Using extremes to help teams

This is technique I have been using for a while and has a wide range of applications. If you are familiar with affinity mapping, then this takes that and expands it for use in several different areas.

Let's start off with a simple application....

Story sizes have not been working for me for a while. I love the conversations which often uncovered something we had forgotten or someone knew that nobody else did. Unfortunately differing sizes were often a catalyst for these conversations.

In my previous blog about super fast sizing, we used a different way of sizing that I think gets you the best of both worlds.

How I use this in refinement is knowing where to put more effort. 5 days or less needs no more intervention. The team I work with now even have something called a 'fast track', which is 1 day turn around which they do not refine since it would cost more to talk about than do.

More than 2 sprints means we need to spend some time looking at how we could break it down. The ones in the middle we also try to break down but can also accept the increase in risk if we want to.

Asking these questions and gauging the response from the team allows you to invite conversations as a facilitator and help the team explore the scope of the story.

You can also use this for long term estimates. When I was asked about how long a piece of work could take I used extremes to give some idea - "4 months is too pessimistic but 2 months feels to optimistic but it will be somewhere between the two. With progress on this bit of work I would expect this come in as we know more, which I can update you on as we progress". This was just enough to allow our stakeholder to plan.

I often use fist of five voting to get people's feedback on ceremonies. This again uses extremes and you can be playful to make it more fun e.g. ".... where no fingers is 'please, please never ever do this to me again' and 5 fingers is 'this is sooo cool, I think I might get in early just so we can sneak another one in before work'"

Recently, I have used extremes to challenge the status quo. When looking at staff retention, we can honestly ask what would happen if nobody left - is that ideal? This extreme stance makes us realise that the extreme is not ideal either so we can start to ask questions about what is the ideal. In terms of staff retention, we can be realistic about what to expect using the extremes to guide that thought process.

My favourite comes in exploring ideas. We had an example where we were talking about testing strategies and testing environments. We used an extreme to explore some new thinking rather than just what we had.

In this extreme, we asked what our testing strategy look like if we only had our production environment and our local development environments - no dev or integration environments. We explored what branching and releases might look like, what testing we could do and where and the risks we would face.

It's deceptively simple and you have probably be using it without realising in some areas, enjoy!

Vote with your fists

If there was a single tool I use more than any other with teams it is Fist of Five voting.

If a session with a team does not feel right, at the end I ask the group to provide some feedback. I create a scale from 1 (or 0 if you like) to 5 and give a description for the highest and lowest. I make these up every time, something like "Where 1 is 'please never ask me to do this again' and 5 is 'can we do this every day, it was so much fun'" seems to work well.

You can vary the description to fit what you are looking for. You could choose to describe the scale in terms of effectiveness or return on investment, for example.

Every one then gives a score using their fingers, allowing us to get some insight what people are thinking.

I follow up by asking anyone with a score of 3 or less to suggest one thing we can change that would improve their score. As a group, we quickly decide which ones we will try and then we call the meeting to a close.

This is such a simple mechanism but it works for a couple of reasons:

* The feedback we get from the group is at the same time as the problem they observed, making it easier to act on
* Changes are often small so they are easier to implement in the next meeting
* We encourage group ownership of our ceremonies and meetings which helps people engage and take responsibility for their success

An obvious place to try to this is in you standup. If it feels wrong, this would well get some instant feedback that you can put into practice the next day.