Jeff is the author of Actionable Agile tools (available on Amazon, and direct from the author at bit.ly/aatbook). He joins us on this series of Q&A shows to answer questions you’ve submitted. You can submit your questions via our survey (short, about 2 min to fill-in) or by tweeting us @scrumpodcast with #agilejeff.

In this episode, we talk about getting management to be involved and buy-in to the agile transformation.

How do you get teams to collaborate to reach a goal?

I was working with a team that was experiencing a serious issue. They were not able to finish the work on time or finish what they planned for the Sprint

There could be many reasons for that, but in this team what I saw when I came it was that they had one task (not story) going on per developer all the time. Stories were not delivered except in the last day of the Sprint.

It was very hard to get the team members to collaborate and feel ownership for what they had planned to deliver.

How do you solve problems like this?

Resources and tools

• We discuss Systems Thinking and talk about a tool you can use to understand the real causes for lack of collaboration: The Causal Loop Diagram, which we discussed in several episodes of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast before.
• For more Systems Thinking tools listen to our System Friday shows here on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.
• We mention the Event Log tool also described in Jeff Campbell’s Actionable Agile Tools book.
• We refer to Deming’s famous quote: A bad system will defeat a good person every time. For more on Deming, check out this website on Deming’s work. Or read Deming’s famous Out of The Crisis book.
• We refer to the Timeline Retrospective format as a way to engage the team in investigating the root causes of the problems they are experiencing.

About Jeff Campbell

Jeff Campbell is the author of Actionable Agile Tools, a book with practical tools and practices to help you amplify your impact as a coach and Scrum Master

Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organizations both small and large.

Jeff is also involved in the Agile community and is one of the founding members of Gothenburg Sweden’s largest agile community at 1500+ members www.scrumbeers.com, and he also organizes the yearly conference www.brewingagile.org.

You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.