Team health checks - now with more teams!

I had the chance to help out with team (squad) health checks again, this time with eight dev teams (last occasion was just two) - seven of which happened in a single week!  One of the teams had done a few health checks in the years prior, and it was really cool to see their responses and approaches mature over time.

As before, a ton of learning and a great experience all around, with some really cool insight from the folks participating:
  • On the topic of 'delivering value', one team member raised his hand after the team had said their piece and noted: "You [the team] have been describing delivering quality.  Delivering value is something else."  (which of course spurred other discussions and thoughts)
  • Success metrics/OKRs have the power of crystallizing the organizational mission as results
  • Legacy code/platforms constrain present/future options (i.e. tech debt doesn't just require recoup work in future, it prevents you from doing some things in future - as if to say, tech debt not only constrains your time, it constrains your options)
  • Include your product and UX people, if they work with the teams - they provide valuable perspective
Some thoughts on being the facilitator:
  • Doing two health checks per day with only one hour between them was a bit tight
  • 'Booking 3 hours, assuming 2 hours' inevitably meant the meetings ran for 3 hours (that being said, these teams are a lot larger - 8-17 people vs. 5-8 people)
  • Have someone else handle food arrangements for you (we just didn't end up having food)
  • It's fascinating to observe what is not said alongside what is
  • Remaining neutral is hard, especially if you are part of the organization (i.e. have a vested interest in seeing things improve) - resist the urge to plant ideas in folks' heads
    • Start each meeting with humility, and the understanding that you do not have all the answers
    • Remember that large value here comes from letting the team talk amongst themselves
Things I'm going to do differently next time:
  • Silent idea gathering, group debate: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Silent-Brainstorming (there were definitely some people that were quiet, and therefore didn't participate as much as they could have) - thanks, Steve!
  • Food (veggie tray, cookies, whatever - snack food)
  • Dedicate/block off time for clarifying notes/observations after each session
My biggest retrospective thought was that I bring an agenda with me.  Even if my intentions are pure, is that a good thing for a team self-retro session?  What's the real purpose of having health checks - to shepherd the teams, to provide group therapy, to facilitate team building?  Should the team run their own health checks?  I suppose you could call the facilitator out as an 'agile coach', and therefore a good thing.  Not sure, but there will be more opportunities to learn and understand - we're going to start doing these quarterly, so as I learn, I'll share!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many of us work in seem to apply this as law - an
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible on
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D-5E67-4DA1-99A
Read more