The document discusses key aspects of agility, retrospectives, and the importance of human relationships in effective teamwork, particularly within the context of sprints at Exove. It highlights the stages of group development and the dynamics involved in building trust and communication to enhance team performance. Finally, it emphasizes the significance of open atmosphere, constructive feedback, and self-evolution in achieving high-functioning teams.

1. Agility, retrospectives and
human relationships
DrupalCamp Baltics 2017

2. Very briefly about me
● Perttu Ehn
https://www.drupal.org/u/rpsu
@ropsue
● Competence manager at Exove Ltd www.exove.com
● 11 years of Drupal, contrib module maintainer.
● A scout since 35 years. Leadership trainer.

3. Topics covered in this session
● Agility - via lens of one typical sprint @ Exove
● Retrospective - what and why
● Human relationships - why does it matter

4. Agility - what is it?
● Business needs first -approach
● Small frequent releases
● Work side by side (client, developers)
● Empower everyone, embrace ownership
● Prefer direct conversations, F2F
● Simplicity! Less work = more value.

5. Agility - what is it?
● Effective and truly productive agility relies on self-organised and self-steered
task force.
● Structure is there to support that, and only for that.
● Flex where needed.
● The team must decide how to tune and adjust to become more effective.
● http://agilemanifesto.org/

6. Our agile project roles
● Product owner, PO
● Project manager, PM
● Tech lead
● Architect
● Scrum master
● Developers

7. Events
● Work in 2 week long sprints
○ Backlog grooming
○ Sprint planning
○ Daily standup
○ (Mid-sprint review)
○ Sprint review
○ Sprint retrospective

8. Events in timeline

9. Backlog grooming
● Main Focus: Prepare tickets (user stories) for the upcoming sprint
● Project Manager, Product Owner, Tech lead
● Meant for keeping the backlog relevant and prioritised
● Used also for reducing scope creep
● Is story actionable and small enough for the developer?
○ Tech lead should split stories to max 2 days long chunks…
○ … because ticking boxes helps you feel you’ve accomplished something!
○ … because smaller items are easier to define clearly.

10. Sprint planning
● Main Focus: Define sprint goal, build sprint backlog
● Product owner describes the highest priority features.
● The team (!) decides what they want to achieve during the sprint, write it
together with Product owner.
● Backlog building == The team picks tasks/issues/user stories/whatever you
have -items to work on to fulfil sprint goal.

11. Daily standup (a.k.a daily scrum meeting)
● Every day at the same time (morning)
● Scrum master runs the show
● Keep standing through the meeting
● Everyone answers these questions briefly:
1. What did I achieve yesterday?
2. What will I achieve today?
3. What is blocking me?

12. Sprint review
● What have we achieved, time to be proud!
● Prepare something to show to the Product Owner
● The success of the sprint is evaluated against the sprint goal (not against items
in the backlog).

13. Retrospective - what and why
● Time when the team can freely talk about the good and the bad in the sprint
● It’s important that the atmosphere is open and honest.
● Main questions to discuss: What team should
1. start doing,
2. stop doing and
3. continue doing
● Improving the working culture!
● Identify an actionable change, an improvement that can be reached during the next sprint. Repeat.

14. Human relationships - why does it matter

15. Human relationships - why does it matter
● “It’s important that the atmosphere is open and honest.”
● Groups of people do not form a highly performant team on their own, except in
fairly rare cases (17 %).
● More than half of the groups fail to fulfil their expected goals.
● Highly performant teams produce much more, and of a better quality.
● High performance translates to €€€ very easily.

16. Group process
● Several studies and lots of research on this since 1940’s
● Several models, but in overall most of them are well aligned
● But…

18. Stage I Dependency and Inclusion
● Dependency on the designated leader
● Concerns about safety and about feeling included in the group.
● Fear of rejection.
● Members rely on the leader and powerful group members to provide direction.
● Group goal possible unclear, but members won’t try to clarify it.
● Group assumes consensus about groups goal (!).
● Sign of this stage: Leader asks a question but no-one answers.

19. Stage II Counterdependency and Fight
● Disagreements on group goals and procedures, roles - clarification process
starts.
● Conflict is inevitable.
● Conflict is a positive sign of groups process!
● Conflict resolution is necessary for the establishment of trust and a climate in
which members feel free to disagree with each other.
● Interpersonal conflicts may stop group process - focus on group goals.

20. Stage III Trust / Structure
● Increase of trust and commitment to the group.
● Willingness to cooperate increase.
● More open and task-oriented, “professional” communication.
● Focus from power, status and influence issues to work tasks.
● More mature negotiations about roles, organisation, and procedures.
● Leader’s role changes to more consultative role
● Cohesion and member satisfaction increases

21. Stage IV Work / Productivity
● It is rare to have opportunity to be in a group in this stage!
● Group performance is really high, both in quality and quantity.
● Team’s goals, group roles and individual statuses are clear and accepted.
● Group uses members skills efficiently.
● Team expects to be successful.
● Team encourages innovation.
● Team norms encourage high performance and quality.

22. Using group process as a tool
● Make conscious choice if investing in group process makes sense.
1. Either keep group in Inclusion -phase…
○ rotate group members regularly
○ keep focus purely in tasks at hand, not in interpersonal relationships
○ keep short, task -focused meetings, no hanging around!
○ (This is a good idea in various situations!)
2. … or help group evolve!

23. In stage I: Focus on inclusion
● To feel included, people want to feel
○ Significant - feeling of being noticed and personal needs covered (food,
space, etc.).
○ Competent - feeling of being listened to, ones expressed opinions are
listened to.
○ Loved - feeling of been paid attention to, acknowledged, given feedback to.

24. In stage II: Focus on openness and trust
● Value and express gratitude.
● Be constructive. Use structural feedback tools if necessary.
● Focus on work issues, avoid conflicts based on personality or incompatibility
issues.
● Remember this is positive sign of group development.
● Be patient.

25. How to help teams to self-evolve?
● Educate people about group process (science -backed, no snake oil magic)
● Do not get fooled by “rock climbing helps your team” -claims.
○ In a context of group performance - inefficient.
● Give and ask feedback. Lot’s of it. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
● Enough space and mandate to work the task.

26. How to help teams to self-evolve?
● Ask team to set its own goals. Works well at any stage!
○ In essence this way you hand over ownership of the team evolvement to the
group members.
● Patience. Group process takes time.

27. Recap
● Agility - via lens of one typical sprint @ Exove
● Retrospective - what and why
● Human relationships - why does it matter

28. Questions?

29. Thank you!
Susan A. Wheelan
Creating effective teams
A guide for Members and Leaders