31st March 2009

Collaborative environments to achieve goals

Many productivity problems I’ve found in teams are closely related to collaboration barriers. Really, any time frustration or problem your team is up to, please take the time to see if the roots of the problem is because your team is not fitting the following description:

A group of people come together, create a sufficiently shared understanding of an equifinal meaning that enables coordinated behavior, and then the actual activities of task identification, decomposition, distribution, coordination, and integration of outcomes are accomplished in a manner that lasts long enough for the goals [...] are realized.

That’s the definition of Collaboration as stated in Luke Hohmann’s article Some Answers to What’s Collaboration? .

Enforce collaboration. Agile practicesare meant to enforce collaboration. Think about it:

  • A dedicate workspace for team.
  • The workspace is in itself a meeting place, so anyone can convoke a meeting at any time without waiting for meeting room to be available.
  • The team is working in a circle-like distribution, everybody facing averybody.
  • Pair programming.
  • People participating in Daily stand-ups are talking to everybody, not only to ScrumMaster/Leader.
  • The ScrumMaster enforces a shared vision.
  • Openness in any meeting, specially in Retrospective meetings.
  • Shared agreement in decisions, even in controversial matters.
  • Reflect and Inspect what went wrong and right in each iteration (Retrospective meetings) in order to improve teaming.

Further reading

How to set up a productive working environment for Agile teams

Pair Programming with VNC

Organizing an Agile Modeling Room

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under ScrumMaster Training, TaskBoard, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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