During the Unexpected Meetup: 1st Open Space I had an opportunity to discuss the topic of changes with fellow Scrum Masters / Team Leads / Agile Coaches. Here are some notes (subjective and incomplete):
- Books to read:
- You shouldn’t expect that your team will come with new change proposal every day. It will be rather your task to help them to discover that some changes are required and decide that they are worth the effort.
- External experts can really make a difference. Somehow people from the same company are less credible (“No prophet is accepted in his own country”)
- New hires – especially if they are seniors – are treated similarly to external experts. At least for some time.
- Imposed changes are much less effective than grassroot changes.
- No sense to order changes (e.g. “you will do the pair programming 100% of time starting today!”). Much better is to show the idea and let people use it at their own will.
- Onboarding (especially with fresh devs) is a great time to inject some desirable behaviours.
- A nice way to introduce a change is to run an experiment (e.g. “Let us do the pair programming 1 hour per day for 2 weeks. Then we decide whether we like it or not”.) Be prepared that people might not like the change. But this is fine.