Are you having trouble communicating and understanding daily goals as a team? Is there a lack of transparency? Do deadlines keep getting missed? Are there too many meetings being scheduled daily with co-workers?
Something I have come to value greatly in any part of the organization is a daily meeting with the below three questions. This allows for inspecting and adapting as a team toward your goals. This meeting also helps build transparency and raise any impediments to one’s work. In Scrum, it is called Daily Scrum. In this ceremony, three questions taken from the Scrum Guide are asked:
• “What did I do yesterday that helped the Development (your) Team meet the Sprint Goal?”
• “What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?”
• “Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?”
A sprint (team) goal would be defined as what you are trying to complete in a certain period of time as a team. For example, let’s say you have a project in marketing, and two people on the team are working on the creative assets and another person is working on getting the advertising placements scheduled. These three team members are working toward the sprint goal of having the assets submitted to the chosen advertising agency in the next two weeks. They coordinate daily with other team members in the process using the above three questions and inspect and adapt as needed.
You may also invite other stakeholders such as someone in financing or a manager to listen if they want to know where a particular item is in the process. Say an impediment comes up and the team member above working on the advertising placement can’t get a hold of one of the advertising agencies. It may get flagged to the manager listening in and they may have a connection that helps to put them in contact with the agency. Therefore, the impediment gets removed and time, money, and effort is saved in the process.
This meeting would ideally be time-boxed to fifteen minutes or less. Follow up conversations outside the three answers to the above questions would ideally be spoken about after the meeting. These conversations after the meeting are of great value in inspecting and adapting to your team’s goal. One may also find it beneficial to keep a list of impediments from the meeting for transparency and to make an actionable list to work from.
What activities have you tried to build transparency with your team’s goals and improving communication? Have you tried a daily meeting such as Daily Scrum?