Retrospectives are one of the most important ceremonies that agile teams use as part of their efforts. This ceremony allows the team to extern their problems and achievements based on the sprint they just finished.

Some of the most common problems that retrospectives face come up when the teams don't know how to structure their ceremony or they don't have the correct steps to follow and ensure the member's participation. Working remotely makes this even harder.

But Retrospectives are very necessary for continuous improvement in all teams, remotes, or not. That's why we want to share with you:

5 steps to killer retros, a quick guide to help your team make the most of this Agile ceremony. We took inspiration from Derby, Larsen & Schwaber's book. Check it out:

1. Think: Allow members to individually express ideas that will help the team to be more efficient. Recap what went right and wrong during the sprint.

2. Group: Assign a moment for the team to collaboratively go over all the ideas and group them by topic.

3. Vote: Efficient retrospectives don’t address all topics at the same time. Identify pain points and prioritize ideas worth discussing.

4. Discuss: Focus on the most important topics and collaboratively decide what's the best solution. Define specific action items.

5. Assign: Assigning tasks is the best way to increase accountability. Go over the resulting action items and encourage your team to take ownership.

There you have! Efficient agile retrospectives in just 5 steps.

If you are using Atlassian's Confluence or Jira, make sure to check out our add-on's in the Atlassian Marketplace. We are dedicated to making Agile ceremonies a lot easier for distributed teams around the globe! Try it for free, now!

Don't forget to check out all our tools. Excellent for remote agile teams!

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

Agile teams have been gaining notoriety due to their capability to make decisions, faster problem resolution, furthermore faster deliveries, and continuous improvement. But what makes agile teams more “agile”? One of the principal reasons why agile teams can become better and faster in their performance is self-management or the autonomy that agile methodologies provide.

But self-management is not just letting the team do what they want and expect that all goes fine, there are structures that self-management and autonomy need to have a performance where the results are fruitful and based on the company’s necessities.

Basic self-managing skills include problem assessment, self-goal setting, self-rehearsal, self-observation and evaluation, and self-reinforcement or punishment. (source)

What points do I need to have a fruitful self-management?

Individual autonomy:

It is important to highlight the fact that there are different kinds of autonomy, and the first one is related to individual autonomy.
Individual-level autonomy is the amount of freedom and discretion an individual has in carrying out assigned tasks (Source)
High autonomy on individuals has been linked to an increase of motivation, job satisfaction, and performance, and to decreased psychological and psychosomatic complaints. (source)

The importance of this feature on the autonomy that you can give to your team's members is because of the increase of self-efficacy, which affects the way that members perceive their own work and confront the possibility to adopt new responsibilities. Also, take advantage of unique task-specific knowledge that may only be available to them, without interfering with team coordination. (source)

The problem or the risk in this kind of autonomy is the possibility of getting lost in the team's progress and reduced transparency, that a team member can make their job with autonomy is important, but it is also necessary to have in mind that the team performance is important too. One excellent way to maintain collaboration on teams is with daily standups, standups are great to make the team connect and help each other.

"Self-managing individuals thus take personal responsibility for the outcomes of their work, monitor their own performance continuously, manage their own performance, take corrective action when necessary, actively seek from the organization the guidance, help, or resources they need for excellent performance, and take initiatives to help people in other areas improve their performance" Source

Task interdependence:

It is defined as the degree to which the interaction and coordination of team members are required to complete tasks. Source

According to the last points, it is important to consider that there are higher possibilities that a team or a team member works with tasks that not are linked to other members, therefore the capability to make decisions is faster and easier for our members. But the level of interdependence is important too. Individual autonomy is ok but, developing the capability to make decisions as a team helps the team to increase the engagement.

Teams that have lowers levels of interdependence, their interaction can lose important knowledge that the process shows and in one point degrading their own autonomy. Transparency and well-shared info are important for the interaction of teams and for decision making. Meanwhile higher task interdependence means that members effectively collaborate their efforts to accomplish their goals.

Check our Slack tool to make daily standup automatically without meetings. Perfect for asynchronous teams!

Teams characterized by higher levels of task interdependence have been shown to have higher performance and motivation associated with team autonomy or team control. In teams with lower levels of task interdependence, on the other hand, team autonomy is often associated with performance and motivation losses (source)

Leader-member- exchange (LMX):

It is important that in teams leaders and members support each other and bring value to the team. It is not important if in our team all the members are on the same level; the members need to bring support, in the shape of direct help, emotional support, advice, or feedback; and also has to exist the willingness to accept the help and make a real change with the feedback. The relationship within your team members must bring confidence and allow teamwork independently but at the same time have the support to define that the problems and mistakes are in everybody's hands.

Team-member- exchange (TMX):

Even if the members have the autonomy, it is important to bring support within members. Adopting good behaviors that don't just help the team, but other members. For example, helping to finish a task or teaching your teammate a better way to make something can help the team to be more autonomous and more productive.

Team members who feel supported by their supervisor and/or their fellow team members are more inclined to incorporate additional responsibilities into their individual jobs in exchange for the support they receive. It is a total win-win. Your colleagues help you with a task, then they help you with another until the job is done, and your team members take accountability of new and more tasks because there is this social support that they will feel safe, even if they don't have the know-how, makes the team more autonomous.

Goal clarity

When there is autonomy on teams, having a clear goal will make it easier for teams to follow the paths and activities that can position the team closer to their goals. And also help the team to redirect and overlook for new alternatives and strategies that make it more beneficial for the company. When there is no well-structured info and bad set up on the company’s goals the possibility of a state of disorder is very common.

When the goals are well-defined, Self-management can be increased an teams become more efficient. One of the best ways to have clearest goals is through the information exchange, like daily standups to follow the process and help the team to maintain engagement through good communication. Check this stand-bot for Slack that will help you to have more efficient daily standups.

Feedback:

Feedback is necessary to bring clarity to the team. The use of feedback in self-management environments is essential to create order and direction to the team’s goals. Feedback will also help the team to be more proactive, direct the individuals, promote team effectiveness, and help the team to refine the goals they are pursuing thus making the self-management efficient and effective.

Self-management can be seen as a utopic state that just big companies can achieve. But the truth is that self-management is not easy but also not impossible when your team has the correct information and there is a feedback environment where members are looking to be more attached to the company’s goals.

Self-management can be a bit more difficult when you are working in a remote team, that’s why we have some incredible tools that will help your team to be more agile and achieve the autonomy that your members need. Check out below for more info

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

A Retrospective session is a ceremony that has been gaining ground in different teams even if they don’t follow scrum / agile methodologies; the reason is because during this ceremony the team can show their achievements, improvements, and more important failures.

Like the name says, Retrospectives are the time & space to go back and check the activities that were realized during the sprint to determine if the performance is working or is it time to make some changes. All of us have heard about the 5 steps to make a good retrospective from Diana Larsen and Esther Derby, if you don’t remember it those steps are: Set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do and close the retrospective. But what does gather data means?

We'd like to focus on this point to help you and your team to improve your retrospectives and your team's overall performance.

First of all, why do we need to 'gather data' and why it is important for our retrospective?

Facilitate the conversation:

Retrospectives need to focus on specific topics to find specific solutions. You can’t try to tackle all of them at once. When you focus your retrospectives the conversations become easier and way more productive. Well, if you use the right information that explains, shows, and reflects the performance, your team can be more aware of what points actually hurt the team and be more consensus about what the team needs to do.

Compare information objectively:

Comparing information gives us a better sense of what happened during the sprint. Instead of talking about the problems subjectively (when this is not necessary) and focus the conversation on the problems that the team “thinks” is happening you can be factual and show real problems.

Maybe your team thinks that they are doing bad estimations, but the information shows that maybe that wasn’t the problem. Digging a bit deeper and you may found there were too many bugs, or some other events that slowed or accelerated the work at hand.

The point is that it is always better to focus on the problem that is more relevant for the performance instead of just guessing what the problem is.

So let’s go with the data.

Facts:

What are the facts? Facts also are known as Hard data.

Facts can be events, metrics, features, stories completed, meetings, decision points, changes in team membership, milestones, celebrations, adopting new technologies. Metrics like charts, velocity, defect counts, amount of code refactored, effort data, and so forth.Source

Other valuable info that you should take into consideration for your Retrospectives are:

Sprint goals: It is necessary to have present where the team thought was going to be and what actually achieve to determine why they didn't and why the goal wasn't achieved

User story: story points and all the points that make a bigger picture of what should be finished and doesn’t happen.

Bugs: sometimes delays are for many bugs, try to keep a record or remember the bugs that appear and show a solution and take more of them into consideration for the next sprint.

Estimation: It is common that some teams have trouble because they make bad estimation; it is totally normal. But notice that they are failing on it can help them to make more accurate the next time

Timeline: A very helpful that can help you to find specific problems is trough a timeline that shows the progress that the team has during the sprint and to figure it about where the team start to have problems or have a slower performance

Why facts: because facts are the objective information that shows the real information that reflects the troubles. It is a more fundamental way to expose that something is going wrong.

Feelings:

Once that your team is focused on hard data and found the principal source of problems, it is necessary that you start talking about the team’s feelings. But why feelings? Because it is time for your team to express their opinions and their approaches to determinate what are the attitudes and behaviors that are delaying the team to achieve their goals.

Many of us didn't like to talk about the way that we feel, even less if it has to be in front of all the team. But you have to figure it out wich is the correct questions to found that information without being aggressive or make the people uncomfortable:

For example on the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, they show this question to make better questions without being awkward

Past retrospectives info:

Some teams get frustrated with retrospectives due to they feel like the past retrospectives didn’t change anything and they still have the same problems. Have the points that were inspected the last retros is important to compare if the action items are working or if the problem was solved, to determine if its time to look for new solutions. The truth is that so many teams don't have a consideration about their past retrospectives}, they just change the page and that’s all.

Sometimes the reason why the team doesn’t bring the info from their past retros is because they don’t have records and because it is too difficult to collect it. We have an Agile Retrospective tool that will help you and your team to save all that important info and go back to it at any time. Check here.

The truth is that retrospectives need to be very focused to really find a solution, and the best way to do it is through gathering data and expose a big picture for all the team. Find the best ways to expose all that important data that help your team to have a bigger picture of what the team needs to keep improving.

In SoftwareDevTool we always want to help you to keep improving, that’s why we want to share with your our tools to help you and your team to adopt easier agile ceremonies.

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

Feedback is a very common practice that all agile teams must-have. Not just during their retrospectives sessions but in their day-to-day. But there is a big difference between what we do and what we should be doing. Feedback doesn’t start just deciding that you will do it with your team, feedback should start with a healthy environment where feedback is looked like something good instead of criticism and painful.

What is the feedback environment?

The feedback environment refers to the contextual aspects of day-to-day supervisor-subordinate and coworker-coworker feedback processes rather than to the formal performance appraisal feedback session (Source).

A supportive environment is necessary to achieve Feedback-seeking, which actually is like to achieve a wellbeing circle. You encourage a good environment for feedback, the people give and receive feedback, the people look for constant feedback; all these are essential to achieve a culture of constant improvement.
(Source)

Feedback-seeking promotion is defined as the extent to which the environment is supportive or unsupportive of feedback-seeking. One excellent way to encourage feedback in your team is trough Retrospectives. We have an excellent tool that will help you to have more transparent Retrospectives.

Why feedback environment is important.

Feedback is one of the best ways to take the abilities of our teammates to their best. A person that is always looking for feedback and improving themselves in one way or another will achieve their maximum potential.

Make your team member more aware of themselves and the ways that they are working, resulting in accountability and engagement.

In a place where the feedback is looked as safe and necessary is more probable that your members increase feedback-seeking behavior. Then organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, employee learning, and motivation determinate effective teaching practices, identify areas of need, and provide suggestions for improvement. (source)

The lack of feedback in teams can prove the feeling of absence of progress among team members.

(Source)

Which are the characteristics that good feedback has in a safe environment?

Research suggests that individuals are satisfied with feedback when it provides the information they perceive as useful for performing a task they want to perform well and when it is not redundant with the information they already have available.
(Source)

The feedback environment is measured across two dimensions, the supportiveness of the supervisor feedback environment and the coworker feedback environment.

Constructive feedback must also possess features like being descriptive; timely; honest; useful; respectful; clear; issue-specific; supportive; motivating; action-oriented; solution-oriented; strictly confidential; trust; collaborative and informative.(source)

There are seven dimensions that contribute to an increasingly supportive feedback environment

(Source)

Source credibility:

Feedback can be received from different sources, but what makes it a more fruitful and secure environment is received from trustworthiness sources (not necessary top sources). The point is that the people who actually provided it is a person who has the correct knowledge of the member that is receiving the feedback

Information like:

Knowledge of the feedback recipient’s job requirements, knowledge of the recipient’s actual job performance, and the ability to accurately judge that job performance are essential to creating an environment of learning through feedback. (Source)

• Feedback quality:

An environment when feedback has been encouraged is possible when feedback provides relevant information that helps the member. consistent across time, specific, and perceived as useful. The recipients need to perceive like they are received help to improve their performance.

• Feedback delivery:

The recipient’s first impression is to recognize the person who is giving the feedback to then determine the intentions; that is how the recipient is going to respond to feedback and determine if it is useful or not.

Intentions are very important to define is the reception of feedback is going to have a good or bad response. Have correct vocabulary and feedback based on help people to learn and improve is essential o achieve a good environment for feedback.

• Favorable feedback:

Favorable feedback is perceived through compliments and it is essential to determine if the performance of our members is going in the right way. There has to be a balance with these practices to ensure that our team does not feel like everything they do is wrong. Acknowledge the good results and practices are part of learning.

unfavorable feedback:

This one is perceived through expressions of dissatisfaction, and sometimes is not necessary to say something; that is why is important to be careful in the way that the messages are transmitted. And even if it is harder to learn to communicate, disagreements will teach your team to transmit it and receive it in a more natural way.

Source availability:

An environment where the feedback arises, start with the member's availability. Recognize the achievements one per year is not sufficient to create a safe place where the people interact and talk about problems and compliments. Feedback arises in an environment where day-to-day people can express it and is willing to receive it.

Promotes feedback-seeking:

Last but not less important, we need to encourage our teams to feedback-seeking. Constant improvement is something that all people look and feedback is the best way to achieve it, but fewer people ask for it. Instead of wait till the team look for feedback encourage it till you can see your team is accustomed to it.

Feedback is essential to achieve the constant improvement that all the teams need. But it is not possible if the environment is perceived as tough and not safe. Create a feedback-seeking environment is important if you want to improve your performance.

In Softwaredevtools we work as a remote team, but that doesn't impede to look for new ways to express our feedbacks. Check out some of our tools that will help you:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

Productivity is a very common value that teams and people look for on a day-to-day basis. But productivity is deeper and difficult that just starts your work. It could be more productive for your team to prioritize.

It is very common to have problems if you are trying to work in the entire task at the same time. And this is not just common individually but on team performance. One of the most common ceremonies in agile teams are estimates, this is the ceremony when you define with your team the activities that will be done in the next increment. The main importance of this kind of activity is to avoid work in things less valuables and achieve a delivery more important for the customer. And the best way to do it is by prioritizing.

Some teams incur to avoid this kind of ceremony because they think that is a waste of time but the next points will make you think if keeping avoiding it is healthy for your agile performance.

Focus your work:

In times when quick responses are necessary, it is not anything new to know that prioritizing your task helps you to focus on the tasks you need to do. But the most important is that this not just will help you to start your work, this will make you work with a well-defined goal. Have a clear purpose and a well defines burden will avoid that you start to work on things that don’t create value which will make you more productive, results will arise fastest than the normal and more attached at the results that you expect because when you know where you need to go, find a path is easier.

Save more time:

Well, following with the last point, if you have a clear idea of the necessary results and the path is evident; saving time is just a collateral result of work on significant tasks instead of work on activities less important or that just don’t make sense in the goals. The point is that your workflow becomes more evident allowing your team can start to work easier because you won’t have to waste time finding the next task.  Research shows that for every 1 minute you spend in planning, you will gain 10 in execution.

You will make more accurate estimates the next time:

Learn to prioritize your tasks will help you to make better the next time. If you try with some burden but at the end of that sprint you notice that the result is not what the team was expecting for, maybe you will feel a little disappointment, but remember that agile teams look for constant improvement and make something bad actually means that you are going to make something better the next time.

Estimations and prioritizing work can be a little difficult at the beginning but remember that doing it is about trial and error. In one way or another, you will learn to do it more accurately and to prioritize better your work. Don’t be sad if you didn’t achieve what you expect, even more, if we are working within new environments for your team.

Estimates are more difficult if you are trying to do it remotely. With the help of your team, you can achieve better results. That’s why we have an excellent ally for you and your team: Scrum poker. It is an excellent tool to achieve more accurate estimations and you can personalize in accordance with the preference of your team’s members.

Define your purpose:

A well-defined purpose can help your team in a lot of ways. But set up your priorities can help you to define your purpose better. Not just because your task will follow the purpose of your company, because you can guide your task-based on the companies needs.

The purpose is very important to create more value not just in your team but in your deliverables and more benefits that you can check here. But with prioritizing your tasks you can have clearest expectations, a well-defined path, and create better and efficient results. Also can help you to redefine your own purpose which is an excellent way to keep improving,

Your team will make decisions easier:

Having well-defined tasks can help your team to perform on their own. This is clearly leagued in the way that you define your backlog, hence in the way you prioritize your tasks. If your members have a clear idea of why they are working on that tasks and why this will create more value, find ways and better solutions is easier, because now the work and the expected results. Which is why prioritizing your work will create a save environment where your members work making their own decision but not far from the company needs.

Create more customer value and customer satisfaction:

By now you could know why prioritizing your tasks create more value for your customers. The reason is very clear, prioritize work can help you not just to finish the work which implies that you are showing a result to your customer. But you not are just finishing something, you have the expected result and so your customer. Have enough time to work allow you to find better solutions and better ways to solve the same problem, and let me tell you: prioritizing your tasks is the begging to achieve better responses.

Increased productivity:

If you take the right time to plan your activities, and defining the work that needs to be done you can increase 25% or more your productivity. Which means more work investing less time.

Increase the spirits of your team:

How do you feel when you notice that you finished that task that was in your errands all this time? It is a very good feeling; imagine that kind of emotion treating of work. Make your team notice that they actually finished their work or they achieve the result just in time is a very good feeling that you need to encourage in your team. With your tasks well prioritized, you can achieve that your team has this sense that their work is taking your team somewhere and feel more motivated to achieve more work done.

Prioritize work will teach you to avoid unnecessary tasks and activities that are taking you valuable time to work on things that really matter. In times where everything looks like important and urgent knows define your work can save a lot of time and create better results.

In Softwaredevtools we want for you the best agile ceremonies and help you to achieve your goals easily, this is why we have some incredible tools that will help you to enhance your remote practices.

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

In SoftwareDevTools we know that Virtual meetings have become one of the most important “tools” for teams that work remotely. The existence of this kind of meeting has been increasing over five-times in the last months.

Virtual meetings are far from being like in-person meetings, which makes it more difficult to achieve the productivity and efficiency performance of our teams. That’s whys is very important that we take care of the way we make our meetings in our team. When work conferencing practices are inadequate, this can result in USD 34 billion loss revenue annually due to a lack of productivity.

We have been working remotely for a while, and we want to share with you some tips and tricks that can help you to adapt better virtual meetings to your team, increase your transparency and improve your team performance.

All meetings need to have a purpose:

We talked about why is important to have a purpose on your team. It is the same if we talk about meetings.

I read this incredible article for DZone and makes me think in all the problems that can provoke have meetings without purpose.

One easy way to find out if your meetings are necessary is taking into consideration that having it will provide value to your members. If you see that your meeting doesn't provide: results-oriented, make decisions, solve problems, brainstorming, etc. Maybe the meeting lacks purpose.

Let your members decide if they need to be there: Meetings without purpose not just are invaluable for the team these are costing money for the company. Takes almost 23 minutes to focus in an activity, if you make your team a meeting for 1 hour and then they only have 30 min until they chance to a new meeting, they not just will skip those 30 minutes, because there is no chance to focus and star an important task. You will take away at least 2.5 hours until they can start their activities.

Make your meeting with purpose, and be sure that all the members need to be there. If some members just need to be a little part of the meeting, make them know that they can go before the meeting ends.

I found these incredible tips on Snacknation about what your members need to know about the meetings, have this kind of information can make more valuable results, and focus better the meeting.

All attendees should know:

• The meeting purpose
• What topics you’ll cover
• How long the meeting will take

Schedule:

Like the last points said, it is important to know when the meeting is going to be. All this for the productivity of your team. This is one of the most important points because here you show respect for your team’s member time.

You need to have in consideration the different time-zone of the members and be aware if they have enough time to have the meeting. This will help you to increase productivity because you can perceive if the schedule that you are selecting is working for everybody and if the time that you define is enough to keep the work in progress. Which takes us to the next step.

Timeboxing:

As well as you define the meeting beginning, it is important to determine the end. Remember that all your members have activities, and they organize their time based on the meetings that they have. If you have a meeting, respect the begging and the end, in this way you will avoid delays for waiting for your teammates and you avoid taking time for their free or next meeting time.

One of the most efficient ways to save time in meetings is to have a timebox and follow rightly. If you are taking more time than the time that you define at the beginning, don't extend the meeting, instead, plan another meeting or finish to solve the problem with asynchronous communication. The next time you have a similar meeting try to put more accurate time, it is all about to try and fail. Take more time than you defined just will provoke more waste of time and you can delay other meetings indirectly.

If you finish the conversation before, well not let the meeting till the time over, finish the meeting when it requires it. It is better to have some minutes to continue the day than force the meeting and waste valuable time.

Make more efficient meetings with well-structured info:

Another good tip to save time in meetings and make it more efficient is having all the info prepared and that all members have the possibility of check what is the principal topic in the meetings. This not just will focus the meeting but there will avoid a change in topics and distractions at the meeting. If it is possible make an agenda where you prepare all the topics that you want to share and you won’t waste time trying to remember the topics.

This also can help you to allow your teammates to skip the meeting if they don’t think that is necessary (be clear with this kind of behavior, allow the opportunity to skip meetings can be a good idea but can incur the loss of information in your team).

Another way to share good information and make the most of your meetings are being understandable. Be clear with your words, and always remember the people that you are talking about. If you are talking with developers try to make the most understandable to give the correct messages. Adequate massages fo adequate people.

Another incredible way to make your meetings more efficient is with:

No interruption.

Interrupt thinking what the other person is going to say will take more time than you think. The person will need to repeat their commentary and you have to give the correct answers. Don’t hurry up to answer and hear actively your people.

Meeting free time:

This is one of the most important times, and unfortunately one of the less taking into consideration. Your members need free time for work. All the members have their activities, and while some members finished their work with the help of meetings some others need free time for their work. So don’t overschedule meetings If you see that some members have free time in their calendar that doesn’t mean that they have time for another meeting, which means that they are saving that time for work.

All-time is important, even more, the free time for your activities and rest, which actually can increase your team’s productivity.

Meetings for status or updates:

Some agile teams used to have stand-ups meetings to talk about progress and the next activities for every member. But nowadays this kind of meeting wastes a lot of time. There is no relevance to these ceremonies due to you know-how is the team going.

Talk about the importance of status an how to do it without a meeting is possible with the right tool. In Softwaredevtools we use an incredible tool called Standbot that can be linked to Jira. It is very efficient to keep a record of your standups and make it when is the right time for every member. Also, you can check easily the blockers on your team.

Feedback:

talk about the meetings with your members, all members have valuable opinions, and listen to them can help you to notices if the meeting is working or how other members perceive them. Always there is good info and good opinions on your team.

Plus: share screen if you want to explain something with more detail, it is a very useful tool that can help to avoid misunderstanding and a quick way to share relevant info.

Virtual meetings are very important for remote teams, it hasn't to be difficult. In Softwaredevtools we know that all remote teams need good practices to increase efficiency and transparency, even more in their virtual meeting. Check some other incredible tools for became more agile your remote team.

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

Our last post was about the signals that show that your agile adoption can be failing. This time we are going to focus on actions that can help us to deal whit those problems. One of the most important habits that we need to encourage in our team is feedback. Many times feedback already exists on the team but it doesn't have results that we expect or simply we don’t know how to express it.

Feedback can be perceived similarly to retrospectives, but what happens with feedback is that can be more constant or even don't need and specific ceremony to give it a place in our team. Feedback is the return of the information based on what we know (our team's behavior) looking for improvement when the person received it.

But sometimes feedback not is perceived as good in the team and some people can feel it as harmful and others take it as an opportunity for criticism. To give feedback and obtain the best results we need to coach our team from the right path to finally accept it and obtain the best of our team. Finally finding weak points help us to be better and effort to keep improving.

So, here are some important points that will help you to give better feedback:

Have a point of reference/make a difference between what could be done and what happened:

How could you know if something is wrong if you don’t know what is good? Objectives, purposes, missions, goals, KPIs, users stories; all that kind of things are very important for the performance of your team. You can’t expect that your team makes what is necessary if they don't have clear what is the point of all their activities.

If you haven't created a purpose check why it is important, and how can achieve one.

The reason why you need to define a point of reference is that you need results to compare if the performance of your teams is going for the right path and if they are achieving the Definition of Done (DoD) of the sprint. If you have a well-defined backlog (check this tool for doing it with your remote team) and you compare what you actually achieve in contrast to what your team thought they could achieve you can find easier the problems and the feedback is going to be more focused on the points that weren’t achieved.

Complain is not feedback:

One of the most uncomfortable problems that exist with feedback is that some people think that is time to complain. Having a team member that just uses this time to remark the bad behavior of some member or complaining about the big work burden that they have, it is far from being healthy for your members. Be clear with the team or if it is necessary personally with the members (be careful of being kind, some people could think that is against them and they won't participate in the next feedback.)

The point is to have a safe environment where the members feel comfortable talking about the problems that they could be having without stepping on the complaining. That is why you need to focus your feedback to be on the right path. Remember that this time is more like us instead of you. That’s why we talk about constructive and positive feedback instead of positive and negative.

Positive and constructive feedback are necessary:

Positive and constructive feedback are necessary to achieve improvement and increase the engagement on the team. Create this safe environment where your team can speak and express why they are not giving their best can help you to find new ways to work. But to achieve this environment you need to express the good and bad things. But being careful, this is all about work, not is necessary to talk about the personal part of the members.

Constructive feedback: helps you to find those little mistakes and behaviors that are not letting your members work with freedom. To find what is delaying the deliveries and even for noticing it the groups are having trouble. Constructive feedback is like their name says: that helps for a useful purpose.

We need to have in mind that there is a limit on being kind and being soft if your members don't say the hard stuff (related to work obviously) the feedback is not taking you to anyway. They need to be capable to expose the mistakes without being tough.

Positive feedback: Just as there are people that can’t express the bad behaviors there are people that can't do it with the positive things. And the positive is very important too. This part can be more difficult so try to encourage your team to say when something has been done good and rewards the efforts of those that are giving their best.

The team needs to know that when something is going bad or is going fine. Communicating will make the difference in continue with the same mistakes or twist it to finally follow the right path

Show the problem but also a solution:

One of the most important things that make the difference between complaining and constructive is giving a solution. Sometimes the reason why the people are giving their feedback is that they think that there are better ways to do something, and actually, it is. Encourage your team to give some solutions instead of just feedback, solutions are what we are we looking for. So if your members show the problem and the solution, well they are giving bigger steps for improvement.

Make this kind of practice can help you to have more fruitful feedback and encourage more communication with your team. Also is an excellent form to share knowledge and teach all the members new methods and always look for the best solutions.

Incremental improvement:

One of the most common problems with teams that are trying to improve their practices talking about retrospectives or casual feedback is trying to solve all the problems at once. It is more efficient to try to do it part by part; and it is the same if we talk about feedback. Be consensus about the topics that the team is going to touch in every session. Focus the feedback in little parts and find baby steps for solve every problem, is more probable that your team adopts the change if it is short and will give you more result instead of trying to find a solution of bigger problems and drastic changes.

One excellent way to make that feedback works is making it casually, instead of waiting until the retros session. If you see some members doing something different from you expect for, making notices it or try to speak at that specific moment. This will help you not just to remember what you want to tell your team, but also to make little steps to achieve incremental improvement.

The importance of little things, like casual feedback and little changes, can make all the difference in the way that your team works. Try to adopt some good practices to give feedback and be transparent with your team. You’ll look at how things get better and better. And don't forget to be able for your team if they need to talk about some feedback that they can express, together you can find a better solution.

We know the importance of giving good feedback and We want for you and your team the best practices for your continued improvement. That why have some incredible tools to help your team to be more agile and transparent. Check out some of them.

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

SoftwareDevTools is so excited to tell you that we achieved the Silver on the Marketplace Partner Program that Atlassian has launched replacing the program Top Vendor.

Top vendor was the program that Atlassian used to reward those vendors that provided excellence in their products and customer experiences. We already have the silver in Top vendors, but this time is more gratifying to share with you our silver in Marketplace Partner Program due to the meaning of being one in Atlassian.

The Marketplace Partner program was launched on June 7th.
This program has the objective to reward the vendors, which have changed to Partners. This time Atlassian is interested in celebrating those partners that share the strategy that Atlassian wants for their customers, highlighting the importance of enhanced security practices and to incentivize cloud and Data Center app development.

This program also rewards the individual Partner’s efforts and formalizing through these programs gives more confidence to our customers about the quality of our products and services.

Two principal points are taking into consideration:

• Cloud and Data Center: Partners are investing in cloud and have Data Center Approved versions of their high-traction server apps.
• Security: Partners are up-leveling their security practices by participating in our Marketplace Security Programs. For cloud apps that participate, we are introducing a new security badge on the Marketplace so customers can make informed security decisions.

All these having in mind the importance of security that customers need due to the necessity of change and rewards the alignment of Atlassian platforms.

The most important requirement for us to achieve this incredible program is guaranteeing that the Service-level agreement is fulfilled and give you the support that you and your team need.

In Softwaredevtools we are interested in giving you the best products, guaranteeing security, and the best support for you and your team. Helping you to adopt the best agile ceremonies like Retrospectives, asynchronous standups and achieve accurate estimations for your sprint

Check out some other achievements that we like to share with you:

• Pitney Bowes SMB Hackathon
• Valuable lessons at Atlassian's #StrideCon
• Atlassian Summit — Product Roadmaps for Agile teams.

Follow us on our networks:
Facebook: /SoftwareDevTools
YouTube:SoftwareDevTools
Twitter: @softwaredevtool
Email: hello@softwaredevtools.com
And Subscribe to our blog below!

Sometimes you can have an excellent purpose a well-defined sprint backlog, taking your retros regularly and things simply don’t seem like they're going well. At Softwaredevtools we know the problems that exist for Agile adoption, and even more, if we are talking about agile remote teams.

Working remotely is fantastic, but that doesn’t mean that it's super easy. Sometimes there is some stuff that can be more difficult if you are trying to do it remotely. But the thing is that your team can be reflecting some bad habits that you didn’t notice, but that is really the reason why your team doesn't feel comfortable or simply they aren’t giving their best.

Bad habits at work are like bad habits in life, sometimes you know that they are bad for you but you just keep doing it. Until one day the habit shows all the consequences that you just didn't expect would happen to you. Surprise! For the more that you avoid communicating or accepting that something is wrong in one way or another, this will hurt your team more than you think, and the worst part is that it can be more difficult to solve once that is late.

These are some habits that can reflect that your team culture has failures. Don’t worry, once you notice it is better than avoid it.

1. Lack of empathy:

You can perceive this when the team doesn't really talk about the problems and the conversations are superficial. The team doesn't look engaged and their performance as a team shows no improvement. The worst part is that if your team doesn’t show empathy to solve problems can be more difficult. How you can expect that they work by themselves if they can't feel empathy with their teammates?

Lack of empathy also can provoke one of the most common problems in remote teams: lack of communication. Which actually is one of the problems that could be causing all the other problems.

How you are going to plan all the sprint, have your standup, or your retros if your team doesn't communicate. Communication is difficult in remote teams and with no empathy, well it is almost impossible to obtain engagement in your team.

2. No metrics or improper metrics

Try to solve this question: Is your team obtaining the results expected? If you think: well, we are getting the job done. Well, that is not an answer, the point is that you have the metrics that actually show that you are obtaining the results that you want? For that, you need to know what you want to achieve. No metrics will take your team to an endless cycle. Finish work but never feel like they finished, because they don’t know if actually they are complying with the necessary.

But beware, having improper metrics is also a common error. For example, if you are trying to have the fastest development team and finish all your tasks in the first sprint. But if the product owner has not received the product they want to, or simply your teams are not creating value in their results, why would you want to have the fastest team?

Be careful in what, why, and how you evaluate the performance in your team and ask yourself if it is important.

Some of the best practices to evaluate if your team is going on the right path is with Retrospectives. Check out our tool for better results in remote teams!

3. No approachable team members.

Works as a remote team demands good communications and the possibility of talking with every member any time they need it ( working hours). If you are trying to manage your team and encourage empathy, but you are never available for your team. Well, it is a bad example for your team.

Working remotely can be difficult when you have some trouble and you can’t find the person that could help you, the team member will finish the work as they find appropriate with the information at hand and the results could be something that you didn’t expect. Carrying the waste of time and frustration for your team’s members.

4. Thinking that mistakes are bad

Agile teams have this feature of constant improvement, but it isn't possible if you don't let that your team have troubles and mistakes. They will perceive it as bad. Mistakes are necessary to find the right solution, if you fail more you will improve more.

I found this incredible paragraph in an article and I think that explains very well why you need to fail:

Develop to refactor: Failure to quickly adapt to change is not always a problem in the process, but also in the code. While there are many good practices on writing software out there in the wild, try and evaluate them in light of refactorability. Design software with a change in mind and in the future you will be your best friend.
Source: https://medium.com/@jonasdrieghe/being-agile-was-never-about-the-process-4cbcc1197a45

Changes are necessary, something that worked in the past, not necessary will be the best way to do it in the future. But you can't find the best solution if you are trying to have the answer at the first shot. You can find the answers by parts and improvement is more fruitful in this way.

5. Disempowerment of members (lack of self decisions)

Having just one person that makes all the decisions and is approving all the steps in the process can incur delays on the advance and the deliverables. This kind of behavior avoids the self-organization and cross-functionality that agile teams need to keep improving. The loss of agile culture will provoke that the work moves in silos provoking late deliveries and loss of accountability by the team.

Agile teams and even more remote ones, need to develop the capability of decides by themselves. The existence of a person that has control in agile teams is very different compared with what we know about normal teams.

Agile governance is participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive. Source: https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/assessment-tricks-and-traps/

If you put the information and the right instructions to your team they could decide the best for your team. Not like I told you some paragraphs above (works as they think it could be), with a well-defined purpose and transparency your members will learn to respond based on what the company needs.

6. Thinking that the way you do it is better than others

Some teams adopt a methodology and think that the adoption fails when they don’t do the things exactly how the methodology says. You try to do everything following steps by step and the team doesn't get better, let me tell you something, that is wrong. Maybe for some teams will work, but, as we know agile is more a mindset than a methodology. There a principle of Agile Manifesto that talks about the importance of processes compared with the interactions:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Even if we were talking about Scrum, Lean or Kanban. Following exactly as it says, won't guarantee that everything will work perfectly because the most important of methodology adoption is the capability of using it based on your needs. Adapted to your work and find what works better for you. After all, your individuals and interactions should shape your processes and tools, not the other way around.

It is the same when you require something from your team and you expect that they do it exactly as you would do it. Letting your team work and find their best process is very important for a healthy agile adoption. There are more than one answer and your development team is the more indicated to find their own. Just make sure that they know what they need to do. Collaboration and accountability will increase if you let them work by themselves.

After all: Teams armed with capabilities across business knowledge, product thinking, technology, and operations are the ones who can deliver outcomes. Source: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/habits-modern-digital-business?utm

Agile adoption in remote teams is not an easy task, but totally worth all the efforts. If you detect some of the past signals, be clear with your team, and talk with them. Bad communications can worsen the thing for your remote teams. Always it is time to find the best solutions and keep improving.

Sources:

• https://dzone.com/articles/5-signs-of-a-toxic-work-culture
• https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory/
• https://www.atlassian.com/blog/leadership/empathy-remote-teams
• https://holub.com/kpis-velocity-and-other-destructive-metrics/
• https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/habits-modern-digital-business?utm
• https://responsiveadvisors.com/blog/one-shocking-thing-many-agile-coaches-getting-wrong/

In SoftwareDevTools we want that your agile adoption improves with some incredible tools for your ceremonies:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

At Softwaredevtools we know the importance of ceremonies in Agile teams. And the most important is retrospectives. An Agile Retrospective session is a perfect moment to go back and reflect on our performance as a team and find the best practices to avoid past mistakes from happening again and again. We have already talked once about the business value of agile retrospectives but this time we are going to focus on the time and the money.

Agile methodologies have been gaining ground in remote teams, due to the advantages that they provide. Often split the work in chunks and define what will you work on during a sprint. But how can you be working remotely with an agile team and have a really valuable retrospective session? Or even more difficult, how can you have an efficient Agile Retrospective?

Well, if you don’t know how to improve your Retrospectives sessions, it is possible and it's has nothing to do with the difficulty.
The answer is… Finding the right tools.
Tools are very important for teams that work remotely because using them is the way that team members can constantly interact and work together. But we are not just talking about Agile Retrospectives tool (available in Atlassian), we are talking about saving your team's time and therefore money.

Retrospectives for Confluence or Jira is a tool that allows you to customize your retrospective beforehand and invite your team to meet in the Jira project or Confluence space they are actually working on.
That actually will help you set the stage to drive the conversation and collaboratively agree on what needs to be discussed and define an action item for the topic at hand.

During a colocated retrospective we have been learning from [Esther Derby] & Diana Larsen the five stages that are important to achieve great retrospective sessions:

• Set the Stage
• Gather Data
• Generate Insights
• Decide What to Do
• Close the Retrospective

But being remote and being aware of all these, can be very difficult and can result in a waste of time and money. That’s why we are going to share with you why having a tool for your retros will help you in every step and actually save your team some money while improving results:

US News defined that in 2018 the lowest salary for developers for that year was $79,340. Taking that into consideration the salary per hour is $27 dollars. In the next paragraphs, we are going to show you how using the right tool for you retros can help you to save money on every step saving between: $85-$115.42 per month means $1020.60-$1385 per year.

Set the stage:

There are two cases for this step. If you decide to have your meeting synchronous or asynchronous (don’t be worry, in both cases, you will save time).

Synchronous: Getting more than 5 persons to connect at the same time is difficult. For sure you have been waiting for some members for more than 10 minutes when you are going to start your meeting. This is a waste of everyone's time. Using our app, this would be the only time that you have to wait. Because once that all the team is ready you don't have to decide where to start because you have the possibility to personalize your own template before the session and start using it.

If you were trying to start your retros without a tool you would have to create the template (7-10min). Even if you have one already you have to prepare it for the next sessions and this will take you at least 5 more minutes. Taking that into consideration with a tool you only have to wait till the team is online.

Asynchronous: If you decide to have your retros asynchronously, well, with this tool you don’t have to wait for anybody at the beginning of a meeting and your team can fill the template in their own time and when they are not working in everything else, so there is no lost time in this part.

Money saved per month in this stage:

• (25min)($0.45 per min) (1.5 sprints per month)= $16.87 per team member.
• (20min)($0.45 per min) (1.5 sprints per month)= $13.50 per team member.

Gather data:

This is one of the most important stages of retrospectives, and having a person filling a blank page without a good structure can provoke a total loss of information or even worst, misunderstanding for two reasons: the person writes it wrong or the person didn’t have enough time to write. Having a bad way to gather your data can be very frustrating and a waste of time. If you don’t recollect it rightly, the full session can be perceived as a waste of time.

If you are investing time in doing your retros remotely but you don’t use the right tool to do it. In one way or another, the meeting will become frustrating and the team can perceive it as an unnecessary meeting, which is a bad symptom in the team performance for an agile team.

Not having a tool to gather your data correctly can cost you at least 5-10 minutes from your team's discussions not getting anywhere. If you have 8 persons in the team the lost time is 30-70 minutes per session.

Money saved per month:

• (5min)($0.45 per minute)(8 members)(1.5 sprints per month)=$27
• (10min)($0.45 per minute)(8 members)(1.5 sprints per month)=$54

With our retrospectives tool, every member can write their own ideas. And you don't need to wait till the other person is finished because everyone can do it individually. Reducing from 56 (for 8 members and seven minutes per member) to 10 minutes maximum.

Time saved: 46 minutes

Money saved per month: (46 min)($0.45 per minute)(1.5 sprint per month)= $31.05

Generate Insights

Usually in this step, the team looks for the reasons why they are having all the problems that arise during the discussion. The recollection of ideas sometimes is better if every member does it by themselves because it can be perceived as a problem if you are trying to express something that may be a member can feel like an accusation for them. But if you are doing it out loud some stuff never gonna come out, so you can solve all the problems if you don't let the team express with freedom.

If all the members are trying to remember the topics that they talk about in the last step they are gonna lose some ideas and time. How much time? maybe 5 minutes per member. But having everything on the screen and within everyone's reach, the ideas can come quickly and everyone can be on the same channel easily.

The key to having a tool for this section is that actually you can focus on finding the common problem or the problem that was frequently mentioned by the team. It can be very confusing if you are just using a document shared in google docs. The time for grouping and finding the best ideas can decrease from 10 to 5 minutes.

With this tool, you can just take the idea and grouping with the help of a member at the same time that every member is aware of the information. This makes it for a collaborative process that increases engagement from your team. Allowing you to find better insights. Now your retros can achieve more efficient action items.

Time saved: 10 minutes

Money saved:

• (10min)($0.45 per minute)(1.5 sprints per month)=$6.75

Decide what to do

This is one of the most frustrating parts of retrospectives, sometimes the members don't take seriously because they don’t see anybody in charge of the previous problems. Also, some members don’t take accountability for any of the possible solutions that the team found. You can take 15 to 20 minutes assigning tasks and finding that every member selects a task that helps the team but even so, doesn't truly solve the problem.

It is easier if every member takes a task by themselves and has a record of every meeting every time you want. It is possible with the Retrospectives tool. Every member selects the issue that they want and takes more responsibility because this will be assigned as a Jira issue. Instead of wasting 15-20 minutes assigning tasks, you can spend just 10 minutes while the team chooses their own task.

Money saved:

• (10min)($0.45 per minute)(1.5 sprints per month)=$6.75

Closing the retrospective

Closing the retrospective allows you to find the problems related with team dynamics, and your results. But using a tool, the team has agreed on what needs to be improved, and everything's already assigned for follow-up. So, not much left to do, but to check around for agreement.

Retrospectives are such a valuable ceremony that can encourage continuous improvement. Why let an important ceremony became boring and ineffective. The more frequent & efficient retrospective session, the fewer problems are going to arise. So many remote teams don't have a Retrospective session because they think that it doesn’t work or that is just a waste of time. But having a tool to gather the data rightly and keep your team focused on what actually matters can be very fruitful and effective.

In softwaredevtools we want to find the right path for continuous improvement for those remote teams that have problems with their agile ceremonies. That’s why we have some incredible tools for accurate estimates, effective retrospectives, and easy standups. Check it out here.

This post is based on the article: https://hbr.org/2018/07/creating-a-purpose-driven-organization

In Softwaredevtools we are interested in helping you and your team to achieve the best practices. In our last post, we talk about the importance of having a purpose-driven team. This not just going to help your team in self-organization, in one way or another this will create engagement & transparency. Such important values that all agile remote teams need.
So let's check some important tips that you can take in consideration if you are trying to create a pupose-driven team.

How to create a purpose for your team?

Be original:

The purpose of a team talks about why the team is existing, why they should work all this related to knowing how their performance can help the community that they are working for. All the teams have their purpose and you need to create your own idea, but never use the same from other organizations. Use a purpose from other teams could provoke that they don’t believe it; resulting in bad adoption and the lack of identification from your team. Or incurring I some of the most common problems like bad communication and misalignment.

Originality is very important when you are creating a purpose for your team. Originality will create the value that you need to involve your team in their purpose; if you create a great purpose based on the values and activities from your company it is more probable that your team adopts it.

Look for the values and reasons that better fit for your team. Find the reason why your company helps their community, in the end, your product is for help people and how better do it that involving value on them, the same value that your team needs to see.

Talk with your team

If you are having trouble trying to find the best ideas to create your purpose, find the ideas in the best source, your team. Maybe, in the beginning, it could be difficult but with a little acumen, your members will give you the best ideas. They are working with you, and making the job, sure that they will have some incredible thoughts about the benefits that their products deliver.

The principal objective that you are doing it is that your members understand that there is a public using your services, understand that they are creating benefits for the community. If you use the ideas and thoughts from your own team the adoption will be easier and more valuable.

Talk with them and ask for the reason why they like to work there, what motivates them to keep working. If you don't find ideas in all your members at least you will see how some members have low spirits or they are not feeling comfortable working there, which actually will motivate you to find the best purpose for your members and themselves find value working there.

A good example that I find is about a company that let their members write for a private blog in the company, where everyone needs to talks about a good history that reflect the importance of their own job in the company. If the company achieve a determinate number of post they will receive compensation. Imagine that? You are giving the best tool for your members and for you to talk about a purpose and find the motivators in your team. Actually, you can see how I said before, what is decreasing the spirit in some teams. For me is a total win-win.

Maybe you think: well my company don’t have the resources for doing that, but what I actually want to show you is that your members have more answers than you think. Just be creative.

Share it:

One of the most important parts that come with having a purpose is to make sure the team knows about it. What will you have an excellent purpose if you aren´t goit to share with your team? Find a good way to share it. The way that you share information in your team can help you to avoid misalignment in their performance. You can check some tips here.

Something you can do to share with your team (co-located or not):

• Put it in somewhere in the wall or board where everyone can see it.
• Talk with your team about it when you are starting to adopt it.
• Always share it with the new members.
• Make a video where you talk about all the value and how it impacts on the company
• Find a short way to remember to your team in your meetings ( just find a quick way, otherwise it could be annoying)
• Make an infographic, the images are better for our brain, making that we remember easily. If you can do one for your team will be very helpful.

It is important that you find a way to share that works for your team, because all that effort will be nothing if you don’t talk with your team about their purpose. Also if you do it incorrectly the message can be a misunderstanding.

Believe it:

Maybe you think this part is absurd, but sometimes the best way to adopt the values is with your attitude. If you are telling your team that they need give the best from themselves and they have to have a good attitude, but you are giving them a posture where you don't reflect your values, hardly your team will be belive and take importance to those values. It will become your purpose in empty words.

Examples:

I want to give you some examples that could help you to find your purpose:

1. Environment: Company for irrigation system

Purpose: Serve with the most efficient irrigation system to our clients so they can cultivate the best products for good alimentation in our town

2. Environment: Jump Asossiates

Purpose: works to help businesses learn how to change and grow. Their purpose statement uses only a few words to effectively define their existence. Rather than just saying they want to help grow business, they say they want to “transform lives.”

We are always looking for improvement, it is the same for the goals and purpose. Always look for new ways to motivate your team. You don’t have to have the same purpose all the time, you can’t always look for new values that reflect how your company cares about the society where they serve. The best part of the initiate with your purpose is to try with those that you think are important, to then find the new ones that can encourage a better team culture.

In Softwaredevtools we know that sometimes the best you can do for your team is to have the best tools. Check some of our tools for your agile remote team:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

Creating a purpose-driven team is one of the best ways to achieve good communication and transparency, even more, if we talk about remote teams. With a well-structured purpose, you can solve some of the most common problems in teams. But why do you need a purpose in your team?

How many times you are just living and suddenly you think if the things that you are doing are important? Or if the things that you are doing are taking you to the right place? Well, personally I think that stand there, thinking in what you have been doing, and ask yourself if it really matters is a clear indication of two things: you are doing so well that you are looking for the next steps or… You don’t have a purpose. 79% of business leaders believe that an organization’s purpose is central to business success.

Being purpose-driven is one of the most beneficial things we can do personally and professionally. This will clear all your decision-making because now we know what kind of things we have to do to achieve our goal. But we are going to focus on the goals as a team but no talking about money and business. We are going to talk about the cultural importance that arises when the team achieves support and engage based on purpose-driven.

Why you need a purpose in your team

Team purpose can be related to the values, mission, and vision of companies. The purpose that we are trying to define here is not about the backlog is more related to define what kind of work you expect from your team. What values are involved in your deliverables?

The reason that your team should have its purpose is the same reason they have values and mission. Having a group identity that encourages your team to perform with the best ideas and with the best attitude. It can be achieved if you create a driven purpose in your team.

Self- organized:

The purpose of teams can be compared with the backlog. The backlog is your list of priorities on the sprint, this guides the team to make all the necessary actions that the team has to do to complete the incrementation at the end of the sprint. Well, the purpose will guide the team but related to the values and increase the encouragement on the team performance. If your team has both of them, then self-organized teams are just one step away from your team.

If you encourage the right values and your purpose as well, your team will reflect them because they see themself involved in that environment, and their deliverables, outputs, and actions will follow this path. If you are implementing the innovation and improvement values the most logical path that your team going to follow is find solutions that reflect them without a person telling them that they need to improve. That it is actually better than demand it.

Commitment:

One team with a well-defined purpose, not just can work without external supervision, can make the decisions, because now they know what the company is expecting for. Therefore they are going to find a solution that better adapts to their goals. A member team that has this kind of support will create more responsibility in their work, not just they have the power to act, because they have the tools to make the decisions. LinkedIn members want jobs that offer a sense of purpose: 74% of members place a high value on finding work that delivers on a sense of purpose.

Improvement & engagement:

All these kinds of behaviors will result from a good purpose, will produce the improvement necessity. Why? because now that the team works by themselves, it takes the desition and is committed to their work. The failures will be taken by their own problems and the results from their work, producing the looking for improvement and the best paths to keep the right habits. And the members don't have to feel like they are actually failing, because their environment is fostering the innovation and the culture to keep trying, even if it results being a mistake is learning.

Also, the quality of performance will tend to improve, not just by themselves but their team, because now they are sharing a purpose that gathers them. A good attitude is very important. 87% of employees say that they have wanted to change jobs while working with someone who had a terrible attitude.

Improvement is very important for the health of teams and retrospectives is the perfect ceremony for doing it. Agile Retrospectives is a tool for remote teams that allow you have all the benefits of this ceremony and assign tasks in Jira. Check here.

Increase of public:

Some of the most interesting parts about create a good purpose is that your own audience will appreciate it because they can see a company’s commitment to the way that they serve not just the public but their workforce. 64% of global consumers find brands that actively communicate their purpose more attractive.

Create a purpose can help you to focus your team and increase transparency & engagement, essential for a good team performance. Remember always have good communication with your team and keep redefining your goals for continuous improvement.

In SoftwareDevTools we want the best for your team and improving their performance as agile teams. Check some of our tools that can help you to prioritize your task, continuous improvement, and awareness in your team process.

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

It is normal that we commit mistakes when we start with practices that we haven’t do in the past. But the most important part of making a mistake is to learn about it. In Agile Teams, we are always looking for improvement and found that goldmine on every step even if it is a misstep.

Staring with remote work isn’t easy, but sure have a lot of rewards when you find your balance with your team. I want to share with you some of the most common mistakes that you could be incurring with your remote team. If you detect some that you have on your team you can tackle quickly and find the best solution.

Lack of communication

The mother of problems. In a survey by Slack, The newly remote workers are more than twice as likely as experienced remote workers to cite “the volume of communications to coordinate with others” as a challenge.
Image Source: Slack

Having good communication is essential in remote teams due to we aren’t in the same place and we can just go to the next office and ask questions. The difference between good and bad performance on remote teams is on the transparency that exists with your team. You need to maintain all the teams on the same channel and make sure that everyone is having the same info. Misunderstanding can become a little problem in a bigger one. So be aware of how everything is going with communication even if it is a casual conversation is important.

Loss information is the result of bad communication. This one is linked to bad “hygiene” on the way that you structure your information. As a remote team documentation is very important. I’m not telling you that you have to be all day writing about what you’re going to do. But you know that there are some documents and some information that all the members need to have without asking for it.
Here you can find some advice to improve the way you share information with your team.

Misalignment

With remote teams not is just that your boss isn’t some offices nearby you, for remote teams is about been self-organized. Because actually, agile teams need to be prepared to work without external coordination.

Agile teams don’t work based on what a person at the top of the hierarchy says. Actually, we work following the requirements on the backlog. These teams follow the necessary steps to achieve the sprint incrementation. If your team doesn’t achieve an incrementation at the end of the sprint, the problem isn’t the team, the problem is on the backlog. Maybe the backlog isn't clear or it is ambiguous. So check with your team that everyone has clear what are the activities necessary to achieve.

One great way to achieve an accurate backlog is with Scrum poker. This tool will help the team to decide to prioritize their activities.

Not having the right tools

Remote work operate based on tools. Because tools are like buildings for Building blogs for the organization, is where all the information is, where the team interact is everything, a remote team without tools is a serious disadvantage. So if you are working remotely and you haven’t defined the tools you will use, all the other efforts you made isn't going to work.

Make sure to have a tool for:

• Instant messages: Slack, Skype.
• Meetings: Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype.
• Share Information: Confluence, Google Drive.
• Assign tasks: Trello, Jira.

And for remote teams using Atlassian products, we have some incredible tools to keep your agile ceremonies easier:

• Scrum Poker
• Stand-bot
• Retrospectives

If you want to learn more about these ones check this article.

Lack of productivity.

Some newly remote workers declare that they are having problems with their productivity. With all the distractions that you have in your house, all the people there, notification, and work, being productive can every difficult.

Stay in front of the computer all day doesn't mean that you are being more productive, actually means that you are being less. One of the biggest benefits of remote work is that you can work in the time that you feel more productive. But it is necessary that you help your team scheduling the working time, these will simulate the office hours and will help your team to keep a routine that is extremely necessary to be productive.

Have some scheduled meetings, this will help your team to feel motivated and start with the work. And encourage your team to take some breaks, that actually help you to be more productive.

Role Success.

First of all, what does it mean role success? Role success is a kind of behavior that exists in many teams, where the people think that the most important part of all is to highlight over all the members. This kind of behavior is all the opposite of engagement and team performance. The worst part of role success is that it can result in the individual mindset that the most important thing you can do in the team is to be better than the others and the constant research to overthrow your partners. Clearly this is not how agile teams need to behave.

For sure there are members that have been working more on the company and have more experience. That actually is great because they can teach the new ones to be prepared for all the situations in the area. But it doesn’t mean that the new members have less value or they are less important

Another way you can see role success is watching the deliverables and it will show some kind of overlap that is clearly a signal that the team is not having good communication because they are focus on their own area problems -that it is ok- but remember that the goals are collective. Having different groups for each area in your team is okay. But when the success of a little part of the team and this is not helping the entire team you are not on the right track.

All the teams have problems, find the little signals that shows that your team is having and encourage them to find the best solution. One great way to do it is with Retrospectives

Check our tools to improve your team performance:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

In Softwaredevtools we know that Increasing and improving communication is the most important part to achieve your engagement and team performance. But this time we are going to learn how to increase the good communication with some practices to structure your information.

Communication is the pillar in all the teams, but in remote teams is everything. Imagine that you are working remotely, and you start to do your job with the requirements that your partner tells you at the meeting. But when you just finish, you found an email where are all the requirements broken down specifically. All you have done is bad and you have to start again; even worst you don’t have enough time. Well, this could happen to your team if you don’t structure rightly your information sharing.

Learn how to structure your information

Communication vs. sharing info

The way you communicate with your team is different from the way you share your information. It’s necessary that you define with your team what platform is to communicate day-to-day info, and which one is for the work documentation. For example, if you are using Slack to send instant messages and updates, be sure that everyone knows. Else maybe some members are sending emails and they are not having a response to their work.

Same for meetings. Don’t report rightly the changes can provoke to lose information and good communication. If you schedule a meeting and you know that always is trough Zoom, but the new member thinks that is going to be on Google Hangouts, your member is going to miss all the meetings. Over-communicate with your team about everything. Maybe it can turn annoying but is not a problem if you can ensure good communication.
Label rightly

Now, if we talk about sharing documentation you need to structure your information logically or at least with congruence. Explain to your members where they can find different kinds of documents, use tags on the tickets, tell them how you are naming the documents. The order of the documents not just will facilitate the way you share information, this kind of structure can help the team to save time. If a member can find the info easily, there is no necessity to explain the same over and over. Even better they can back every time they want, which is so important because they will feel comfortable.

Right vocabulary and easy reading

Misunderstanding is common on all the teams, but in remote teams can be more frequent. So if you are sharing the backlog with your team on Confluence for example, and you are not using the right terms, or you are being ambiguous, every member will have their own backlog idea. It is important that all the members understand the same goal. Something you can do is write the documentation the clearest possible (you can try to let someone you know read it and check what parts weren’t understandable), organize a meeting, and explain everyone and always verify if there is no question.

One important point to watch out is that if you don’t highlight the main point in the document if someone start read it and they didn’t find the purpose of the document surely they will stop reading it. Be specific and also use bold type to highlight important ideas, this will facilitate the displacement in the document.

Share learning

Encourage share learning. The team can learn more things if the team shares what they know. If the culture of sharing learning isn’t on the team, all the good things that you already achieve will be useless. Spreading the knowledge all over the team will facilitate the cross-functionality because we will understand what is capable of our team and what kind of things we can improve and what other we can start to do.

One good way to share learning is by recognizing the member’s achievements. All the people will value that their efforts are being recognized. Also is good for the other members because they will know the partner’s capacities and ask for help from the right person.

Tools

Well, there is nothing new to understand that tools are very important in remote teams. As I said in some paragraphs above, the team needs to know how the platforms work. But you have to select those ones that work better for your team.

Be sure to have a tool where you can have asynchronous messages to encourage communication on your team. This one will help to make some short questions about meetings, little clarifications, and more important some casual messages make all funny.

In our team, we use Slack for this kind of communication. It's pretty great because if you are having Daily Standups, you can have it on Slack with our Stand-bot. This tool allows you to have asynchronous standups where all the members share their updates, or if there are problems with their job. The most interesting part is that your Scrum master can receive their reports and check how the team is going. If you are using Jira you can verify what task needs an update.

Also, you need a tool where you can have meetings. The meetings are the pillar of communication on remote teams. So be sure to have a tool suitable for your team and also have a plan b if the tool fails. With meetings and even more with videoconference, you can reach the most similar to casual conversations

Well-structured information is the key to achieve good communication and transparency. Look for the best practices for your team and always listen to the ideas that your team has for you. In SoftwareDevtools we want you to achieve the best environment for your team, that’s why we create awesome tools to help your team to improve. Check them:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!

We already know how agile teams need to be capable to find a solution when a problem comes up. Lately, with all that chaos outside, one term that has been increasingly used is: the adoption of resilience. This term can be very similar to the agile culture. Resilience is defined as the capability of recovery from difficulties. Operational resilience is defined by Forbes as part of a company culture that has to do with your ability to recover quickly from events that would seek to disrupt your day-to-day operations.

As agilistas, we are looking to find the best ways to make our job and take our team to the top. Some people think -and it is ok - that finding solutions to the problems is just about resolving them. But what we have to learn is about practices. Or even more specifically: finding habits that will help us during all the situations and not just for a specific problem.

I want to share with you some incredible practices that will help you and your team to be more resilient.

Finding the bottlenecks.

One of the most obvious practices we have to implement in our day-to-day operation is to discover what is impeding our team from fast deliveries, and from improvement. You need to find the bottlenecks. But how you will do it? Toggl track defines the next points as awareness points to detect bottlenecks:

• People waiting on others
• Work piling up on anyone’s desk
• Missing project deadlines
• Inaccurate estimates
• Errors in communication

Sometimes we think that solving a superficial problem will end all our problems without noticing that all the problems come from another bigger one. Find those bottlenecks will not just increase your efficiency, this will help you to stop the problem from the root.

The best solution is to always keep a record of what you find out while solving problems. These problems will always come back in one way or another. But if we are aware of them it will decrease the way it affects our work. You can track them during your daily scrum or discuss them during retrospectives.

Sometimes the biggest mistake we can incur is not to share the information. But remember that all the team needs to know what is going on. If the team knows the goal, the goal becomes the expectation for all the team. This will increase your engagement because everyone will feel committed, every team will make their best to achieve that goal. Even better this will generate a sense of belonging that you are looking for your team.

One of the best ways to maintain the team informed about the team progress is by keeping that information on the same platform. For instance, Atlassian created a central page of information to maintain the team informed about the current COVID situation. You can do the same with all the information that your team needs to keep in mind. This for sure will help you to increase transparency and will save you a lot of time because it wouldn’t be necessary that a person answer the same question constantly.

Avoid micromanagement

Micromanagement can be perceived by the team as weak leadership. Micromanagement can be the result of a leader that is trying to control all the team and wants to see every detail of the progress. Keeping in mind the last point, we need to remove Micromanagement from our team. The micromanagement can create delays for the team when the same person takes the decision. And it has the same solution. Keep the team informed about the follow-up of the project. You can make a very specific ticket on Confluence that will maintain the team on the same channel and the current tasks, avoiding that some member keeps control of the entire process.

Take breaks

The disruption of work is very important. Keep the team working all-day will conclude in a waste of time and money. The lack of recovery is costing $63.2 billion a year to the companies. For teleworkers, it can be very difficult to separate work from their personal life if we also include long periods of work we are creating a bad environment where our members can become workaholic which is totally opposite to resilience. On HBR article, they talk about how to overwhelm a person with work will incur the loss of productivity. Why? Because our members will be thinking about work all time and even if he doesn’t have to work all day. Provoking lees efficiency on their tasks because of mental fatigue. Rest is part of resilience.

Be sure to establish a schedule and be aware to follow it. Respect the free time of employees and even you can encourage them to have free time with the team to increase communication and engagement.

Stability - priority works

As an agile team we need a backlog to work, but sometimes have an accurate backlog is hardest. You need to learn to define the task based on what you know about the progress of your team. But furthermore, you need to keep stability on those tasks. If the teams are constantly changing their goals, you are causing not just a waste of time but members working more than they have to. As human beings, we can't make more than one task at the same time because we lose focus on one of them. So if you are trying that your teamwork in the backlog but you are constantly changing, the number of problems that will appear will be endless.

With Scrum Poker you can make accurate estimates and define your tasks with more efficiency. Check [here] for more information.

Psychological Safety

This one is to implement on your team feedback and encourage communication. If the team feels comfortable working with the team all the other problems can decrease. Talk with your team about what is going wrong with their work, make videoconference to be aware of the progress, talk about the problems with the deliveries, and find a solution is just a few ideas about how you can make the team feel physiologically safe.

Resilience is an ability very important for agile teams. I can say that is very close to the agile methodologies concepts and implement it will encourage an improvement culture. Resilience also can help us to be aware of the wellbeing of our team that after all is our most important responsibility.

Check out our Atlassian tools:

• Agile Retrospectives for Confluence
• Agile Retrospectives for Jira
• Scrum Poker for Confluence
• Scrum Poker for Jira
• Stand.bot for Slack: A bot to automate daily updates.
• And for Slack also!