A Troika Consulting experiment for daily stand-ups feedback
Stine N. Olesen, Oleksii Tkachuk and Renato Claudino
How can the scrum masters learn from or give feedback to each other? There are certainly many good ways to do that, by simply talking to each other for 10 minutes or following each other’s work closely for a given period.
It may be a challenge though to try to find a balance between the time spent and the value you get from it. In other words, the return of investment. This post will provide you a framework that — with only little investment — you can experiment with to learn from each other, share thoughts, collect feedback and increase awareness of your peer scrum masters’ challenges.
What to expect from the experiment?
The participants in this experiment can expect to:
- Give each other feedback
- Follow each other and see how peers interact with teams
- Experience different teams with different team dynamics in our organization
Troika Consulting
Troika Consulting is a Liberating Structure that can be used by teams, peers or groups to give each other “consultations”, that could be coaching, mentoring or — in the case of this experiment — feedback. This liberating structure is based on two roles:
- Consultants: the ones who will provide the feedback
- Client: the one who will receive feedback
You can find more info about troika consulting here: http://www.liberatingstructures.com/8-troika-consulting/
How to do it?
The setup of this experiment is based on three scrum masters. Each scrum master will host the other two on his/her team’s daily stand-up (DSU) meetings.
The scrum master of the team who is having the DSU will be the ‘client’ and the two guest scrum masters will be the ‘consultants’.
Setup of each DSU visit:
- The two consultants will be silent during the DSU. Their presence is mentioned as observers.
- The team should not change the usual behavior or the stand-up structure because of them.
After each DSU visit, a Troika Consulting meeting is organized, preferably on the same day. Suggestion: 15 min per team visited.
- The meeting starts the feedback part, with the client scrum master turning the back to the consultants and being silent, so the consultants cannot hear or see the client’s face expressions or body language.
- In a virtual setup: the client scrum master turns the camera and mic off.
- The two consultants share their observations from the DSU and discuss with each other — what they found interesting, what they liked and potentially suggestions to improvement. That should be a dialog referring to the client in a third person as if he/she is not part of the conversation.
- After the feedback, the client turns around (or the camera and mic on) so he/she gets part of the talk. Then the client shares his/her thoughts about the experience and the takeaways from the discussion the consultants had. It’s also an opportunity to ask clarifying questions.
Why the daily stand-ups?
The daily stand-up meeting is a great meeting to observe many things in a team, for example to observe the team’s approach to defects, user stories, impediments and other daily routines etc. Also, as it takes only 15 min, it’s also easy to find time to attend it.
In addition to the above, it also gives a great insight of:
- How the team members interact among themselves and towards scrum master and product owner (PO)
- How the atmosphere is and how the scrum master contributes to that
- Who is active and how the team dynamic is
- How the team work together to achieve its goals
Results of the experiment
Overall, it was great experience for us to try this out. Each of us works with two teams, so we had the opportunity to get to know better the team dynamics in four other teams from our department — which is already a great learning.
Apart from that, some of the results are listed below. They are gathered from two different perspectives as the following:
Consultant scrum master
- The consultants can learn some good practices from the client and “steal with pride”
- For the consultants it can be an eye-opener to realize that peers may face the exact same challenges
- The consultants can spot or realize about their own behaviors by observing others and how it affects the meeting (mirror effect)
Client scrum master
- The client can receive tips or suggestions of what to possibly improve
- Even if you know about issues in your team it’s valuable to see that the observers could spot them, so you can prioritize it
- Amazed how accurate the two ‘consultants’ where from just being in one daily stand-up
Conclusion
It was a great experience for the three of us. We definitely want to try it out again and also with other scrum masters/teams. Below some of the positive feedback we gave to each other:
- “Well done! Sorting out possible conflicts in a smooth way”
- “Kudos for ability to encourage the team to do ‘more than just enough’
- “I was amazed to see the team started the DSU discussions even before anyone shared a screen”
- “Good job being able to treat the DSU in different ways that suits the team’s personality”
- “It was super great to see how the scrum master was embracing the silence and letting team members step in and not overtake the meeting”
Variations
If you want to try this experiment with variations, here are some suggestions:
- Have more than one DSU’s before a Troika Consulting session
- Get some of the team members — other than the scrum master — into the consulting session
- Try the Troika Consulting as coaching style, instead of feedback, for any issue the scrum master client wants to solve
