Achieving Team Alignment with Kanban: The Importance of a Working Agreement
Introduction
One of the primary ways to derail your Kanban strategy and fail to achieve the expected value is by not agreeing on how to work as a team. Without a clear working agreement, your team members are likely to operate based on personal preferences, leading to chaos and inefficiency.
The Necessity of a Working Agreement
A working agreement is essential for team alignment and efficiency. Here’s why it’s crucial and how to establish one:
- Lack of Agreement Leads to Disarray:
If team members do not agree on how to work, each person will approach tasks based on individual preferences, causing misalignment.
Without consensus, the team lacks direction, leading to random and inefficient task selection and execution.
- Scrum Framework Misconceptions:
Many believe that merely adopting Scrum or another framework will solve all problems. However, frameworks provide guidelines, not detailed instructions.
Scrum, for instance, doesn’t dictate the use of story points or planning poker; these are optional practices. Teams must decide on these specifics to ensure cohesion.
- The Board Game Analogy:
Think of your team as players in a board game. If everyone makes up their own rules, the game becomes chaotic and unwinnable.
Similarly, teams need to agree on the rules for success, how to achieve it, and what steps are necessary for incremental wins.
Steps to Establish a Working Agreement
- Define Roles and Responsibilities:
- Clearly outline each team member’s role and their responsibilities. This ensures everyone knows what is expected of them.
- Set Common Goals:
- Agree on the team’s objectives and how to measure success. This could involve setting specific targets for deliverables, timelines, or quality standards.
- Agree on Processes and Tools:
- Decide on the methodologies and tools to be used, whether it’s Scrum, Kanban, or another framework. Ensure everyone understands and agrees on these methods.
- Create a Definition of Workflow:
- Document the workflow stages and establish criteria for moving tasks from one stage to the next. This ensures consistency and transparency.
- Regularly Review and Adjust:
- Continuously revisit and adjust the working agreement as needed. This allows the team to adapt to changes and improve processes over time.
The Consequences of Not Having a Working Agreement
Without a working agreement, teams operate in a state of total disarray:
Inconsistent Work Practices:
Team members might work in different ways, leading to inefficiencies and misunderstandings.
Lack of Clear Direction:
Without agreed-upon goals and processes, the team lacks a unified direction, making it difficult to achieve success.
Increased Frustration and Conflict:
Misaligned expectations and unclear roles can lead to frustration and conflict within the team.
Conclusion
Establishing a working agreement is crucial for the success of any team, whether using Kanban, Scrum, or another methodology. By sitting down and agreeing on how to work together, teams can achieve alignment, efficiency, and ultimately, success.
If you’re struggling to implement a Kanban strategy, we can help or connect you with someone who can. Click the link below and get in touch today.
One of the main ways to wreck your campaign strategy is not agreeing how you’re going to work as a team. Right? Unless you’ve sat down with the people you’re going to work with and decided on how we are going to approach things, we probably don’t have agreement. Right? Most people, unless you sit down and agree, are probably not on the same page. We don’t have all of our noses pointed in the same direction. Right? I might pick things based on their affinity to something I like; you might pick things based on their affinity to something you like. And suddenly, from the outside, it looks like we’re randomly picking stuff to work on. Right?
That working agreement is so often missing from teams. For some reason, lots of people think that you can just throw ten people together and they’ll magically figure out how to navigate the complex nature of delivering high-value complex products and be able to just figure it out. And they also think that you can just apply some framework, and if we all follow that, we’ll also all be in agreement. So, for example, Scrum. Right? We have a campaign strategy. We’re going to do Scrum as part of that. That’s our working agreement. No, it’s not. It’s not your working agreement at all. Scrum is a framework; it’s not a blow-by-blow how to do stuff. Are you going to use story points? Are you going to use planning poker? Those are not part of Scrum; they’re optional things that you might pick. Have you decided to do those things? If you’re not doing Scrum, you might just have ten people who all want to work a slightly different way, working together towards some outcome.
So I would say to you, if I took one of my lovely board games to my board game group, I’ll be there tonight playing. If I took one and we got the pieces out, I don’t know if you’ve seen these things, but they have like 300 pieces in the box. Right? We got all the pieces out of the box. I set it up the way I think it looks like it should be set up, so I’m not going to look at the rules; I’m just going to make some stuff up. And then every member that’s playing, all four of us, make up our own rules for how to play the game. We don’t read the official rules; we just do it our own way. Are we working together? Are we playing the same game? Right? You can’t have a win; you can’t have success unless you’ve agreed what the rules are for success. Right? Most of these games, it’s the most points. Right? But have you agreed how you get points? Can I just move a piece to here and say now I have 300 points?
That’s total disorder. That’s total disarray. And most teams that I see and engage with operate in a state of total disarray because they’ve not agreed what their rules are. They’ve not agreed what game they’re playing, what success looks like, how they get little successes within the context of the bigger successes that the organisation’s trying to achieve. So sit down with your team and agree the way forward. Don’t tell you need to agree, because if you tell me how to do the stuff that I do, I’m going to ignore you. I need to be in agreement with you. You need to collaborate on creating that definition of workflow. We need to collaborate on creating our working agreement. And it actually doesn’t matter whether you have a CI. I don’t care if you’re doing a Kanban strategy, Kanban method, Scrum. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you’ve got a bunch of people working together, you need to get together and agree how you’re going to work. Otherwise, you have disarray. Everybody’s making it up as they go along. Don’t do that.
If you’re struggling to implement a Kanban strategy, we can help or find you someone who can. Click the link below and get in touch today.
