(Newswire.net — June 19, 2019) — One of the ways to prevent or minimize losses is to eliminate mistakes at the very beginning of the journey. However, at the early stages of the Scrum implementation, the team is trapped by a huge number of difficulties. Read about the most common mistakes that make 99% of Scrum teams and their solutions in the article.
1. Too many unfinished tasks
Do you remember your first steps towards introducing Scrum into the workflow? When there are more obstacles and blockers than solutions, then the growing number of unfinished tasks could cause the total collapse. At this stage, most teams are convinced that Scrum does not work with them. Why is this happening?
Tip: Follow one of the Learn philosophy guidelines: “Stop starting and start finishing.” Focus on only one task at a time and move on to the next one after finishing the previous one. Implement the additional solutions to optimize your everyday job using Standuply Slack bot. It helps to fully replace Scrum master, run Slack polls, retrospective or everyday Scrum meetings.
2. Individual decision making
It is often happening that the stakeholders and the Scrum make individual decisions. We often hear two possible explanations:
- the team is passive and does not want to decide on this issue;
- the team takes too long time to make a decision
Tip: Be patient and allow the team members to take responsibility. It may take more time than you would like, but if you continue to do it yourself, the team will not share the responsibility for result. It will also cause the lack of motivation among team members. Scrum Master should help the team to reach a consensus as soon as possible.
3. Behavioral Management
Many managers are still confident that the best way to monitor employees behavior is to measure their effectiveness. Due to this belief, managers are trying to calculate the number of hours spent on each task, strictly following their activity. Have you ever seen a real positive effect from such surveillance? Improving work efficiency is certainly an important condition for reducing costs and increasing profits. However, one should not forget that in some situations it could be useful to sacrifice efficiency in favor of flexibility.
Tip: Concentrate only on important and meaningful metrics, for example, quality of work, Definition of Done, progress in achieving the Sprint Goal, users’ feedbacks. Remember that team members are real people who also need a space to think and learn. Without flexibility in work, team performance indicators are unlikely to be at the high level.
Conclusion
Do not hesitate to remind team members that they should strive to constant improvement in order to achieve the highest level of productivity. Continuous improvement is one of the foundations for the development of a corporate Scrum culture. Which means do you think are the most effective for increasing team productivity? Share your thoughts in comments.