SMART Goal Setting

It is that time of year where I spend my time writing out new goals for organizations. I sometimes think that “New Year’s Resolutions” are overrated in  our personal lives, because we aren’t held accountable for the next 12 months. However, in operating a business where generating revenue allows you to eat, it becomes very important. I like eating!

Using the SMART guidelines helps me define those goals.

S – Specific. You want to know what the goal means when you read it again in a few months. Fight the urge to be brief here and opt for clarity.

M – Measurable. You need to have a clear measure for each goal. Make sure you define and clearly communicate its data source.

A – Actionable. Good goals start with a verb that adds motion. Action verbs tell you what you’re doing.

R – Realistic. This is one of the areas where we’ve tweaked the traditional acronym. In addition to having an owner responsible for the outcome, good goals can be realistically achieved within a certain time frame. Lofty thoughts or aspirations don’t belong here – those belong in vision statements.

T – Time Bound.  Goals need to be executable within a defined time. Depending on what level each goal is at within the plan will help dictate it’s time. Strategic objectives should be within the year. Corporate goals may be yearly or quarterly. Action items and initiatives are within a quarterly period or less.

As a final note to SMART goal development, make sure to have a little heart or passion when answering the question “why” for each goal. Make sure you communicate why each goal is important to your success. It’s an easy way to help the goal owner understand the impact of their work and why it’s important for your organization’s success. I get really excited around second quarter when the team is checking them off. To me, we did a great job of following the guidelines of setting up our goals for the organization!

Good luck to you all this year as you develop your 2017 strategic plans.

Data Sources for Strategic Planning

Taking the time to build your data so you know the resources you apply will yield high returns.

Of the four possible data sources listed here, we have influence and even direct impact over:

1. Market – The next smaller circle is market. This covers your geographic market and your target markets. Data sources may include economic development organizations, or Census Bureau statistics.
2. Industry – Coming in a little bit closer is industry-specific. Find the top three sources of reliable data relevant to your industry. Look for quantitative data supporting industry trends, market sizing, shifts in customer demographics, or even movement with environmental, political, or economic conditions impacting your ability to fulfill your mission and achieve your vision.

So, time to get the information into our hand so we know right down to the atomic level what's going on to make the best decision for the outcome. I know we can collect this information and generate reports to help with these decisions during the strategic planning process each year.

http://onstrategyhq.com/resources/4-data-sources-necessary-for-a-better-2017-strategic-plan/

4 Data Sources Necessary for a Better 2017 Strategic Plan

By Jeff Brunings

Don’t let your 2017 strategic planning be another year of wash, rinse, repeat. Do something different. Start by building a better strategic plan. From now through the end of the year we’re dedicating each installment of our newsletter to serving up our best insight, experiences, and practical tips for helping you build a better 2017 strategic plan.

So, let’s start with the hard, cold reality that your plan probably sucks. Why? Chances are your past planning efforts have missed one, very important ingredient. They lacked market data. But isn’t everything data? No, it’s not. Data are facts, published by someone other than yourself and recognized as reputable sources.

Why is data important?
Without data it’s easy to fudge your own reality. You’ll bark up the wrong tree. You’ll see things that aren’t there. Data keeps your planning process grounded in reality. It’s like having concrete for a foundation. People don’t see it, but it helps hold everything together.

How is the data used to support the planning process? Think of the collection of external data as a series of concentric circles. Here’s the breakdown of the 4 different data circles that can give vital information you need for your planning process.

1. Megatrends – The outside circle is filled with megatrends having big impact on most organizations, like aging baby boomers, growth of millennials, and so on.
2. Market – The next smaller circle is market. This covers your geographic market and your target markets. Data sources may include economic development organizations, or Census Bureau statistics.
3. Industry – Coming in a little bit closer is industry-specific. Find the top three sources of reliable data relevant to your industry. Look for quantitative data supporting industry trends, market sizing, shifts in customer demographics, or even movement with environmental, political, or economic conditions impacting your ability to fulfill your mission and achieve your vision.
4. Competition – Before and during your planning process, you need to take a look at what your competitors are doing. Take a look at what they’re doing well and what you’re doing well. This is important to gain a holistic view of your external factors.

With data in place, use it to help define your organization’s current state, especially when conducting a SWOT analysis. Remember, SWOT simply stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Market data is especially helpful in identifying areas of growth opportunities or identifying potential threats, which need to be continuously monitored.

Private vs. Not for Profit Organizations

I'm a bit bias here because I ran an independent private dance studio for six years. Making decisions can be hard and having guidelines and even a Charter to make decisions really helps move things. Ultimately, it does come down to one or two persons. Here are a few articles that help guide me through the process.

https://hbr.org/2006/11/how-well-run-boards-make-decisions

Committee vs. Final Decision Maker

Design by committee can work. However, you often need a group of like-minded individuals that do not differ in opinion too drastically for this succeed. In the extreme circumstances, if there are wildly divergent opinions, the group must be willing to forego their egos and accept the decisions that are made even when the decision is the polar opposite of what they believe to be the best decision. When all else fails, there is a final decision-maker at the top.

Thus enters the architect. They are after all, responsible for the product that is ultimately designed and built. They will help the team make decisions that are aligned with the macro-scale goals for the organization. While the development team themselves focus on the design decisions that are most beneficial at the micro-scale of the feature or system for which they are responsible.

On Being a Data Skeptic

After reading the book "On Being a Data Skeptic", I determined that evidence based data collected should allow most people to reach a similar conclusion when working on creating strategic plans for their dance communities.

http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/being-a-data-skeptic.csp

In the modern digital economy, data is a critical asset. Just like capital, credit and talent. Having the best data and the tools to use it gives you a distinct competitive advantage. It allows you to find and pursue opportunities and manage risks better than others. And frankly, I'm concerned when community leaders use just intuitive based decision and execute, and cannot back it up with facts. If growth in a sustainable scene is disproportionately shared by those who have a data edge versus an intuitive edge for sustainability. Obviously, collecting and managing data has a high overhead, but this is a marathon folks and not a sprint.

So, start making good decisions based on data and intuition. Like in high school when the science teacher says, make a hypothesis and test it to see if it is true or not. That is the innovative and scientific process in play and I encourage leaders to explore these ideas.

Scaling while promoting growth

I once watched an all star band play one time. I said to myself, gosh these are folks are all giants on the band stand. It each of their own rights, they were all leaders, high skilled and great people. How did we get so lucky to have them work so well together?

Scaling a team to their potential means a balance of micro managing and delegating work we already know how to do.

It gives me a chance to really see how people will grow. That means making mistakes, falling down, re-grouping and taking another kick at the can.

How do we move forward with all the work to date, defining the what and how for each of the scenes in Canada? So it may mean some of our definitions may cause a derailing and disrupt operation, but is that how we learn and grow so we can take another kick at the can? I think so.

Art is not just be expressive, but to explore all the possible permutations that could be applied to create a desired outcome. I love this because the outcome is what you as the artist defines it.


Article reference:

https://shift.newco.co/how-a-single-conversation-with-my-boss-changed-my-view-on-delegation-and-failure-ae5376451c8d#.s2nobsqei

How a single conversation with my boss changed my view on delegation and failure

One day, I was having my weekly 1:1 meeting with my boss, Andrew Bosworth. We were going through the regular updates about my team, things going on at Facebook more generally, yada yada. Then he asked me a somewhat startling question….

“So, Margaret, what’s going off the rails on your team?”

I was taken aback. Had he heard rumors that my team was “off the rails”? Did he think I was a screw-up, a leader unable to track the progress my team was making and ensure the right outcomes? My team was pretty big, and I thought I had a handle on everything, but maybe I didn’t. Good lord, maybe I’d finally been found out to be the giant imposter fraud I had always secretly feared I was???!!!

But I looked at him, and he seemed really calm, unconcerned.

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound calm and cavalier. “I don’t think anything is off the rails.”

“Well, that’s a problem,” he said, and my confusion doubled. How could my boss think it was BAD news that nothing was off the rails?

“Listen, if there isn’t something going off the rails on your team, then I knowyou are micro-managing them. You are really good at what you do, and if you stay in the weeds on everything, you’ll keep things going perfectly, for a while. But eventually two things will happen. One, you will burn out. And two, you will eventually start to seriously piss off your team. So I better see some things going sideways, on a fairly regular basis.”

My head exploded. This was so counter to traditional management philosophy: keeping everything going smoothly and hold leadership accountable when things went awry. This philosophy is certainly better than blaming the team itself, but ultimately it makes leaders paranoid about failing, and that has enormous repercussions. It makes us more conservative in our decisions to avoid failure and embarrassment. It teaches us to cover up our mistakes instead of being open about and learning from them. And worst of all, it keeps us from delegating and growing our leadership bench.

As leaders, we must learn to hand off significant portions of our jobs in order to grow and scale our teams. Sometimes these hand-offs are necessarily to people who may not be quite ready for it. They have to learn a bunch of things that we already know how to do, and initially they will do it slower and less effectively. The short term thinker in us may want to stay involved in everything because it’s less risky. But in doing so, we may unintentionally rob high potential members of our teams of leadership opportunities. We have to give them the space to fail in the short term so they can succeed and grow in the long term. And of course, there is that magical moment when we delegate and allow an emerging leader to grow into their new responsibilities, and they end up being way better at it than we ever were. That’s real management success.

That single conversation with my boss has had a big effect on me. His management philosophy has created a safe space for our leadership team to share what’s not going well. As a result, we are less likely to judge each other for the things that go “off the rails” in our teams. It feels good to be in a place where I can talk about areas of concern without fear of being judged, and instead even be praised for it. And because we share our challenges openly with each other, we are much more able to collaborate in productive ways to help each other succeed.

Data Science and Technology as a tool

The best thing about about gathering data is that it can provide insight in the industry. I am planning on creating a strategy on collecting that data so I can help create valuable strategic plans for communities. Before I can do that, the data has to point towards approving those plans.

I have found that most people in the communities who lead the charge are using both life experiences in business and their gut instinct. For the most part, gut instinct would be greater in decision making. We agree that everyone's lives are different, experience things differently and of course draw conclusions in many ways.

Creating a plan and using technology as a utility tool will get results that are beneficial for organizing groups. The article below points out great points on how I plan to gather data.

https://www.oreilly.com/learning/theres-nothing-magical-about-learning-data-science

There’s nothing magical about learning data science

The top 5 habits of a professional data scientist.

By Jerry Overton

August 4, 2016

There are people who can imagine ways of using data to improve an enterprise. These people can explain the vision, make it real, and affect change in their organizations. They are—or at least strive to be—as comfortable talking to an executive as they are typing and tinkering with code. We sometimes call them “unicorns” because the combination of skills they have are supposedly mystical, magical…and imaginary.

But I don’t think it’s unusual to meet someone who wants their work to have a real impact on real people. Nor do I think there is anything magical about learning data science skills. You can pick up the basics of machine learning in about 15 hours of lectures and videos. You can become reasonably good at most things with about 20 hours (45 minutes a day for a month) of focused, deliberate practice.

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So, basically, being a unicorn, or rather a professional data scientist is something that can be taught. Learning all of the related skills is difficult, but straight-forward. With help from the folks at O’Reilly, we’ve designed a tutorial at Strata + Hadoop World New York, 2016,Data Science that Works: Best practices for designing data-driven improvements, making them real, and driving change in your enterprise, for those who aspire to the skills of a unicorn. The premise of the tutorial is that you can follow a direct path toward professional data science, by taking on the following, most distinguishing habits:

5. Put aside the technology stack

The tools and technologies used in data science are often presented as a technology stack. The stack is a problem because it encourages you to to be motivated by technology, rather than business problems. When you focus on a technology stack, you ask questions like “can this tool connect with that tool” or “what hardware do I need to install this product?” These are important concerns, but they aren’t the kinds of things that motivate a professional data scientist.

Professionals in data science tend to think of tools and technologies as part of an insight utility, rather than a technology stack. Focusing on building a utility forces you to select components based on the insights that the utility is meant to generate. With utility thinking, you ask questions like “What do I need to discover an insight?” and “Will this technology get me closer to my business goals?”

Figure 1. Data science tools and technologies as components of an insight utility, rather than a technology stack. Credit: Jerry Overton.

In the Strata + Hadoop World tutorial in New York, I’ll teach simple strategies for shifting from technology-stack thinking to insight-utility thinking.

4. Keep data lying around

Data science stories are often told in the reverse order from which they happen. In a well-written story, the author starts with an important question, walks you through the data gathered to answer the question, describes the experiments run, and presents resulting conclusions. In real data science, the process usually starts when someone looks at data they already have and asks: “hey, I wonder if we could be doing something cool with this?” That question leads to tinkering, which leads to building something useful, which leads to the search for someone who might benefit. Most of the work is devoted to bridging the gap between the insight discovered and the stakeholder’s needs. But when the story is told, the reader is taken on a smooth progression from stakeholder to insight.

The questions you ask are usually the ones where you have access to enough data to answer. Real data science usually requires a healthy stockpile of discretionary data. In the tutorial, I’ll teach techniques for building and using data pipelines to make sure you always have enough data to do something useful.

3. Have a strategy

Data strategy gets confused with data governance. When I think of strategy, I think of chess. To play a game of chess, you have to know the rules. To win a game of chess, you have to have a strategy. Knowing that “the D2 pawn can move to D3 unless there is an obstruction at D3 or the move exposes the king to direct attack” is necessary to play the game, but it doesn’t help me pick a winning move. What I really need are patterns that put me in a better position to win—“If I can get my knight and queen connected in the center of the board, I can force my opponent’s king into a trap in the corner.”

Figure 2. A data strategy map. Data strategy is not the same as data governance. To execute a data strategy, you need a map. Credit: Jerry Overton.

This lesson from chess applies to winning with data. Professional data scientists understand that to win with data, you need a strategy; and to build a strategy, you need a map. In the tutorial, we’ll review ways to build maps from the most important business questions, build data strategies, and execute the strategy using utility thinking.

2. Hack

By hacking, of course, I don’t mean subversive or illicit activities. I mean cobbling together useful solutions. Professional data scientists constantly need to build things quickly. Tools can make you more productive, but tools alone won’t bring your productivity to anywhere near what you’ll need.

To operate on the level of a professional data scientist, you have to master the art of the hack. You need to get good at producing new, minimum-viable, data products based on adaptations of assets you already have. In New York, we’ll walk-through techniques for hacking together data products and building solutions that you understand, and are fit for purpose.

1. Experiment

I don’t mean experimenting as simply trying out different things and seeing what happens. I mean the more formal experimentation prescribed by the scientific method. Remember those experiments you performed, wrote reports about, and presented in grammar-school science class? It’s like that.

Running experiments and evaluating the results is one of the most effective ways of making an impact as data scientist. I’ve found that great stories and great graphics are not enough to convince others to adopt new approaches in the enterprise. The only thing I’ve found to be consistently powerful enough to affect change is a successful example. Few are willing to try new approaches until it has been proven successful. You can’t prove an approach successful unless you get people to try it. The way out of this vicious cycle is to run a series of small experiments.

Figure 3. Small continuous experimentation is one of the most powerful ways for a data scientist to affect change. Credit: Jerry Overton.

In the tutorial at Strata + Hadoop World New York, we’ll also study techniques for running experiments in very short sprints, which forces us to focus on discovering insights and making improvements to the enterprise in small, meaningful chunks.

We’re at the beginning of a new phase of big data—a phase that has less to do with the technical details of massive data capture and storage, and much more to do with producing impactful scalable insights. Organizations that adapt, and learn to put data to good use, will consistently outperform their peers. There is a great need for people who can imagine data-driven improvements, make them real, and drive change. I have no idea how many people are actually interested in taking on the challenge, but I’m really looking forward to finding out.

Article image: Fish Magic, 1925. (source: Google Art Project on Wikimedia Commons).

Jerry Overton

Jerry Overton is a Data Scientist and Distinguished Engineer at CSC, a global leader of next-generation IT solutions. Jerry is head of advanced analytics research and founder of CSC’s advanced analytics lab. In his blog, Doing Data Science, Jerry shares his experiences leading open research in data science.

Data and Forecasting to Build Your Strategic Plan

Building a really good strategic plan, you'll need to have market data. We’re talking about the kind that originates at the sub-atomic level. I call this industry knowledge and wisdom. Some say it is time in and experience. I say it is that plus some real solid facts that is undeniable. And having a good position on your growth potential means knowing where your growth has occurred, what it looks like today, and where it’s going tomorrow.

So, where do you get that kind of data? Well, collecting data to make good decisions and forecast upcoming sales so you can budget, but at the same time move your organization forward.

Start with your sales and marketing teams and be ready to start pulling data all the way down to individual accounts, individual products, or even micro geographic segments. Yes, finding out how many male leads works or is studying Science, Technology, Engineering or Math!

It’s just the kind of thing we are formulating. Plans for hardcore data collection, analysis, and interpretation of historical performance, current pipeline health, and account level performance projections. For me it means the analysis of hundreds of individual accounts, scenes and provinces.

This kind of data collection is a balance between top down and bottom up forecasting. If your strategic plan is only top down there’s a very real risk of having growth supported without any basis.

The deal here is to create a market so we can deliver music and dance services.

So here are few things to consider. Get your sales and marketing teams together. By account, by product, or by geography pull historical performance back from at least the last three to five years. Analyze what’s currently in the pipeline. Hopefully you have a really good Customer Relationship Management system since you’re looking for total value of what’s in the pipeline for each account and probability of winning the business.

Forecast out five years from your data. Use market data, competitive analysis, and sales projections. Projections are directional, but you’ll be able to pressure test your growth targets and where you expect the business to come from.

It’s not easy and it takes coordination and conviction. But if you’re serious about having a really good strategy, the kind that’s grounded in data and facts rather than simply opinions and gut feeling because a good dancer is the scene leader, take the time to get the data right. It’s often difference between plans that succeed and those that become stagnant.

Organizational social responsibilities

ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (OSR) AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Swing dance business relies on the idea of organizational social responsibility, better known in the business world as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The operating value is on to identify projects that reflect the scene's sense of social responsibility and to tailor projects to reflect that sense. This is perhaps a step in the right direction when it comes to the organization's position in the host community, but is extremely difficult and complex in its implementation. There are two key factors that contribute to its difficulty:

Both for profit and not for profits' main goal is still profits; they owe this to their stakeholders and or shareholders. Although profits and social responsibility are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there is frequently a price tag associated with these operations and projects and this creates a conflict: choose the project, or tailor the project to meet social responsible objectives or focus on increased return on investment? Where a project meets both objectives, the conflict is eliminated but you know intuitively that this won't always be the case.

How does the organization of a scene determine what is socially responsible and what isn't? This is seldom clear cut and in many cases different social groups have goals and objectives that are opposed to one another. The organizations can't satisfy the objectives of both groups and will be seen as irresponsible when it chooses one or the other. That is why stakeholder identification through the analysis process is important.

These issues are compounded when a members of one organization work in another with different social values. The chances of a conflict between two social groups who are stakeholders in the venture increase because of the cultural differences between the stakeholders in the home community and those in the other community. Organizations have invested lots of time developing their social media persona only to see it destroyed by one ugly conflict that gets media exposure. The results achieved by the social responsible investment are not newsworthy while the single incident that tarnishes that image is.

Organizations must take the time to evaluate what their social responsibilities are, claims to have followed all the laws, rules, regulations, and standards of the city and province they are operating in.
They further claim to have followed their own code of ethics. These ethics have been developed and implemented at significant expense in some cases. In some cases having a spokesperson answering the allegations on behalf of the companies is a way to show there is effort placed on ethical behaviour by these organizations. Whether or not these organizations have been effective in adhering to the laws of the city of province they operate in and their own codes, it is apparent to me that they have honestly tried to do so.

You can do all the right things, in your organization. But it is still not going right, things don't sit or feel correct because you are trying to overlap profit and social responsibility.  Implementing the code of ethics or even best practices crafted by a social responsible organizations will inevitably inflate costs at some point during some projects. Is it possible for a scene to have two organizations that are in conflict? You bet. Remember we're dealing with people here and as everyone who has worked with others knows, a working relationship leads to differences of opinion. For a team working on a project, the project manager will ask the team members to forsake personal agendas for the good of the project. When the conflicts are operational and conducted at the executive level this approach doesn't always work.

In my personal experiences, the initiation of a SWOT analysis or the mention of a scene strategic plan was enough to initiate a conflict between one another in the community. One suspects that there may have been issues between the two that pre-date, and understanding that history is important. So how does all this concern the project manager? The issues between organizations are experiencing demonstrate the difficulties it is possible to face when doing business where values conflict. These examples are extreme and can divide and make people choose even if they don't want to. In the end, it drives them away and the overall attrition rate goes up. That is if there's a mechanism to measure attrition in any socially operated community. I'm sure that not many projects will lead to an organization or social group facing allegations of physical violence. On the other hand, the underlying factors will affect any project. The question is what can a project manager do to address these factors?

What should one do?

The first step is for the project manager to understand all the issues that can affect the project, including pre-existing local issues. Is it reasonable to expect a project manager to have foreseen the conflict in the communities involved and any ongoing dispute? I would say given enough education on local issues and the likelihood that the project would only directly financially benefit members of one of the two communities, the dispute could have been foreseen. How to address the issue is another story. There may or may not have been something either organizations could have done to avoid the conflict and or dispute but they should at least have anticipated the risk of this happening and if no mitigation strategy was feasible they could then have decided whether they wanted to assume the risk. The object lesson for project managers here is that the exercise of risk identification must be expanded to include not only the risks of a culture clash between the organizations and the project and the city, but those of different stakeholder groups within the scene.

So how would a project manager go about identifying those risks?

The answer is that the investigative work required surpasses the activities we normally associate with risk identification. Speaking to members of both communities would have revealed pre-existing conflicts, dispute, examining back issues of newsletters, Facebook group discussion and interviews with locals and would be other sources for the information. The lesson here is that you may have to expand your risk identification exercise to include mining the information that would help you identify risks.

There is another issue that has plagued social clubs doing business in a capitalistic society long before anyone ever heard of organizational social responsibility, namely the issue of a clash between the laws governing the organization in the city, province or country and their laws and cultural norms running the project.

The classic example of this clash is the solicitation and payment of bribes. My experiences in many countries outside of North America and Europe the solicitation of bribes is not only legal, but is actually encouraged by the local governments. Getting a pass when the local authorities ask you questions and you don't know what to do is quite powerful and can get you out of hot water!

Laws in North America make it illegal for organizations to pay bribes. But using the system of I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine is probably the closest thing we can do in Canada. Specifically, I am referring to strategic partnership where both organizations work on mutual beneficial outcomes and possible goals. I'm not talking about aligning values here, that is what probably caused the dispute in the first place. That is not only healthy for all the organizations in the scene, but it shows solidarity amongst the leaders to the members. As good leadership will trickle down, the members will begin to practice those ideas and in time it becomes the cultural norm.

What to do when conflict and dispute happens? The effort to The answer is simple; don't find yourself in that situation. The situation described above is untenable and no project manager should be asked to expose themselves to that level of risk, regardless of your values. You can avoid this situation by investing a little time during the initiation phase of your project to investigate the risks.

What are the applicable laws of the city or province the project, or portion of the project, will be performed in? Will the project call for the playing of recorded music in classes, dances and possible outdoor events? What are the laws pertaining to conducting business when this one asset that drives your business? Sorry, you can't dance when there's no music and you don't want the authorities to fine you for not being responsible for the legal requirements of operating your business.

What are the laws pertaining to labour and human rights? Perhaps the best way to approach the investigation is to look at the project scope and your project management approach and determine which questions you should ask. Know the risks going in. Normally we think of risk identification as a project planning process, but there are some risks which will have a bearing on whether the organization wants to undertake the project, or whether you want to undertake managing the process. These are the risks that will be identified by asking the right questions. Once the risk has been identified,  you can then make the decision as to whether there is a mitigation strategy that might work. If you can't identify a workable mitigation strategy, does the organization want to undertake the project? Do you want to undertake managing the project? Sometimes the situation calls for you to ask the right questions of the right people before you commit to the project.

Project managers must become knowledgeable about their organization's social responsibility policies so that the goals and objectives of their projects conform to these policies, but they must go further than that. They must determine how well those policies conform to the laws, standards, and social customs in the scene where the project work will be undertaken.

They must also investigate all the possible stakeholders to determine if there are any conflicts with the organization's social responsibility policies or with each other. There really isn't anyone in a better position to do this when you think about it. The project manager has the best grasp of the project goals and objectives and management approach so is the best qualified person to identify risks to the project.

The suggestions in this article are not meant to contradict the best practices for risk management taught by project management courses such as PMP courses or other PMP exam preparation training, but rather to augment them. The strategy you use to quantify, qualify, monitor, and control the risks once you have identified them should be the same ones espoused in my experiences.

The team I'm on requires Trust so we can scale upwards

I was asked about team members and how I work with them over long distances. I have faith in trust, I take them for their word and professional ability to relay information that moves us towards our vision. Trust is the Key - The theme has come up over and over again, but it’s worth stating as a conclusion. You have to trust the team.  It’s the only way you can scale and be successful. I cannot scale the organization if that isn't there.

What do you do if you can’t trust your team?  Well, that’s a personnel issue and that’s why organization leadership positions exist — to make hard decisions. You need to figure out how the folks on the team can become professionally trustworthy and you need to figure out where you can go to find and hire folks that are trustworthy. Your main responsibilities should be finding people you can trust, hiring them, and clearing all distractions, yourself included, out of their way. You do your job, and they will do theirs. You will hear me say that my job is to remove barriers so the rest of my time can do their job. Just like effective linebackers in football, creating space for the job to get done.

Bringing Together an Entire Community to Sustain Lindy Hop in Canada

As I continue to shape this idea, I am using the knowledge of Strategic Planning through the Project Management Program (PMP) guidelines and recommendations. The start of any project does include a team who monitors the "Key Performance Indicators" and wave yellow or red flags when necessary. So the first step is to identify stake holders with this draft communique. I'm going to need resources to gather all this input when it starts to come in, ensuring inclusion and diversity to create an innovative solution for the challenges we all face.

Although Lindy Hop is an internationally recognized and practiced dance form world wide. Flowing throughout the east and west coast of Canada are pockets of swing dance communities, each community serves as both a life source and community hub for much of this inspiring African-American Folk dance with a rich history in jazz music.

While many organizations and social groups do great work to tackle projects that preserve and protect the art, no single agency or all-inclusive plan exists to create a conduit of awareness of each other, and for discussions to take place, or share resources to drive the entire ecosystem upwards to becoming abundant and self sustaining.

Community leaders, dance instructors, studio owners, swing dance community enthusiasts, jazz musicians, DJs and other partners are uniting to create a comprehensive best practices and guidelines for the Canadian ecosystem. This is a big task, so we are starting in to get together and work through small and tiny chunks at a time.

First phase of the project focuses on identifying everyone and ensuring they know what we are doing. It’s the first all-encompassing plan in Canadian Lindy Hop history.

I am asking for your help to collect, gather, and analyze who these people are and take their input to create viable goals. The people and the communities they all live in is the life source for any scene to even exist, not to mention dance, convene and be inclusive. To ensure everyone’s voices are  heard, I am creating a Stake holder's List so we can collect and analyze your input from all the scenes in Canada, and anyone generally interested. So the plan could represent the country's holistic and cultural view.

By the community, for the community: From awareness, to conversations and innovation, the community’s input will be used to create a plan that ultimately affects the eco system operating back through each scene. The hope is that the plan is built on feedback from all the community members as time and effort exists. 

Observations, on going concerns, collaboration...

My current observations, on going concerns, ability to collaborate and align values, mange effective human resources and finance floats around in my head. So I got most of it down on paper and eventually into this blog post.


CURRENT OBSERVATIONS

• Evidence based decisions through advanced business intelligence and analytics.
• Self serve models – E-business for day to day business.
• Mobile devices – any place, any time, any device access expectations.
• Ongoing convergence and consolidation of enterprise infrastructure and operational stake holders.
• The growing risk of "threats" will require careful analysis and risk management.
• Significant social and legal requirements for information management (privacy, access to information); while balancing demand for open and transparent communication.
• Agile development (delivering small usable pieces of functionality often with client assisted iterations as opposed to larger projects), value for effort.

ONGOING CONCERNS

• Number of silo operating communities (ie: Sudbury, ON).
• Complexity of integration and have a going concern for basic awareness and communication between leaders in those communities.
•  
• Silos of data; lack of authoritative data sources. Includes PCI-DDS compliancy.
• Vendor and contract management.
• AVLA and SOCAN Licensing, professional affiliation and asset management.
• Some grey roles and responsibilities with members in every community.
• Staffing (competitive market); difficult to attract in some instances and or grown local talent and leaders.
• Number of community members nearing retirement or burn out  continues to increase.  There is a limited thought and discussion around entry level positions available for new talent, leadership and administrative staff for succession planning purposes.
• Optimizing Technology in the business practice.
• Infrastructure and Funding strategically and ensuring all communities have ongoing operational resources and funding.
• Demonstrating the value of outcomes with real working examples.
• Increasing capacity for change, because that's life.
• Providing training for existing and new community leaders, instructors and administrators.
•  
• Addressing information Security, privacy, and AODA and Globalization.
• An Enterprise architecture or Best Practice in Canada.
• Finding Balance between security/privacy and open/transparent operations based on business operating types. (ie: Private vs. Public operations)
• Adequate liability insurance coverage for operations.
• Demand for accountability and transparency with the leaders in each community.
• Sustainability and Succession Planning (ie: three deep, three wide knowledge method).

COLLABORATION & ALIGNMENT FOR VALUE

• Remove barriers of entry for new scenes (ie: resources, budget and training).
• Remove operational barriers for existing communities.
• Investigate partnership or strategic alignment with other local operations (ie: other dance communities, city's culture plan, private halls and entertainment venue).
• Investigate LEAN Principals and Practices for all level of operations.

EFFECTIVE HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

• Ensure leaders are assigned to tasks and responsibilities that energizes them and not deplete them.
• A pathway for development and training to becoming a leader, instructor or administrative member. Performance development program is one example.
• Fitness and Health revolving around body care, assessment and treatment of injuries by professionals and emotional support through difficult operational times.

MAINTENANCE

• Investigate charge back model to encourage commerce between scenes.
• Investigate financial sustainability models.
• Rationalize and realize equipment replacement frequency models and support.
• Investigate buying bulk for regional groupings where it add values to client, scenes and vendor.

Communities posting their classes, dances & events using one common tool

The software engineering principal of DRY can be applied in our communities. The tool is meant to help keep information update to date and that it would cascade the information through all the channels like Facebook, Twitter and any Newsletter application you use.


I have heard time and time again about outdated/inaccessible/incorrect content is still on the website. And yes, it’s also my least favorite call to get in my line of business. When the date, time, location and cover is inconsistent across all the web mediums.

How can I help bring awareness, educate and provide best practices to help improve a streamlined communication strategy.

Luckily, with a few easy settings with Lindy Hopper's website, you can make avoidable website errors, consistency issues, and outdated copy a thing of the past.

Send me a message to find out when the next "Shortcuts to Success" webinar to learn:

• Why consistency on the web matters to your stakeholders.
• How to setup your local scene's policies and implement them.
• Popular best practices for building better experiences for those attending your events and classes.

Value Proposition and Cultural Conflicts

After speaking to Lindsay M. and meeting with our various dance communities. I referred to this TED talk about the cultural issues we as North Americans value. Here's a TED talk about some of these issues that smash into each other as try to operate as "not for profit" or have this shame of not spending money to make more money for the cause. That any money that arrives, should be directly invested towards the purpose instead of being strategic.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong

Our value proposition—a single sentence that helps communicate what we do, who we do it for, and why we do it— this defines our product.

"We are bringing Canadian swing era communities together to communicate, innovate and grow."

Building Better Teams

A centralized top down approach and self organized teams. I've employed these techniques with the teams I worked with. So not only for software development, but to coach others along the way to create positive outcomes and balance it with team positivity. I use these techniques to build the strategic plan along the way when bringing teams together. Identify standard operating protocols or procedures around this, and being sure to communicate it so everyone knows how to maneuver makes for excellent outcome and results, while leaving team members energized to start the next campaign or sprint. I recommend watching, addressing and then managing these points as teams move though their campaigns.

This is what I look for. As team positivity factors, Phillips and Sandahl identified:

Trust — all team members have confidence in other team members, how might we practice that...
Respect — treat everybody as a valued partner, how might we show that...
Communication — nonviolent communication is focused on solutions, how might we do that...
Interaction — give and Receive feedback, and treat conflict as an opportunity to improve. how might we find an activity that encourages this...
Cameraderie — team members feel empathy, express kindness, and are friends. How might we play a different game that we...
Optimism — team members see positive aspects. How might we show we...
Diversity of values — diversity encourages new ideas and different points of view. How might we show or tell...

I document into an agreed strategic plan. Their productivity factors are:

Goals and strategies — the team has clear goals and vision of product. Priorities are set. Co-workers provide fast feedback on the realisation of goals.

Alignment — people feel a connection with this vision and can align the team’s goal with personal goals.

Accountability — everybody is doing their best and feels responsible for the product.

Resources — beyond simply the presence of the required skillset and equipment to perform work, this factor also allows a team to find or ask for missing resources.

Decision making — the team is encouraged to make decisions at their level.

Proactivity — this means acceptance of changes and creativity in proposing them.

Team leadership — the team as a group has strong leadership, which means that in any particular situation, a team “local or sprint/campaign leader” will take the initiative to encourage the team in a common direction.

The productivity factor is dependent on the the team positivity factor.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/exercises-building-better-teams

Key takeaways see influence of leadership style in self-organized team understand importance of balance between productivity and positive attitude in work environment know factors that can influence each of those areas get tools that helps you assess team's point of balance get new ideas for retrospective

Have you ever seen a team perform so great that you wanted to join it? If you examine the values of such a team, you may discover a perfect balance of orientation on people and results. If you are trying to discover how far away your own team is from this state, read this article and try the exercises. I’m sure that with the correct questions and answers, you will find your own state of perfection.

In the 1960s, Robert Blake and Jane Moulton investigated various leadership styles and discovered that leadership can be measured in two dimensions: concern for people and concern for results. They created a grid to illustrate leadership styles.

The concept of work organization has been evolving for years. Not only agile practitioners have discovered that self-organized teams are highly effective. A strong manager is not a requirement for a well-performing team, but that does not mean that self-organized teams lack leadership. There is plenty of leadership in such teams; it is just distributed among all team members rather than gathered in one person.They stated that leadership style influences teamwork and this thesis established a base from which to evaluate team dynamics and health.

Distributed leadership does not invalidate Blake and Moulton’s thesis. Focus on and balance between people and results remain important to the team. To ensure that such a balance exists, Alexis Phillips and Phillip Sandahl proposed a Team Diagnostic model based on Blake’s leadership grid. They translated “concern for people” at the management side to a measurement of team positivity that reflects team spirit and joy of work. They transformed “concern for result” into team productivity, which means effectiveness in delivering results. They identified critical competencies for each of those areas and it is amazing how well this list aligns with the agile mindset.

As team positivity factors, Phillips and Sandahl identified:

• Trust — all team members have confidence in other team members.
• Respect — treat everybody as a valued partner.
• Communication — nonviolent communication is focused on solutions.
• Interaction — give and Receive feedback, and treat conflict as an opportunity to improve.
• Cameraderie — team members feel empathy, express kindness, and are friends.
• Optimism — team members see positive aspects.
• Diversity of values — diversity encourages new ideas and different points of view.

Their productivity factors are:

• Goals and strategies — the team has clear goals and vision of product. Priorities are set. Co-workers provide fast feedback on the realisation of goals.
• Alignment — people feel a connection with this vision and can align the team’s goal with personal goals.
• Accountability — everybody is doing their best and feels responsible for the product.
• Resources — beyond simply the presence of the required skillset and equipment to perform work, this factor also allows a team to find or ask for missing resources.
• Decision making — the team is encouraged to make decisions at their level.
• Proactivity — this means acceptance of changes and creativity in proposing them.
• Team leadership — the team as a group has strong leadership, which means that in any particular situation, a team “local leader” will take the initiative to encourage the team in a common direction.

Let’s see what happens if a team is stuck in one of Blake and Moulton’s quadrants:

Without focus on both positivity and productivity the team can burn out completely, fail to deliver, or both. To avoid this, levels of productivity and positivity should evolve over time. I would encourage every ScrumMaster and agile coach to understand these ideas and use the concepts of positivity and productivity in their work with teams.

A good ScrumMaster encourages their team to continuously improve in both areas and keep a balance. In order to improve, the first step is to know where you are. I’ve used different exercises to help various teams discover opportunities for defining an effective work style. Below, you can find some that use the concept of balance between positivity and productivity based on Esther Derby’s retrospective framework.

Exercise 1: Create a set of values

The goal of this exercise is to define a common set of values for a team.

This exercise can be useful in defining working agreements, in resolving hidden team conflicts, or as a team-building activity that helps you to better understand each other.

Phase 1: Explain the purpose

Time: Up to 5 minutes

Explain the expected outcome of this meeting, e.g. “It is important to a team to have not only a common goal but also common values that stand behind our working agreements. We’ll spend some time today talking about our team values — but first, let’s play.”

Phase 2: Energize people

Time: Up to 10 minutes

Find some activity that fits your team’s mood and the size of the room. Ask people to do something that expresses teamwork, shows the diversity of team members, or — oppositely — pulls similarities.

If nothing comes to mind, consult the links at the end of this article. There’s a huge list of ideas for trainers and for simple games. Don’t make the game complex, just make sure that all team members participate. It’s nice if the game gets people to step out of their comfort zones. Have fun! This is not waste of time.

At the end of the exercise, ask the team members what they have learned about each other.

Here’s an example of the game Wind of Change:

• Get chairs (one fewer than the number of players) and arrange them in a circle.
• Ask people to sit in the chairs. The one person without a chair stands in the middle of the circle and states the following, completing the sentence: “There is a wind of change for people like me who.…” — for example, “There is a wind of change for people like me who have a dog.”
• People who share the stated characteristic stand up and rush to find any other chair that was just abandoned by someone else who shares that characteristic. (You cannot get back in the chair that you have just released.)
• The person who does not get a chair starts the next wind of change.
• Play a couple of rounds then ask team members what they have learned about their teammates.

Phase 3: Generate insights

Time: 30 minutes

Now is the time to talk about values. Describe positivity and productivity, and explain that both are equally important. You can show the graph above.

You can choose different options to continue discussion depending on your comfort level.

Option 1: Print all positivity and productivity competencies mentioned above, each on a single card. (You should have 14 cards.) Put the cards on the table and ask the team to classify each competency as an element of productivity or positivity. Start a discussion on what those words mean to the team.

Option 2: Bring the Agile Manifesto or ask people to recall the agile values and principles. Ask the team what values are important to them. You can discuss which of those values influence productivity or positivity.

Option 3: Ask team members to individually write down the three values that are most important for them in their work. Gather the input from all team members and let them describe how they understand those values. Discuss which of those values influence positivity and which affect productivity. Remember, you will end up with a unique set of values — it can be surprising.

These are only examples. You can use any method that works for your team. The result you want is to generate a list of the team’s values with common definitions. Sorting them between positivity and productivity is more a tool to ignite discussion than a goal in itself.

Phase 4: Create a plan

Time: 30 minutes

Ask the team to prioritize values. You can use “must have” and “nice to have” labels. For each “must have”, ask people what behaviors exhibit or break this value. Moderate this discussion to reach agreement on your team’s common values or working agreements. When you finish, show the complete list and once more ask the team if they agree with it. When you get approval, mount the list in a visible place in the team’s area.

Results

I use this exercise mostly to build working agreements. My suggestion is to look at what kinds of values each team member is picking up. It will help you better understand your teammates’ behaviors.

I’ve never had a team choose values belonging only to one area (productivity or positivity) but some teams tend to pick up more values from the area that they feel more comfortable with. I’m don’t push to keep balance, only show teams my observations.

It’s easier for people (especially in the IT industry) to talk about productivity than positivity factors and to explain what kind of behavior they are expecting. Trust or respect are difficult to describe but they eventually will also appear on the list.

The following are real-life examples of working agreements that were created as a result of this exercise.

Goals: “Each sprint and story has clear acceptance criteria, so check it during the backlog grooming. The visual layout is created at latest during planning.”

Accountability: “We are accountable for our code:

• “Do not check in code that is not reviewed.
• “Always fix bugs as top priority.
• “Maintain unit test coverage at the minimum level of 75%.”

Cameraderie: “Go for a beer at least once per sprint.”

Respect: “Respect time. Do not be late. Do not extend meetings. No meetings after 4 PM.”

Communication: “When Kate is working from home, call her on her mobile — do not send e-mail.”

Customer interaction: “Every Tuesday at 1 PM, an operator from xxx company will join a call to answer questions.”

If rules are written down, a team usually doesn’t need help to execute them. This is the greatest benefit of rules created by the people — instead of forced by company policy. None of team members felt ashamed to talk about fulfilling working agreements; they didn’t need a ScrumMaster or manager to voice their concerns.

I’ve also seen the following messages sent among team members:

• “Hey, next week is my birthday. How about our monthly beer next Friday?”
• “Mark, it’s 4 PM. We need to stop here as I have to pick up kids from school. Please check what we have left and we can continue tomorrow after daily.”
• “Guys, I’m pissed off this morning. Three tests failed last night and no one cares. I have fixed it but that’s not what we agreed.”

Disobeying rules that we have created for ourselves is much harder than ignoring rules created for us by another.

Another benefit that my team has found is that they can change their own rules. If you have created a rule that is not working correctly, you just need to get buy-in from your team to move forward and change it.

Senior managers usually ask me here if I’m scared that a team will abuse this possibility. My answer is no. I stopped pushing most external policies upon my teams in 2008 and have since let them tell me what they want.

The most challenging situation that I’ve faced was when a team voted to work in shifts and remotely at the same time. They pointed out that having a full team working at the same time was hard for them due to a resources bottleneck (in equipment usage). They created a rule that stated that until more equipment became available, they will be in the office only between 1 PM and 3 PM each working day and the work schedule outside these hours is left to each individual. I was scared. Would they be able to work efficiently? Would they be working at all? How would this influence communication? Isn’t it against company policy?

We expected new equipment in five weeks. I took a deep breath and said okay.

The new equipment came even earlier, but we kept the rule in place for more than a year as it was working perfectly. Team members were giving their best and delivered results that exceeded expectations. They created an internal working schedule and introduced new tools that supported communication and remote collaboration. Other teams in different time zones were delighted that they could always immediately get in touch with someone on this team. It was a solution to compensate for a lack of resources yet built great trust and proactivity inside the team.

Exercise 2: State assessment

The goal of this exercise is to define the current state of the team and to create a plan to move forward.

This exercise is good for a retrospective. You can use it to clear the air in cases such as changes of team structure or issues with delivering or cooperation. You should repeat this assessment after a couple of sprints to see if the team noticed any improvement.

Phase 1: Let people hear themselves

Time: Up to 5 minutes

Ask “What is the weather in the team today?” You can ask each person for a verbal description or have printed images of sunny/cloudy/rainy/stormy/snowy/etc. Landscapes and ask people to pick one and to explain their pick. This encourages people to express their opinions and the responses will summarize the mood for you. Accept all answers and do not judge them. You might hear “It’s freezing because the air conditioner is broken,” or “I have a beautiful spring day because I’m expecting positive feedback from users for newly delivered functionality.”

Phase 2: Set the stage

Time: 20 to 30 minutes

Describe the purpose of the exercise as follows:

The goal of retrospective is to evaluate the current way of working and search for opportunities to constantly improve it. One of the possible ways of dealing with it is by assessing the quality of work. Do not mistake it for quality of product. Two factors make up quality of work: productivity and positivity. Let's have a look at how productive and positive we are as a team.

Productivity is effectiveness of work. Are we achieving goals? Are we producing good products?

Positivity is a measurement of attitude to work. Are we enjoying what we are doing? Do we like the work atmosphere?

This is how we can present those factors.

Create a two-dimensional grid on the floor. Use duct tape on for the axes or label corners in the room. Use your creativity. What is important is to have clearly divided sectors which require physical activity to move from one to another. Invite team members to role-play. Explain that the purpose of this part of the exercise is to gather information about behaviors in different areas.

Ask team members to go to position A and adopt that perspective, to behave as the sector dictates. Give them a minute to absorb this position. Ask them how they feel, how they perceive their work, what would happen if a new person joins this team. Let everybody speak.

Next, ask the team to move to new position and repeat the exercise for positions B, C, and D (in that order).

Phase 3: Gather data

Time: 5 minutes

Draw the same graph on a flipchart and ask each team member to mark down their assessment of:

• where we are right now, i.e. current state of the team, and
• where they would like to be in one to three sprints from now, i.e. the desired state.

Ask them to reflect on the descriptions they provided in the previous phase.

You might decide to gather the data anonymously on Post-it notes.

Phase 4: Generate insights

Time: 30 minutes

Look at the results from the previous phase. Focus on areas with the biggest distances between current and desired states.

One possible scenario that you may observe is misaligned assessments inside the team of the actual or desired state. If there is a significant difference among team members’ opinions, focus the discussion on those aspects. Try to figure out what drives their perceptions. Let people voice their opinions and expectations.

Here’s a real-life example:

ScrumMaster: Ann, you have scored our productivity low, and Tom, you have scored it above the middle. Can you give us insight what your score is based on?

Tom: Our velocity is still growing. This iteration, we delivered three more story points than last time. I do believe that we are doing great.

Ann: Yes, we have delivered more stories this iteration but our unit-test coverage has dropped and we haven’t created any automated functional test for one of the stories. We’re increasing our technical debt in this area and I’m scared that soon we’re gonna pay for this. We’re just focusing on one aspect and forgetting about others and this is not what we promised in our working agreements.

ScrumMaster: What I hear is the concern about fulfilling the definition of done. Am I right? Let’s discuss the details to reach a common understanding.

Another possibility is that team agrees on the current and desired states but there is a big distance between those values. In such a case, focus the discussion on generating ideas for reaching the new state.

Use brainstorming or any creative method that works for you. For example, the ScrumMaster can say, “At this chart, I can see that our productivity is quite similar to our expectations but our positivity level should be higher. Let’s start generating ideas for how to improve our team spirit. I want to remind you that any idea is good at this stage. Please do not criticize ideas, but feel free to modify any or raise as a new one.”

Phase 5: Decide what to do

Time: 10 to 15 minutes

Mark down all ideas and ask the team to sort them in order of importance. You can use a silent sort or dot voting. Pick up to three of the most important ideas and ask the team if these are their choices for experiments for next sprint. Create a plan to implement them.

Results

This exercise is anchored in the agile principles of inspect and adapt. Scrum teams usually are focused on inspecting and adapting processes from the perspective of certain actions and results. It helps to see a bigger picture of team’s environment. I also have found this exercise useful in pushing people beyond their current thinking patterns. Ideas generated during this exercise are different from simply concluding “what is good and what can we improve”. People bring much more of their previous experience to the discussion.

I find that walking the team across all the state fields on the grid to finish in the high-performing zone is an important part of this exercise. It helps people create a vision that motivates them for change.

Once, when a team was standing in position D, one team member said, “I was thinking that the Avengers are like this. Do we want to be like the Avengers?” The team liked it. “Avengers” became their official name and each team member chose an avatar from the movie. What they gathered was a tool that helped them think outside the box and a glue that was keeping the team together: “C’mon. Let’s solve this problem like Iron Man;” “What? This story is much more worth than 13 story points. The testing set will be heavier than Thor’s hammer.” Comparing situations and behaviors to their favorite movie characters also gave them neutral ground for solving conflicts. This particular team didn’t need a peaceful environment. They enjoyed the constant tension that was pushing them to achieve.

In another team, someone said, “That was scary. I was once working in a team in field A. I hated work. We never talked to each other. Management was pushing for results. We hadn’t been responsible for work as a team, but as a group of individuals. I never shared my ideas as someone else could steal them. If I ever hit this state again, I will quit immediately.” In this case, sharing fear and frustration helped clear the air. Beware! When setting the stage, I’ve asked people if they have worked in teams occupying the A, B, C or D section, and I’ve ended up with retrospectives of all past and neighbour projects. It requires great moderating skills to get back on track and talk about the current project; otherwise, this can kill the retrospective.

I have also observed an anchoring process, in which all team members pick a similar place as the first person to vote. Anonymous voting is safer. Another option is to ask strong personalities (each team has its informal leader) to vote at the end.

In my experience, a team usually agrees on the positivity aspects. Things that are difficult to describe are easy to feel. Also, positivity is not the first area that a team is willing to choose for improvement unless there is a conflict in the team. The choices always have to be the team’s.

When productivity is discussed, I see a tendency to focus on details in a not so positive way. You may hear excuses for low scoring such as: “It wasn’t our fault. Requirements were not clear;” “We have poor equipment;” “John has broken the mainlane and hasn’t fixed it for three days because he was on sick leave;” “There is no work for my area of experience so I’m working slowly.”

This need to be cut out quickly. In such a situation, I clearly call out this behavior: “I can hear blame or explanations in this sentence. This isn’t our goal. If you are concerned about the situation, think of what YOU can do to change it.” After one or two interventions, people usually start thinking more constructively: “Okay, next time I see something that I have doubts about, I will ask the team or call the PO to confirm before implementation;” “Maybe we can ask to refresh our build environment. I can pull out stats for how long it takes to perform builds and basics tests if this will help;” “I can do pair program with Andrew to understand this piece of code.”

If people are too deeply buried in negative thoughts and cannot switch their way of thinking, I break the session and ask the participants to do some energizing exercises to bring up the mood. My feeling is that the team will not later execute any plans created during such a state of depression.

I’ve learned that each team has its own desired state and way of working. I used to assume that a state of high productivity and positivity is the target for everybody. That is not true. I’ve faced teams that pinned their desired states in fields A and B. After a couple of sprints in this state, they’ve eventually taken decision to move forward.

Exercise 3: Values reassessment

The goal of this exercise is to check if team values have changed.

It can be used to follow up after a previous retrospective.

Phase 1: Let people hear themselves

Time: Up to 15 minutes

Present your working agreements or team values to the team and ask each team member to select the single statement that is especially important to them. Ask people to comment on their choices.

Phase 2: Set the stage

Time: 5 minutes

Describe the purpose of this exercise as follows:

The goal of this retrospective is to check if we are moving in the right direction with our performance and attitude.

I’d like to remind you that productivity is the effectiveness of work. Are we achieving goals? Are we producing a good product?

Positivity is the measurement of attitude to work. Are we enjoying what we are doing? Do we like the work atmosphere?

Previously, we have evaluated where we are and we have selected our desired state. (Show the states that the team assessed as actual and desired in exercise 2.) Let’s add our current state to this chart.

Hand out markers and encourage the team to add new dots. Examine with the team which areas require further evaluation: “I can see that our positivity has improved since last time but our productivity has slightly decreased. Is it okay to focus on that today?”

Be prepared! You cannot predict what the team will choose. Just follow their suggestions.

Phase 3: Gather data

Time: 30 minutes

Create a radar plot of competencies for the selected area. The easiest way is to place on the floor string, duct tape, or anything that will divide the room into areas. You can use the positivity or productivity factors mentioned above or the list of your team’s values that you created in exercise 1. I usually select values from only either productivity or positivity but there is nothing preventing you from mixing them. Write the factors on separate sheets and put one in each field as in the image below. Always add a “?” field. You cannot be sure that your list is complete.

Ask team members to walk across the fields to remind themselves what every factor means.

Search for the strong points of the team. You can use some of following questions:

• “At which of these factors you feel strong?”
• “Which factor is the biggest asset of the team?”
• “In which area have you most improved?”
• “For which area would you give yourself the highest score?”

Ask the team members to stand in their selected fields and share their points of view. If needed, ask questions to get deeper insight, e.g. “What helped you in this improvement?” The field with the question mark can be selected by those who would like to use areas not listed.

Now, search for areas to improve. Ask questions such as:

• “Which of these factors are you missing?”
• “If you have to pick one area that would help you achieve better performance, which would it be?”
• “In which area would you like to improve now?”
• “For which of these areas would you give yourself the lowest score?”

Again ask the members to stand in their selected fields. Use the question mark the same way as above.

Observe what is happening. You may discover one or many strong and weak points. It’s possible that someone will select as a weak point the same area that a teammate selected as a strong point. Highlight this and focus on that point during the next phase.

Phase 4: Generate insights

Time: 20 minutes

Start generating proposals for actions that will help you move forward as a team. For example, the ScrumMaster might say:

A significant number of you has chosen accountability as a strong asset that we can build on. You have also selected proactivity as an area to develop and decision making as something that we have mixed feelings about.

Let’s focus on those factors. Please work in pairs on proposals for actions that could influence or employ selected competencies. Write them on Post-it notes.

Of course, use any method that your team might prefer to gather input. Discuss all proposals.

Phase 5: Decide what to do

Time: 10 to 15 minutes

Ask the team to sort all discussed proposals in order of importance, possibility for implementation, or predicted return of investment. You can use a silent sort or dot voting. Pick one to three of the most important ideas and ask the team members if this is their choice of experiments for next sprint. Create a plan for implementation.

Results

There is always at least one person who will choose the question mark.

When leading this exercise as a follow up, teams who have been working together for longer periods of time touch on more difficult items. I’ve heard about:

• Trust — “I feel that we are breaking our trust. At the last retrospective, we showed a delivered story but we haven’t said anything about bugs that we have introduced and not fixed. I don’t feel comfortable with this.”
• Decision making — “We are good at making decisions, maybe even too good. I don’t think that we should make a decision about the limitation of this functionality. This decision should be made by the PO.”
• Goal — “I don’t align with the vision of this product. I don’t think that it will be a success but no one has listened to my concerns.”

You need to address each of those issues. Sometimes, this is way too much to address quickly or even to discuss during one meeting. For one retrospective, I allow the team to select one (sometimes two) area to work on, but I record all concerns and will walk through them one by one during subsequent retrospectives or additional follow-up sessions. Quite frequently during this exercise, hidden conflicts or disappointments are brought to light. During the retrospective, I’m trying to focus only on those that are relevant to the team — but that doesn’t mean that the others are not important. I touch on each of them separately. Sometimes just saying something loud is enough; other cases may result in stating clearly that a person wants to leave a team.

Conclusion

When you are working with the values of your team, keep in mind that the team is living organism. It’s constantly evolving and that is great. Be with them and enjoy their changes. As a ScrumMaster, you will never be bored. Be prepared and open for anything that will happen. Whatever values you discover are the correct values as long as you all agree on them.

References

1. Blake, R. and Mouton, J. (1985). The Managerial Grid III: The Key to Leadership Excellence
2. Derby, E. and Larsen, D. (2006). Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
3. Whitworth, L., Kimsey-House, H., and Sandahl, P. (1998) Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life
4. Team Diagnostic. 
5. Examples of icebreakers and energizing activities:
   1. Best Icebreaker Games for Adults 
   2. Icebreakers for Small Groups