Information Technology Reference
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need closer supervision, especially toward the beginning of a new Agile
effort where the customer is interacting on a daily basis.
One of the specific practices intended to help manage the current list of
work is the daily go-round where all team members discuss briefly what
they have accomplished since the last meeting, what they plan to work on
during the next day, and any obstacles they might be facing. The entire
team is responsible for the team's work, and members are expected to chal-
lenge other team members who might be working issues that have not been
agreed to.
This practice motivates the team to stay on schedule. The DART team should
have been challenging Al, but they didn't feel there was anything wrong
because they thought Al was just “collaborating” with the customer. The
DART team members thought Al was doing the right thing because the cus-
tomer was happy. The team members, all being new to Scrum, had not fully
understood their responsibilities as Scrum team members.
LESSON 1
Don't expect your people to know how to collaborate if they haven't worked
closely with a customer before. Plan to spend time training them in the
practical issues related to “how to collaborate.”
7
8.8 Why Didn't We Prepare Al for His Collaboration
Challenges?
To u n d e r s t a n d w h y w e d i d n ' t p re p a re A l f o r h i s c o l l a b o r a t i o n c h a l l e n g e s , w e
need to talk more about DART and the responsibilities of Scrum team mem-
bers. When using Scrum, work tasks are placed on a visible list. Scrum was
originally developed for software projects. I recommended to DART that we
tailor this to address all project work.
Even if you include systems products, documentation, and software, some
work tasks never make it to an Agile team list. The typical tasks found on a
Product or Sprint backlog are tasks such as code, design, test, and docu-
mentation.
7. A technique to aid collaboration is provided later in this chapter.
