you intend, even indefinitely.

“Our team was originally bolstered with several contractors, who stayed for differing periods. Only once the last contractor had left and we had settled into a stable team — well over a year after the team was first created — did I feel the team really started to jell.”

— Ian, software ATL in a hardware company

About the book

The excerpt above is from the book The Human Side of Agile: How to Help Your Team Deliver which will be available September the 12th. The human side of Agile is tricky. It’s the least manageable, understood, and appreciated asset in an Agile environment. Even if your customers are reasonably happy and your developers seem to be doing okay, you know your team is capable of more: delivering great products and staying ahead of ever-changing demands. You want to feel good about using Agile and to create the conditions for great results, but the skills you honed in traditional environments don’t always apply to the role of Agile team leader. The Human Side of Agile fills this gap, guiding you to:

Establish yourself as a confident and capable leader who adds value
Build and lead an engaged team that can handle almost any challenge
Cultivate collaboration and a continuous improvement mind-set
Reap the full benefits of Agile in the real world with real people

[i] The original paper is Bruce Tuckman, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” Psychological Bulletin 63 (1965): 384–99. For a recent review of the concept, see Mark K. Smith, “Bruce W. Tuckman — Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing in Groups,” Encyclopaedia of Informal Education (2005), www.infed.org/thinkers/tuckman.htm. In 1977, Tuckman added a fifth stage, “Adjourning,” to describe the dissolution of the team (Bruce Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen, “Stages of Small Group Development Revisited,” Group and Organizational Studies 2 (1977), 419–27). While this important stage is potentially stressful for some members, it is outside the scope of this book.

[ii] Based on Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 1992).

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The Softer Side of Agile: Leading Collaborative Teams to Success

Written by Nancy Y. Nee on July 2, 2012. Posted in Articles.

The Agile Manifesto places customer collaboration over contract negotiation with a keen focus on a highly skilled, motivated team in constant interaction with the product and the customer at every phase of the project. As a result of this collaborative, customer-centric view, Agile requires more than the technical expertise needed to gather requirements, and develop and test new product lines. It requires soft skills, leadership competencies and an understanding of how to apply those skills in a more malleable, people-focused setting. As practitioners know, collaboration brings a set of challenges. With the Agile approach, project managers are called upon to team up with customers in a constant stakeholder dialogue.

Constant customer collaboration provides great opportunities to measure project success by gauging the level of customer satisfaction throughout each life cycle of the project. It creates the framework for faster time-to-market and a more nimble process to deliver successful project outcomes. When it comes to successful agile project delivery, collaboration also is key for the integrated project team.

What Makes Good, Effective Collaboration?

To begin to understand, we should first take a look at the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto. These principles, which are the building blocks of Agile, identify three areas that lend themselves to successful collaboration. These principles are as follows:

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Projects need to be built around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Based on the above three principles, successful collaboration among the team relies heavily on three key factors:

Feedback
Communication
Motivation

Feedback

How does feedback work in a team environment? What is the most successful way to deliver it on an Agile project? Remember that feedback during the iterative development work of an Agile project must increase awareness and insight as well as foster innovation, yielding positive alternatives. Having the business as part of the core Agile project team creates the environment for continuous feedback and an opportunity to take positive risks in doing things differently, which is the very nature of why the project is being done in an Agile setting. Within the iteration work, it is essential to provide feedback that:

Contains a clear purpose
Is specific and descriptive
Offers positive alternatives

For all members of the Agile project team, it is important to identify what to start, stop and continue doing when it comes to iteration work. This is where effective feedback is most often used. You can easily integrate these practices into your daily stand up meetings to prepare for the day’s work.

Communication

What makes effective communication? When it comes to communication, it is important to deliver information in a manner that is understood by the receiver, which means that we need to get past the receiver’s filters and ensure that the individual understood the intended message. To get past those filters, we, as the sender of this message, have a responsibility to understand how our receiver takes in information. Does he communicate in a direct manner? Is she considerate in her messaging? Understanding your receiver’s communication style will help you provide feedback that enables effective dialogue.

Motivation

When you combine productive feedback with effective communication, the foundation for motivation has been established. Motivation is built on encouragement, partnership and compromise without making concessions that damage trust. Working together to ensure that barriers, impediments and unrealistic expectations do not derail the creative impulses of the team brings about team unity. When the Agile PM delegates to team members the authority and responsibility to complete features to which they’ve committed, the Agile PM has created an environment of trust, partnership and self-directedness. By creating this environment, the team can discover their patterns of working,

The soft side of Agile is just as important as the technical side of Agile. Both sets of skills are required and dependent upon each other for success in the Agile environment. Given what you just read, ask yourself, how soft is your Agile team?

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Being “Authentic” Doesn’t Give One License To Be An Ass

Written by Peggy Klaus on June 11, 2012. Posted in Articles.

Disclaimer: Please note the following article contains strong language that some may find offensive but the message is one I feel is far too important to not relay. The following article was published in Chief Executive taking on the leadership lessons of Steve Jobs.

Meg Whitman lives by it. Hilary Rodham swears by it. Steve Jobs ruled by it.
These days everyone is touting their authenticity. What I call “Popeye’s ‘I yam what I yam'” school of self-management is in full swing. Far too often, however, this cry of authenticity has become nothing but an excuse for bad behavior. In short, it’s giving people—particularly those who think they’re geniuses— license to act like assholes.

In a recent Harvard Business Review cover story, Walter Issacson appeared to rationalize and legitimize this type of behavior in his essay on the true leadership lessons of Steve Jobs—
the poster boy for the movement. Last year Issacson wrote a bestselling biography on Jobs. His purpose in writing the article now? To set commentators straight “who fixate too much on the rough edges of Job’s personality (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship).”
According to Issacson, Jobs’s behavior can be explained away thusly:

“Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and desire to work with only the best.”

And by Jobs himself, who, when pressed by Issacson on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, replied:

“Perhaps so. But it’s not who I am. Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”

Now that’s what we used to call back in the 70s a “cop out!” Did Jobs really think we’d buy into the notion that you’re either someone who is telling it like it is with brute force and honesty, civility be damned, or you’re a stiff, tight jawed, mealy-mouthed leader who is unwilling and unable to tell the truth? How ridiculous. Is there no middle ground for a leader who respects those around him and provides both positive as well as critical feedback in a thoughtful, direct, manner?

As well, did he really have the audacity to pin his bad boy behavior on his middle class Californian roots? While I wasn’t raised in California, having lived here now for over 25 years, I know of a lot of successful business leaders who spent their formative years in this state, in the very same middle class as Mr. Jobs and his family, who haven’t resorted to the kind of behavior that Jobs was famous for. Indeed there are numerous examples of leaders everywhere—Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Ursula Burns of Xerox, and Daniel Vasella of Novartis, who were exposed to poverty and sometimes abuse as children and emerged as compassionate and respectful leaders.

Many of us—myself included—love the story of how Jobs re-built Apple by cutting through the BS, winnowing projects down and getting rid of people who did not share his vision. No doubt that incisiveness and directness are behaviors to be valued and developed. But was it really necessary to take those behaviors to the extent he did, exposing a shameful level of scorn, rudeness and even cruelty to colleagues and fellow workers? In others words, could he still have succeeded without being such a jerk?

Absolutely he could have. Jobs got away with it because he could. Yes, the guy who told us to “Think Different” , who strived for perfectionism, scrutinizing his products along with everyone around him, never really turned the lens inward on himself because he didn’t have to. While I never met the man, it’s clear from the hundreds of people that Issacson interviewed that his genius was so revered that many people just wanted to be near him, no matter how difficult or demeaning the interaction. In fact, after one such episode where Jobs said to an employee, “You asshole, you never do anything right!” the response was “Yes, he was an asshole but I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

It’s curious why we need studies to tell us what many of us know instinctively: people respond better and are more successful in environments where people are civil and respectful to one another. For those who miss the point, though, thankfully there are hundreds of social scientists who remain gainfully employed ready with reams of research results that demonstrate how an uncivil culture deleteriously affects the bottom line through loss of motivation, collaboration and high turnover. Furthermore, no corollary has been found between creative, productive employees and workplace abuse.

After years working on the front lines coaching professionals in some of America’s toughest, most demanding industries, no one will ever convince me that being a bully is excusable due to someone’s ingenuity, title, longevity, company size or success. The simple truth is that, like our playgrounds, bullies have no place in corporate America. If your definition of being authentic involves being cruel, disrespectful, amoral or running roughshod over people, then I’d say that there are a lot of words to describe your personality but authentic isn’t one of them.

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