As part of a retrospective a few sprints back with one of the team that I work with something interesting happened.
Since things are remote we do the Retrospective also remotely and not at the same time and most people just add their update on to a wiki.
As I review them I see these words stacked alone in a column in a table.
“Many of the Scrum Rules are Ignored’
And mind you I am the Scrum Master and coach for the team. And such a comment talks about something that I am not doing right? This excites me. Now I can learn something new. Learn something more about me, about my team, about what we can do and about Scrum itself.
I knew who had made that comment and I had two ways to approach that. One I could ping and talk to the person. Or else I could in my stand up say I saw this message and would be great if I had more context and specifics so I can work on them.
I chose the former as I felt that would be ideal. A 1:1… Also if I tell it in the group and the person does not add more details, I might miss the opportunity.
I ping the team member and asked If we can chat. I told what I wanted to know and then we had an amazing conversation for 10 minutes.
We are going to try out a few things during our next planning. I was so happy that my team feels free to tell me how something I am doing is not just right.
The specifics of what was said is not important because the specifics are team specifics and relevant to only our team.
This is not about specifics, about trust and feedbacks and conversations and improvement.
Categories: Articles, Being Agile
Vinod Narayan 
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