Close to trap in complete stagnation? — No need to worry: here are the top-5 fail proof techniques to revive the velocity of your team!
Managing a team is never an easy task. As this means to set a direction, coordinate and control many different people with different opinions and philosophies. Still, the technological advancement forges ahead and concerns the improvement of the technologies of management as well. For instance, software development industry today is led by agile teams. One of the subgroups of agile technologies, — Scrum — have especially good reputation in IT project management. Relying on the principle of self-management, these technologies in most cases bring the best possible results in terms of the work speed, communication with the customer and the end result. Nevertheless, even such advanced approaches to team management cannot guarantee that your team will always be full of energy and put maximum effort into what they do. Troubles can happen anyway, and one of such can be dropping of velocity, e.g. the amount of work a team can complete within a Sprint. Such a metric is one of the main ones in estimating a team’s productivity. Still, it is not the only one of such, — the quality of work is not any less important. But this article is dedicated to the work on this particular metric, the velocity. Its dropping doesn’t ever stay unnoticed and should be addressed as early as possible. In this article we describe the five most effective tactics using which it is absolutely real to recover your team to “life”.
1. Minimize distractions, prevent impediments
Basically, those are the primary reasons why your team is losing in terms of the velocity. Actually, it is impossible to be each time perfectly concentrated on a task and free from any distractions, as it is so human… Still, it is absolutely possible to at least minimize them and not let them lead to disasters in team productivity. How? — By having a list of goals for each day. Setting goals makes it easier to notice when a team is spacing out and thus when it’s time to refocus.
Impediments are as destructive for the work as distractions, but they are usually harder to deal with, by contrast. The best way to deal with impediments is to prevent their emerging on the very start, and it is one of the key roles of the Scrum Master. To perform this function well the Scrum Master must ask relevant questions while writing User Stories, make sure that team members have everything they need for their work.
2. Consider the team size
The thing is it is very hard to manage a big group of people: many different opinions easily become the reason of communication problems and substantial time expenditure on discussions. To work efficiently, teams should be small and consist of 3–9 people. Besides, it is one of the main requirements of the Scrum, an IT management methodology. If your team is bigger than this number, you need to split it.
3. Book the time for interruptions
Interruptions are the distractions we cannot predict, the ones which happen spontaneously and are concerned with helping people from other departments of the company, remote staff or even stakeholders. Actually, there can be many other reasons to interrupt your team members: for example, a member of your team can be interrupted by his wife or grandma… The common trait of all the interruptions is their urgency and, in most cases, impossibility to dismiss the request for help, as such a behavior can be counted as impoliteness and harm the reputation. So, this means that everybody should just resign themselves to interruptions and there is nothing you can do with it, as it just happens with everyone? — The answer is yes and no. First of all, yes, interruptions really can happen with anyone at any moment and yes, they are hardly dismissible. Still, the amount of stress obtaining in result and causing maximum harm can be substantially minimized if you keep your team ready for interruptions. For this purpose, you can, for example, create an additional US consisting of small number of points and add it to each sprint.
4. Visualize the progress
When the progress is visualized, e.g. the team sees what path has been traveled and how much is left, it adds much to the feeling of responsibility for the quality of work and to the motivation. On the other hand, this is helpful for stakeholders, as allows them to see how the project is moving forward. Every day print and fix to the wall a new burndown chart and other metrics showing the information about the progress. Try to deliver to your team as many visual materials on the project as possible, it’s a worthy initiative!
5. Say no to multitasking
It is known that an employee’s ability to work in the multi-tasking mode is usually praised in companies. And there’s nothing surprising about it: multi-tasking workers help companies save on workforce. However, multi-tasking harms productivity and reduces the quality of work — and this should be always kept in mind. When, for instance, a QA-engineer starts working on his task and then after some time has to distract on another task, returning back to his work afterwards he might find that he lost his inspiration and ideas. Multi-tasking is another kind of distractions and interruptions, and knowing what distractions cost for the team’s productivity, it is better you say strict “no” to multitasking once and for all. One more advice is to limit the work in progress, not let your team get overloaded with tasks and focus more on finishing work than starting new tasks.
It is no fun when team’s productivity objectively drops and once doable amount of work becomes for them unrealistic to accomplish. And no team management methodology can guard the team against such a sad scenario. Still, the situation is not helpless, and in this article, we tried to provide you with several most powerful tips on how to address such an issue. These five tips are mainly about dealing with distractions, which usually become one of the main reasons for productivity dropping. Stop abstract distractions with setting plans with clear goals for every day. Prevent impediments from emerging by asking relevant questions to stakeholders and ensuring the team has everything needed for work. Interruptions are unpredictable and always full of stress. They can happen anytime with anyone, but does this mean you can do nothing to protect the situation from them? — You can do nothing to prevent them, yes, but you, of course, can minimize the negative impact interruptions have on work process! To lessen the amount of stress interruptions, bring to your team, habituate your team to interruptions — plan interruptions, schedule special time for them. And, of course, do not allow big teams, do not allow multi-tasking and try to visualize as much information on the project as possible.
Of course, this short list of helpful advice in the situation of serious velocity loss is not exhaustive and can be extended essentially. So please feel free to share your professional views on how to improve this metric and team productivity on the whole in the comments below!
