Nowadays, I spend 100% of my time in agile teams either engaged in direct coaching, teaching, or participating directly within the team. One of the core tenets of agile teams is self-direction. This is a state that is much easier to say than it is to achieve. One of the more critical activities that fosters self-direction is effective facilitation and the role of facilitator.
Leveraging Scrum then, this ‘art’ largely falls within the realm of the Scrum Master. A large part of that role is directed towards focusing the teams’ energy on effective discussion, debate, and decision-making. Trying to create an environment where the team experiences what Jim Surowiecki calls The Wisdom of Crowds. The key point is that the collective wisdom of a team, group or crowd is quite often greater and more valuable than any singular domain expert.
These team-based innovative solutions surround architectural & design choices, surfacing and analyzing critical customer requirements, and crafting the simplest yet most powerful feature sets in response. There are often a myriad of directions or choices a team can make and getting the path right isn’t always easy. Effective facilitation can be one of the differentiators for teams hovering between average and outstanding delivery.
5 Dysfunctions – the passionate debate…
As it turns out, technologists seem to debate everything. Or at least that is my experience from over 30 years of software development. They’ll be just as passionate about naming conventions for a particular nondescript configuration file as they are about designing a high performance databases for a new large-scale CRM application.
I think it might have something to do with personality type or perhaps just a fondness for debate. Regardless, just as we have a tendency to be overly optimistic with respect to estimates, we have a tendency to deaden the horse on nearly all technical topics.
I recently read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni and received some excellent training surrounding that material. One of the key points the instructor made focused towards encouraging teams to have Passionate Debate…but about the Things That Truly Matter. It’s the last part that we often forget as technologists.
A good facilitator will try and focus the discussion away from the myriad and towards the things that truly matter. It’s a prioritization game that aligns incredibly nicely with the agile methods.
So what does this have to do with BA’s?
If you’ve read any of my posts about agile and BA’s, you’ve seen me continuously reframing your role – for example, from an early requirement provider, to a whole-project oracle for requirements and their evolution. Or reframing towards establishing an ongoing and intimate partnership with your customers.
In this post, I’m trying to influence your facilitation skills. I think most BA’s have a wonderful capacity to facilitate team-based discussions surrounding requirements. But I feel you can extend that towards general facilitation surrounding all aspects of an agile team attacking a project. It’s this extension that I hope you entertain.
A quick list of facilitation tools & techniques
So, if you’re a BA who wants to improve your facilitation skills, I thought I’d provide a list of some techniques that I’ve found helpful in guiding teams’ towards successful agile execution. While these tools and techniques can be helpful in all contexts, I feel they’re particularly helpful in agile contexts. Enjoy!
Ask why; ask why five times
There is something quite powerful about asking why. Why are we doing this? Why is this complex design the only way to solve this problem? Why are we taking on so much scope in delivering this feature?
In lean circles a common approach is to ask why five times. The tactic is to peel the onion and drill through peripheral points into the core of an issue or requirement. And when you ask why, don’t be afraid to wait for an answer. Allow time for folks to think about the question and respond. Sometimes that silent pause can be most helpful in getting to the essential core of a discussion.
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