GetYourHandsDirty

You are teaching a team things such as backlog management, prioritization, light-weight requirements or how to write INVEST User Stories.

To do that, you have spent days preparing a wonderful workshop and training materials using a Pizza delivery service as an example (yes, I have done that too).

They say they liked your workshop, yet after that, nothing changes. The team is helpless when it comes to applying what they learned at the workshop on their own real backlog.

Therefore...

Get your hands dirty!

Understand their business, their product, and their backlog. Pair with the Product Owner. Go ahead and propose ways to split big User Stories from the real backlog.

Details

Some people learn to do something by seeing someone else do it first. Also, what you feel is easy and obvious, may be difficult and counter-intuitive to someone else. Therefore as a coach, you may need to participate in hands-on backlog management activities, User Story writing, etc.

When I talk about this approach of mine with my colleagues, some of them are uncomfortable. One colleague once told me: "Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime.". As if to say that by getting into the backlog and "doing", I was actually not helping on the long run.

I disagree. This saying says nothing about how you teach a man how to fish! What if that person has no idea how tasty a fish is? Maybe you need to fish (and even cook) one for him first. And once he has fallen in love with your tasty fish and wants more of it, maybe he is still helpless when it comes to manipulating the fishing rod. Maybe he needs to see you fish once. So, don't shy away from doing things with the team, or even for the team.

Yes, that does create a dependency on you and that is something you will need to deal with later. But for now, this might be exactly what they need. If you manage to do that, your coaching will be more valuable to the team than your Pizza delivery service training by an order of magnitude.

results for ""

    No results matching ""