Hi there.

In this video, we'll go through some of

the challenges you might encounter during a change process
that are specific to Agile teams. As the project manager or Scrum Master, it's your
responsibility to help
teams improve how they work and coach them on how to
effectively adopt Scrum practices. So anticipating and understanding how
to work through common challenges before they happen is super important. Remember
the four themes of Agile
principles that we discussed in an earlier video. To refresh your memory, the
themes are:
value delivery, business collaboration, team dynamics, and
culture and retrospectives. In this video, we'll focus on challenges
you might encounter with an Agile team that are related to
the first three themes. The first set of challenges
are related to value delivery, which is about making sure the team is
delivering working solutions frequently. Some signs that your team is experiencing
value delivery issues could include things like the team has started missing
expected delivery dates and is taking a lot longer than
usual to complete tasks. Or you might notice that
the team seems burned out, is working long hours, and
showing signs of exhaustion. Or maybe the team has too many items
in progress at any given time, preventing tasks from
actually getting to done. If you start to notice your team
is struggling in these areas, there are a few things you can do to help. You can
try doing more demos of the
solutions with the team to ensure they're delivering on the value roadmap. When the
team pauses to take in a big
picture view of the working product, they often notice areas where they
can improve and speed up the work. You can also use retrospectives to ask
the team if anything is slowing them down, like waiting on dependencies or
communication challenges. It can also help to do a quick
review with the team and make sure that everyone
understands what "done" means. And finally, be sure to focus on
only a few user stories per Sprint. This ensures the team finishes
an item together before moving on. Putting all this into practice can
be harder than you might think. My current team is asked to cover
a lot of ground in each Sprint, so it can be tempting for
us to try and tackle too much at once. But doing that usually just
makes everything take longer, so it's not actually helpful. It's better to maintain
focus and
deliver fewer Backlog items in one Sprint than to deliver a lot of
items in more Sprints. Okay, another set of challenges you
might encounter relate to the business collaboration theme. To recap, business
collaboration is
about making sure that developers are collaborating with business people
on how to build the right product. There are a few common signs that your
team might be experiencing business collaboration issues. You might notice that the
team is
overwhelmed with critical feedback or change requests from business people
after they reviewed the working solution. That could lead to people on your
team avoiding asking for feedback or complaining about requested changes coming
from the Product Owner or business team. Or you might start to detect an "us versus
them" mentality between the team doing the work and management. I've sometimes
noticed this manifest
in negative comments from team members like, "Don't give a demo to the salesperson.
It's not ready yet, and they'll just point out what's wrong." If you notice any of
these signs,
there are a few things you can do to help rebuild trust and collaboration between
the developers and the business people. To start with,
try addressing critical feedback and change requests by doing more demos. This
ensures feedback
comes in at a steady pace and that everyone involved has a shared
understanding of what done means. Next, consider conducting
a Solution Design Sprint, which is an entire Sprint spent
working solely on the solution design. These are most effective
when the working team and the business people actually sit together
and collaborate on the solution. Finally, you can help your team focus
by ensuring changes to the Backlog are introduced only in between Sprints. This
prevents your team from getting
distracted by possible changes which could stress them out and lead to resentment.
For example, I was once on a Scrum Team where the engineering director loved to
stop by the engineer's desk to ask for a quick dashboard,
which is a web page that shows data. Asking the engineer to do this completely
disrupted the team's focus and slowed down the team's velocity. We finally decided
to ask the director to
come straight to the Scrum Master when they needed something so that it could be
planned properly and
not interrupt the team's current workflow. Okay, let's move on to the third theme:
team dynamics and culture. Human beings are complex creatures
with lots of different motivations and styles of working, so it's likely that
you'll encounter
at least a few challenges in this area. Here are a few common
signs of team dynamics and culture issues to watch out for. First is low team
morale. If people are super grumpy, irritated,
or generally in a bad mood, then you might have some underlying
team dynamics issues to sort out. Next, watch out for signs the team
is experiencing lots of conflict. If people are arguing a lot and
issues aren't getting resolved, the team probably needs some help. Not everyone is
going to get their way. If team members feel resentful
or hold onto grudges, it'll negatively impact
the team's performance. And finally, and
this might surprise you, but low conflict can also be a sign that
the team is experiencing issues. We're usually taught to believe that
no conflict is a good thing, right? But if a team never has disagreements, it's a
sign that they might be
worried about starting a conflict because they don't feel like
it's a safe environment. Being open and courageous
are two of our Scrum values, but it's not always easy to
put them into practice. As a project manager, part of your role is
helping your team get comfortable being honest with each other and
working through conflicts together. If you notice these or
any other clear signs of team distress, here are some ideas you can try. You could
run a team brainstorm session
about how to work better together. Ask the team to identify
some areas to improve on. An example exercise could involve asking
the team to write down stories about the worst team they've ever worked on and the
best team they've ever worked on, then sharing them in a meeting. Then you might
have the team create a list
of do's and don'ts for working together, based on the stories everyone shared.
Another idea is to
change up the workflows. Try pairing up people to work
together on a hard task or change up the way you run one
of your regular meetings. It can also help to take
a training class together or watch a video about team dynamics and
discuss it as a group. You can also try a retrospective
technique from the internet. There are a ton of great
resources out there. One of my favorite retrospective
techniques is called the Six Hats Thinking Technique. In this technique,
each team member chooses a different hat to explore the subject
of the retrospective. The different hats each
involve a different objective, like discussing positives or
negatives that happened during the Sprint or sharing emotive statements. This helps
to ensure that the team
takes a well-rounded approach to the retrospective. All right, that's it for this
video. Now you've got some idea of some of the
common challenges Agile teams might face and how to address them. Coming up, we'll
explore some more
issues you might encounter as a project manager or Scrum Master.