Agile Checklists Guide: Onboarding plan
How to create the best onboarding plan for your team using checklists
In my current job, I got to experience being in a team that has been built from scratch within the past 3 years. It is risky if you are joining a team that has no structured working culture. But also it is very educational if you have passionate teammates who are constantly trying to do better and bring up ideas to improve. I was a lucky one so I feel like these past 3 years have taught me more than what I can learn in 10 work years maybe!
One of the life-changing and important lessons I have learned in this team was the power of checklists. I have read a book called “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande and I can not tell you enough about how this book changed my mindset in both my personal and work life. The book makes you understand your failures first. There could be two types of mistakes that cause failures; mistakes we make because we don’t know enough or mistakes we make because we don’t use what we know properly. It focuses on teaching you to make proper use of what you know by designing the best checklists to minimize failures.
Checklists can be the very first step to create and optimize a work culture within a team. It can be used as a basic tool to identify any problem or process.
In my team, we have used checklists in many areas of our daily work. For example, the code review checklist. Code review is very common if you are working on a software development team. At least one team member needs to review and approve the code. We have created a checklist for code owners and reviewers so then every team member will know what needs to be done to review the code properly. The second example is the release checklist. This was the step-by-step guide to follow during production deployments. With the help of this checklist, every team member was able to do smooth releases without any incidents. There are many more examples but the one that served me the most is the Onboarding Checklist.
We were a small team at the start, but we know that there will be days in the future when the team will grow and we need to get ready. We have first identified some main contexts for onboarding. This helped us to group what needs to be done, in which order, and prioritization.
Here are a few contexts we come up with;
- Apps&Access
- Company context
- People context
- Agile context
- Product context
- Development context
- Test & Quality concept
- Infrastructure concept
- Training placeholder
Under each context, we have created some small tasks and sessions to explain the way we work to the new team member. We usually create an onboarding plan one week before the new team member’s start date. In that one week, we prepare and share tasks before the new team member's arrival.
Nevertheless, we had our ups and downs with this onboarding mindset until it is fully captured and applied by all team members. For example, there have been times when the start date of the team member was in an extremely busy week of the team and we could not get prepared as we wish. In such situations, assigning an onboarding buddy was very helpful, even though we have not completed all sessions and tasks about onboarding within let’s say three weeks(our approximate onboarding complete timeline was around three weeks), the onboarding buddy was the daily contact and person who helped the new joiner about organizing the onboarding plan, provide guidance for training he could take and just be there whenever there is a question to answer.
As the scrum master of the team, I try to set up an onboarding retrospective session after each onboarding plan is completed. In these retrospective sessions, we identify missing points and get feedback from the new joiner, so then we adjust and enrich the onboarding plan regarding retrospective outcomes and actions. I remember that one of the feedbacks I received from a team member on his onboarding retro session literally made my day. He said, our onboarding preparation made him feel like we are eagerly waiting for his arrival and he was already a part of the team on day 0.
