PDM in Scrum, part 3: The tree metaphor, revisited

continued from part 2: PDM core values

Once at a seminar I asked if anyone knew what empowerment meant. No one knew! Why is empowerment fundamental to agile? One way to show this is to look at the opposite: 

Un-powerment

Inspired by Esther Derby’s drawing here, this is what I came up with. With visualization like this you can ask if empowerment would make a difference to your efficiency.

High Performance Tree

Lyssa Adkins showed us how to communicate core values using the High Performance Tree metaphor. Read about it in the excellent and very useful book Coaching Agile Teams, or watch it live on youtube. Nail up a High Performance Tree on the wall, explain how endeavouring the PDM values (tree roots) yield effects of stronger people, stronger group and stronger agreements (tree branches). These effects will in turn give us more ideas, better ideas and so on (fruits). To see all the fruits in full bloom, so to say, you might want to revisit the tree in part 1.

Team Radar

Team Radar, from zero in centre out to ten. Lines connectiong points.

The Team Radar is a simple procedure that helps tracking team progress toward values. You can visualize where the team feels it stands today, and you can reason on how to improve towards your values.

- What could be improved the most?

- Is our understanding of where we are different? Why?

- How can we improve?

The illustration shows a radar where each team member has marked four dots on the axes, for where he/she thinks the group is living up to the values. The low score on shared responsibility suggests there could be an issue with specialized roles.

Iterate

With this setup you now have the tools to review and measure progress. Do a new radar in next iteration and see how progress is going, or even better,  try other new innovating excercises! Refer to the tree metaphor, and don’t forget to enjoy the fruits from it!

PDM in Scrum, part 2: PDM core values

continued from part 1: Elevating empowerment

Why all this Core Values talk?

Why talk about values? Why not just say what people should do? It would be much easier! In Scrum that would perhaps sound something like this:

- We have four meetings, three artifacts, three roles, and some rules to tie this together! 

When you head on like this without any motives you are very close to a stick-and-carrot leadership style. It’s not that you don’t need to teach rules and methods (like above), but it will not be enough if you want your teams to get empowered.

Shared goals

So, in addition to the above we need to raise questions about how we do our work. Consult the people involved. Question the tools used!

The steps to reach a shared vision (Senge, et al. 1994)

- Why are we doing Scrum?

When you reason around the values and possible benefits from those, the methods gets justified. Also, people might see ways to modify the tools and methods, to something more suited for their context. This will make people feel more engaged, motivated and hence become more empowered.

This will help you to gain some steps on Senge’s ladder to a shared vision (even though we’re not working with shared visions explicitly in this topic).

PDM Core values

Ok then, enough of all this meta-talk. We want team to get more empowered, and we want to know how to apply PDM to do this.

In Sam Kaner’s book Facilitator’s Guide to Particitatory Decision-Making you’ll find four PDM core values.

• Full participation: all members in the group are encouraged to participate
• Shared responsibility: all people in the group feel responsibility for the decisions being made
• Inclusive solutions: everybody’s perspective are taken into account to get wiser solutions
• Mutual understanding: people needs to understand each others needs and goals to get stronger agreements

Great! This allows us to get started the right way! The PDM core values helps us to get motives for working with PDM, and in turn PDM will get us more empowered with the rest of the stuff we do.

(We obviously did not quite get out of the Nine Circles of Meta, did we? Just bare with me, we will soon get to the fruits of this.)

Next: PDM in Scrum, part 3: The tree metaphor, revisited