How hidden are your hurdles?

My article last week discussed the need for team members to act with responsible transparency. Each team member requires discipline and wisdom to judge when an issue preventing them from completing their work items can be resolved quickly without the need for broader communication or escalation.

If a blocker surfaces and no one other than the person who encountered the impediment is aware of it, the delivery of that work item could be critically impacted resulting in a cascading set of delays. The same holds true for the team as a whole. I’ve occasionally worked with teams whose members are uniformly confident in their ability to resolve any blocker which arises. Such teams can go out of their way to show that they are in control and everything is going well on their delivery work, right up till the moment when it is clear to all that this is not the case.

So assuming that team members are doing a good job of surfacing impediments, how should these be communicated and tracked?

The project manager will likely be accountable for maintaining a project issue log but depending on where that artifact is housed it might not be visible enough to create the right sense of urgency from the stakeholders who can help the team resolve issues. Also, such a log is likely to track higher level issues and not just those affecting individual work items.

If a detailed schedule is being used to plan and track work activities, blockers could be directly linked to the affected activities, and indicator icons or flags can be set to highlight the tasks which are currently blocked. But that still requires stakeholders to regularly review the project schedule.

A better approach is to expose blockers through existing information radiators.

If a work board is used to help the team manage their work flow, blockers can be identified in one of the following three ways:

• A column named Blocked could be added to the board and team members would move work items to this column when they encounter an impediment which requires support from others. If the team is following Kanban, work in progress limits could be set on this column to limit the total number of unresolved blockers.
• A new work item designated as a “Blocker” could be created. If a physical board is used, a different colored stickie could be used to denote these. With this approach, the current status of the impediment is clear but the linkage between the blocker and the work item(s) affected isn’t.
• Affected work items could be flagged to indicate they are blocked. In the case of physical boards, a removable sticker could be stuck on them.

Blockers can also be tracked separately using a pain snake (sometimes called a “snake on the wall“). Every time a new blocker is identified, a new stickie is added to the snake. The length of the snake will help encourage the team not to allow too many blockers to remain unresolved.

So how bold are your team’s blockers?

Need help team building? Try to escape an escape room!

There are multiple types of external events which a project manager or Scrum Master could consider to increase the level of collaboration and cohesion within their team. Escape rooms provide a fiscally responsible, but highly effective option.

For my readers who have never experienced one of these, an escape room provides a small team (ideally no more than eight people) with the task of completing a set of puzzles within a fixed duration of usually 45 minutes to one hour. These puzzles are incorporated within a fictitious scenario such as escaping a prison or surviving a zombie apocalypse. The narrative and challenges in lower quality rooms will follow a linear path and focus on solving one combination lock after another whereas better ones will provide the opportunity for parallel and alternate paths as well as providing puzzles which test multiple senses.

So why am I such a proponent of this type of team building activity?

Collaboration is a must, not a nice-to-have

I’ve enjoyed almost a dozen escape rooms and the mental and physical work involved in solving most challenges requires close collaboration. If one is shackled to a fellow “cell mate” at the start of a scenario, both have to work together to ensure that the keys to their shackles can be reached. Many puzzles require team members to coordinate their activities across different points in the room so once again, you can’t go it alone!

We is greater than the smartest Me

It’s a lot of fun trying to solve escape rooms with a group of self-stated Type A leaders. As the clock ticks down, it becomes apparent that the wisdom of the group needs to be harnessed rather than relying on a single leader. Situational leadership is exercised as some puzzles require spatial acuity, some memory or mathematical skills and others will demand physical dexterity. Escape rooms often have a few fiendish red herrings which can mislead one or more team members and ignoring these can be a good exercise for overcoming group-think.

We all need a helping hand sometime

All escape rooms provide teams with the ability to ask for assistance from a staff member at least once over the duration of the game. Deciding when is the right time to ask for help can pose its own challenges, especially if some team members are unwilling to show vulnerability. The same is true within the team – someone might believe they can solve a puzzle, and refuses to ask for help, but with limited time, the team will need to have the discipline to swap them out if they aren’t making progress.

Communicate, communicate, communicate!

With clues to solve a puzzle scattered around the room or even split across multiple rooms, team members need to effectively communicate with one another in order to efficiently solve puzzles.

Focus

There are lots of distractions in an escape room. Multiple puzzles, false clues, artwork and interesting (but useless) trinkets and gadgets can trap us into losing focus. Support from the team is needed to help individual players focus on solving one puzzle at a time.

Unless the escape room is very simple it’s rare that a team will complete their first escape room. When time runs out, rather than just rushing to the nearest watering hole, it might be worth holding a quick retrospective to understand what everyone learned and to identify opportunities for improvement with the next escape room event as well as with our projects.

To plagiarize Michael Jordan, a single team member’s talent can solve individual challenges, but teamwork completes escape rooms.

Shouldn’t we ALL be agile project managers?

I always get a kick out of online discussions referencing agile project managers as if those are some special subset of the project management population!

Yes, there certainly are agile delivery methodologies and adaptive project lifecycles and some project managers might have gained greater experience in those, but what might some of the characteristics of an agile project manager be?

• Their primary focus is on delivering value at the optimal pace of change absorption by their customers and key stakeholders.
• They know that the secret sauce to project success is people first.
• They don’t follow process for process sake and recognize that tailoring is as relevant to project practices as it is to clothing.
• They embrace Robert K. Greenleaf’s teachings on servant leadership.
• They recognize that a good solution today beats a great solution two years from now.
• They accept that changes will occur and they steer their projects to take advantage of these changes rather than rigidly resisting them.
• They favor face-to-face communication and embrace transparency in their reporting.
• They promote a sustainable pace of work as they acknowledge that projects are marathons and not sprints.
• They promote psychological safety within their teams and model the behavior they expect from their team members.
• They instill a culture of continuous improvement in their teams by helping them reflect regularly on what’s working well and what could be tweaked.

The attributes in the list above should be applicable to any project manager in any industry managing projects using any type of lifecycle.

So why wouldn’t you want to be an agile project manager?