Want to bring your productivity to the next level? Let's gain a desire based on an experience to make this happen.
Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little fire that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. We will also discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels. Learning Objectives for this presentation are as follows:
- Gain an understanding, through an exercise, of the cost to productivity a common habit has, that many of us indulge in.
- A new found desire to fix one of the major issues that reduces productivity and quality.
- 2 approaches to fixing the issue.
Slides from Brian Sjoberg's talk at Global Scrum Gathering Orlando 2016.
- See more at: https://www.scrumalliance.org/courses-events/events/global-gatherings/2016/orlando-2016
59. @ExcellaCo @onek2go @FadiStephan
Team Working User Stories
User Story A
User Story B
User Story C
User Story D
Priority
Day 2 Day 4 Day 6 Day 8 Day 10
65. @ExcellaCo @onek2go @FadiStephan
• Henrik Kniberg’s Facilitation Guide for
Name Game
– https://www.crisp.se/gratis-material-och-
guider/multitasking-name-game
• How Multitasking Affects the Way You
Think by Clifford Nass
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHJMIO
wKjE
References
66. @ExcellaCo @onek2go @FadiStephan
• Test Your Focus
– http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/0
7/technology/20100607-distraction-filtering-
demo.html?_r=0
References
Help partner with individuals, teams and organizations to steamroll impediments to help them build amazing products.
Magical key
Drive it home at slower than walking pace.
Studying roommate thought a train was coming through the house and came out to see this.
Metaphor for professional life. Smoothing the road for individuals, teams and organizations.
Agile Coach at Excella
Focus on Org Transform
DC Scrum User Group
Help partner with individuals, teams and organizations to steamroll impediments to help them build amazing products.
Magical key
Drive it home at slower than walking pace.
Studying roommate thought a train was coming through the house and came out to see this.
Metaphor for professional life. Smoothing the road for individuals, teams and organizations.
Agile Coach at Excella
Focus on Org Transform
DC Scrum User Group
Who likes to play games?
Who plays games at work?
Take off your name tags
Who has played this?
Explain game
How long to write one name?
How long to write 5 names?
Gather factors on flip chart. Big letters.
You came here as Scrum Conference Attendees and you need a name tag written for you because you don’t know how to write letters.
For the purposes of this exercise, please remove your official conference name tags.
Lucky for you we have hired a company that says they are great at writing name tags.
They were the lowest bidder and said they would never leave a customer waiting. They believe in start early and finish early. They aim to please everyone. Who couldn’t go wrong with that.
Service at a Snap
Each table is going to break up into Customers and developers. Please remove your name tags …
Seated like this. Some of you didn’t know this coming in but you actually work for SaaS.
Each table is going to break up into Customers and developers. Please remove your name tags …
Seated like this. Some of you didn’t know this coming in but you actually work for SaaS.
Seated like this. Some of you didn’t know this coming in but you actually work for SaaS.
Only skill needed to be developer is ability to write letters.
Customers each have a blank card and need your name written on it. Problem is you don’t know how to write letters.
Furthermore you want your card delivered as quickly as possible.
I will provide a big stopwatch to track the time for delivery.
If bug, you must return
Ordering process:
- Send you card, tell your name
- Wait for name
- Time how long it took
Misspellings must be corrected before checking time
Remove name tags
Just write names but have to adhere to corporate policy.
Mention customer should have a card and sharpie.
Animate sequence of serving each customer equally.
Animate sequence of serving each customer equally.
Animate sequence of serving each customer equally.
Animate sequence of serving each customer equally.
Animate sequence of serving each customer equally.
Tabulate results. Collect results in seconds after you finish, write them on the round 1 card and hold the card up.
Debrief round 1, what influenced and rattle off whether it was one of the influencing factors that the group came up with.
Tabulate results. Collect results in seconds after you finish, write them on the round 1 card and hold the card up.
This was the simplest possible project
-‐
Just write a name on a piece of paper! Yet, multitasking caused us to blow the delivery time by 1250%.
Not only that, it also reduced our productivity to one third of what we expected.
We thought it would take 25 seconds to write 5 names, but it took 60 seconds!
Well you know what Sloth Company …
Lucky for you we have hired a company that says they are great at writing name tags.
They were the lowest bidder and said they would never leave a customer waiting. They believe in start early and finish early. They aim to please everyone. Who couldn’t go wrong with that.
Service at a Snap
Service at a Snap, Ha, Slow as a Sloth.
They believe in start early and finish early. They aim to please everyone. Who couldn’t go wrong with that.
Developers stand up, YOU’RE FIRED!! Now switch places with the other developer or find another table to switch with.
Turns out SaaS stood for Slow as a Sloth. Go figure.
We now hired the git er done company and there motto is to make one customer happy at a time.
Now we are going to hire a new company
Ordering process:
- Send your card, tell your name
- Wait for name
- Time how long it took
Misspellings must be corrected before checking time
Remove name tags
Just write names but have to adhere to corporate policy.
Which one of the factors had biggest impact?
How did these two rounds feel to you as Dev or Customer?
What was it like being the last customer in round 2, compared to in round 1?
What do you think about the statement ‘if we start early, we’ll finish early’?
How does this influence release planning? For example, what do we know after 10 seconds in round 1 vs. round 2?
What would have happened if the dev was perfect at task switching?
How does this influence product quality?
Does this multitasking problem feel familiar? Who is experiencing this right now? Who has experienced this in the past?
What causes us to do this? Why is the problem so common?
When is multitasking a good idea? Who benefits in round 1?
What can you do to combat this problem in your environment?
Did your rounds look similar to this?
Even if you were perfect at context switching it would still take the same length of time to deliver all items.
Little’s law – If you do X things simultaneously, then each thing will take X times longer.
This is better but having more then 2 items in flight will cause you to be less active in removing impediments on higher priority projects.
Your brain, team, program, organization multitasking
Your brain, the team, program, organization
Get good at uni-tasking.
Hire people that hate multitasking
Purpose of Talk – Highlight one of the major culprits to productivity and provide some techniques for improving. When I talk about productivity I don’t necessarily mean output. More like outcome. Give example. Become CSC versus output of coaching activity.
Give awareness of something else
Increase desire to change because of awareness
With that desire you will want to gain the ability to make change
Promote the success that happened because of change
Transfer to others to repeat ADAPT loop
From Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn:
Awareness that the current process is not delivering acceptable results
Desire to adopt Scrum as a way to address current problems
Ability to succeed with Scrum
Promotion of Scrum through sharing experiences so that we rememberand others can see our successes
Transfer of the implications of using Scrum throughout the company
Have you ever been on a project where the work you ship feels like this?