Let a Mentor Help! What Challenges Are You Facing at Work?
The Agile Mentors Community (AMC) is all about mentoring each other. We have so many great mentors in the AMC, so we decided one day to make our discussion all about peer-to-peer mentoring. We asked the community:
What challenges are you currently facing at work? Everyone, please help your AMC peers by sharing thoughts and ideas to help solve their current challenge.
A lot of people jumped in with questions, and many more with ideas and mentorship. Here’s a sampling of some of our favorite topics:
Challenge #1: How do I articulate to senior management why agile ways of working are essential in our transformation?
A mentor replied, “I think the best approach with senior managers is to not even talk about agile in your conversation at all. Honestly, they don’t care how you get there, they want results. Instead, focus on what some of their pain points may be. Maybe it’s not getting products to market soon enough, or products aren’t selling well, or maybe they want to reduce costs. An agile mindset can address all of these things, but you need to understand what will really get their attention.”
Challenge #2: Is it wrong to translate story points to days?
This Connecticut-based member added that her team is new to agile and it’s taking time to learn how to estimate with story points. She coached them through relative complexity and assigning relative hourly estimates as a guide. After seven sprints, she believes the team is giving more accurate estimates.
The team is estimating based on the average number of hours they are spending per bucket (2 is a day or less, 3 is a day and a half or less, 5 is 3 days, 8 is 4 days). While it’s not perfect Fibonacci, they are shooting for a consistency that can work for this team.
She then asked the mentors, “Is it wrong that I am ultimately translating the story points to hours?”
A member from London responded, If it works for your team, that's great, but a few issues to watch out for are:
People tend to treat time estimates as targets, so they change their behavior if they ‘exceed’ the estimate. With story point estimates being more ‘virtual’ the team will just do the work necessary to get to ‘done’ without worrying about the time involved. They don’t let the estimates change the way they do the work.
Time is often relative to the capability of team members, for example, a story might take one developer three hours and another developer eight hours. This can cause issues with less experienced team members feeling under pressure to get things done as quickly as more experienced team members. It tends to be less of an issue with story points.
If the capability of the team improves it can get really confusing. For example, the team may now complete five point stories in two days instead of three as they get better organized.
Generally, we try and avoid predicting and instead rely on a rolling average of actual past performance. Calculate your velocity as the average number of story points achieved by the team over the last three sprints.
Challenge #3: I feel like my team is falling apart!
“My biggest challenge is the lack of trust and shared ownership between the developers on the team,” another member added. “They’re not functioning as a unit and the dysfunction is rippling throughout the rest of the team and affecting our product. Everyone on the team feels as if the Scrum Master has disengaged.”
A Scrum Master from Richmond, Virginia, replied, “All of these are excellent retro topics. Which brings me to a few questions…”
Is there enough psychological safety within the team to discuss these kinds of issues in a retro?
Does everyone treat the sprint commitment as a team thing, where everyone collaborates to get the work done?
Is the Scrum Master using information radiators, not as a club, but rather to drive communication as needed so that the team engages more with the sprint goal?
Does the team feel they can bring up impediments and get the ones they can’t resolve themselves addressed during the sprint by the Scrum Master?
Does the team have a working agreement that states the primary focus of the team is to work together to meet the sprint goal?
Has management clearly communicated that they want the team to work together in an agile manner, and will support them in doing so?
Has the team tried using a technique such as 3 Amigos to get them to collaborate together on stories?
To join the conversation and to be mentored by more than 2,000 agile practitioners from around the globe, join the Agile Mentors Community. Visit www.agilementors.com for more information on membership.