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Team Findings and Coaching Plan Example

PROJECT 2020
Team Findings and Coaching Plan
September 24, 2018

Becca Hokans
Agile Coach
Enterprise Agile Transformation Group

Contents
Summary 3
Team Findings 3
Feedback Methodology 3
Team and Individual Dynamics 4
Agile Ceremonies 4
Sprint Commitment 4
Coaching Plan 5
Motivate the team and individuals 5
Refocus the team on creating business value 5
Implement a System for Grooming Stories 5
Celebration of success 6
Encourage openness to change 6
1:1 Coaching 6
Team Coaching 6
Team Working Agreement 7

Summary
Project 2020 is not a functioning Agile project. 2020 has a waterfall plan; development ends on 10/12 to give way to testing and release readiness for a 12/10 delivery. I’ve spoken to leadership and learned that the delivery date is non-negotiable due to program funding availability. I have also learned that since the project has a waterfall-like deliverable, MVP cannot be redefined to something else. The Project 2020 team must monitor the scope against the delivery through existing checkpoints and project plan. The project may be in jeopardy of meeting its delivery date.
Overall, the Project 2020 team is new to Agile and Scrum, and struggle with the Agile mindset, values, and principles, as well as with Scrum practices. Phase 2 is planned to continue in Agile fashion. Before that can happen, the following high-level actions are required:
• Learn to write discrete, small user stories by slicing large stories into bite-sized chunks
• Achieve a predictable delivery velocity sprint over sprint
• Structure MVP and Features to be released quarterly rather than waterfall-style releases.
One thing that helps the team is their overall communication. I’ve observed that the team collaborates on stories and discusses them freely. Another bright spot is the creation of automation scripts for future testing.
This document provides more details around my interviews, issues, and recommendations for moving forward. At this time, corrective action ownership moves to Clark Kent, 2020 Scrum Master.
Team Findings

Feedback Methodology
This analysis and coaching plan is a result of meeting with key members of the scrum team. I spent thirty minutes with each key team member with the intent of learning about their role on the team and their perceived need of assistance from a coach or any other role on the team. I ask three questions during the meeting:

1. What do you do? - This is a role based question designed to help me understand the responsibilities of each team member. I attempt to determine the original intent of their role and how that role has evolved due to self-organization. I am also hoping the team member can describe their role.
2. What would you change? - This is an open-ended question that can be answered in any way the team member wants. With this question, I am hoping for agile or process related answers that a coach or scrum master can solve.
3. What do improvements would you like to see? - The intent of this question is to determine how the team member perceives the team and its performance. It also helps me determine how I will be able to best help them.
The answers within the question lead to a variety of topics, thoughts, feelings and experiences that result in the enclosed feedback.
Team and Individual Dynamics
The Project 2020 Team does not show signs or behaviors of individual or team empowerment. The team is not self-organized and self-managed, but takes direction from the development team on batching the work and completing it over a series of sprints.
User stories were created as if creating a waterfall Business Requirements Document – all creation up front before design began, setting up a waterfall plan to follow. As a result, changes are managed via the change request process.
The team is fractured by silo by way of its chosen development path. Part of this may be due to the lack of a Scrum Master and the direction driven by a Project Manager. Since a new Scrum Master joined on August 20th, some short-term improvements are realized. The Scrum Master is working on empowerment and seeing some improvement – the team is organizing around the work and pushing back on overcommitment.
Agile Ceremonies
Standups were somewhat stilted yet have improved under the direction of the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master has introduced the rigor around ceremonies, reinstating some that were held erratically and are now scheduled on a deliberate cadence.

Sprint Commitment
The team had a velocity of 100 points. As a stretch goal, the team chose to take on (and complete) 150 points of work. The team was then committed by the Product Owner to 150 points for every sprint. This was due to fixed scope AND fixed delivery date. During the last sprint, the team completed 290 points of work, yet this is now expected behavior from the Business. The team is under pressure to push things out, but does not have the time for failure. The team is expected to complete 350 points in the next sprint, 3.5 times the team’s original velocity. The team is working extra hours to meet their sprint commitments and has added additional manpower to meet the revised velocity.


Coaching Plan

Motivate the team and individuals
The team, collectively and individually, needs a reminder that they are a team of experts who are on the team to think independently and provide innovative solutions. The Scrum Master can remind the team of this in ceremonies using the following mantras.

• You are the expert. We, the team, believe in you. Nobody knows the solution better than you.
• You are empowered with your expertise and with the scrum framework to bring your best solutions.
• Your team is relying on you to bring your best and be your best to benefit our product.
• We believe you are the expert and we trust in you to bring the team the best solution.

• As the expert on this team you are empowered to use your expertise to act on behalf of the team.
• The team trusts you and believes in your ability to provide solutions.
• No one member of this team is greater than the other. We are all equal in seeking and providing solutions for our team.

The intent is to re-awaken the self-empowerment, self-organization and expertise of the team. Each team member should see themselves as a leader and should not rely on one person or group for direction or empowerment.

Refocus the team on creating business value
The team must focus on breaking down stories that fulfill a specific function from start to finish, rather than thinking horizontally across various layers. For example, when building transactions, build one transaction independently so that the user can submit a request and receive a response. This type of story may be designed, developed, and tested within a single sprint, allowing the team to build functionality while increasing customer feedback received for each transaction.
Implement a System for Grooming Stories
The Scrum Master will coach the team and implement a system for grooming stories during sprints in Phase 2. One proposed system is below:
• Three grooming sessions per week
• Each grooming session is 1.5 hours long
• The goal of each grooming session is to
o Groom three complex stories (3 stories in 90 minutes, 30 minutes each story)
o Groom six noncomplex stories (6 stories in 90 minutes, 15 minutes each story)
o Or groom some combination of complex and non-complex stories that produces more than three stories per 90 minutes
This grooming system will produce 27 stories over a three week sprint cycle and should be enough to build a backlog of one to two sprints ahead. Such a backlog is known as a “healthy backlog” of work available for sprint commitment.

Celebration of success
Find opportunities to show appreciation for the teamwork in a meaningful way. The team has had success with meeting sprint commitment and can be acknowledged for that effort. The Scrum Master will look for these opportunities and capitalize on them when available.

Encourage openness to change
The team needs to be open to change and ways to give the team permission to fail on some items and use those as opportunities for learning. The team does not feel safe in the current paradigm. The team needs time to evaluate and retrospect on continuous improvement ideas along their journey and create the safe space for learning.

1:1 Coaching
The Scrum Master will continue coaching each member of the team on agile, team empowerment, individual empowerment and business value. The coaching sessions will be performed as needed. The Agile Coach will meet with the Scrum Master for a period of one month to assist with the transition of the Coaching Plan.

Team Coaching
The team desperately needs an understanding of Agile values, principles, and mindset. They also need an understanding of how Scrum works. I have provide several resources to The Scrum Master so that he may share with the team and address their knowledge gaps. The Scrum Master has already given the team training on Agile basics and the Scrum essentials.
The team has issues with estimation of stories to work through. New team members have joined the team and the Scrum Master is working to acclimate them to the team and schedule knowledge share sessions.
The team does not have a set predictability. To deliver Phase 1, the team added manpower throughout the project, stretched out sprint commitments, and estimated completion based on the number of points left to complete to deliver the fixed MVP. The Scrum Master and the Product Owner will coach them on establishing a consistent velocity by which the team can gauge long-term planning. For example, if the team completes 100 points per sprint, that represents 800 points of working in a six month release.
The Scrum Master can influence the team to find their consistent velocity, and influence leadership to concentrate on the Features under the MVP rather than on delivering the full fixed MVP per release. He can also help the team understand feature-based planning and influence leadership to plan quarterly feature releases to add business value on a more frequent basis.
QA needs to be on the same page as the rest of the team. QA has questions about the stories that Developers sometimes do not answer. QA typically goes above and beyond in the functional testing in their expected results.

Team Working Agreement
This team is in great need of a working agreement to set team norms, guidelines, values and boundaries. The Scrum Master will lead the team in the exercise of creating a team working agreement.


last updated september 2019