It was another day at work for Andy as a senior agile consultant and one of the questions asked by few of the key leaders was when will I get a schedule for the project delivery. Everyone was working hard and doing everything possible yet it seems like they were either heading in wrong direction or they didn’t know how far is their destination.
Cathy was a new product owner ( to be precise 3rd product owner in last four months) for a “Dream Runner” squad whose mission was to deliver best possible customer experience for new customers. She has always worked in the environment in which upfront clarity, upfront planning and big deliveries were appreciated. Being in the environment in which constant exploration of the work was needed to finalise scope was bothering her a lot . On top of that there have been several changes in the team and senior management which was making it hard to bring in any predictability or certainty.
This is when Andy has been hired to help “Dream Runner” team and Cathy to evolve their ways of working so that everyone can get a feel of what’s really happening and what are the real challenges. So far everyone was doing their part of work based on their understanding of what is most important. There were lot of bits and bytes in progress which everyone believed that these will help team to meet final goal. Focus was more on getting started with as many things as possible with hope that it will help to get lot of things finished soon.
Andy found that having a common place where whole team can keep list of all things will be a good start. So he started talking to his manager and other team leaders on what’s best tool to capture it . After knowing that ideal work management tools such as JIRA, RALLY are out of bound for this team , he decided to go with what’s available at the moment which is confluence – online documentation tool.
Keeping things simple was one of the main reasons so everyone started listing down all tasks / activities on the single confluence page. That was a big eye opener as so far no one was aware what’s going on across the team and this is first time anyone can see at a single glance what whole team is doing.
For Cathy , the product owner this was a huge relief as she was struggling to get this big picture by talking with individual team members . As she went thru the list of tasks currently worked on by the team , one thing became apparent that everyone was super busy however she wasn’t able to connect the dots . Somehow still this information wasn’t able to give her clear idea 💡 on where team is heading and whether they are on track to deliver amazing customer experience to new customers before Christmas 🎄 festival season which was just 5 months away.
One of the steps which she decided to take is to go thru the whole list and find out what’s MUST DO , SHOULD DO and COULD DO to deliver better customer experience. She also started expanding that list by adding few more things which she believed team should do but not listed anywhere. As she started going thru this exercise she realised that list is growing up very fast (around 500 tasks were listed in it ) and there was no way one can start and finish all of those before Christmas 🎅 season.
Over the next week or two she decided to trim this huge list and put some sanity into it with help of few of the senior team members who seems to know a lot more than her. As she went through several sessions of 30 mins to 1 hour she realised that there is a common pattern and theme emerging from what has been covered in that huge list. She thought probably it will be good idea to take a step back and identify what are the big rocks, themes customers might be interested in and what team should be focusing on. So she decided to pivot and started pulling together 4-5 big rocks which can help to track down work and bring some sort of strategy to succesfully meet Christmas 🤶 timelines.
Want to know what you should do with such situations and how Agility Academy Experts can help you gain skills to tackle such challenges?
If answer is yes then book FREE 15-30 minutes Agile Leadership Consulting session HERE and take first step towards advancing your Agile Leadership Journey TODAY. Keep learning, keep growing !!!
