Who Are You Serving? How Can You Best Serve? Are You Making Your Unique Contribution? Are You Getting Better Every Day? – Serve to Lead

The Key to Successful Leadership Today is Influence, Not Authority. I Agree. Do You Also? If Yes, then Let’s Practice … & Troubleshoot to Propels Your Organizational Success!!!

Servant Leadership is the Practice of leading through service to the team, by focusing on understanding & addressing the needs & development of team members in order to enable the highest possible team performance.

Agile Approaches were born out of the need to solve issues associated with high rates of change, uncertainty, and complexity on projects. That is the main reasons that this approach contains a variety of Tools & Techniques for dealing with issues that present problems in predictive approaches.

Are You Facing Challenges due to Inaccurate Estimation?

As a Servant Leader, You should work with the team to reduce story size by splitting stories. Use Relative Estimation with the entire team to estimate. Consider Agile Modeling or Spiking to understand what the story is.

Are You Facing Challenges due to Unclear Work Assignments or Work Progress?

As a Servant Leader, You should help the team learn that self-manage their work. Consider Kanban Visualization Methods to see the flow of work. Consider daily stand-up to walk the board and See what work is where.

What do You do When the team struggles with obstacles?

As a Servant Leader, You can help clear these obstacles. If the team doesn’t know the options they have, Consider an Agile Coach. Sometimes, the team needs to escalate obstacles the Team or Servant Leader has not been able to remove.

What do You do When Team Struggles with Higher Number of Defects?

As a Servant Leader, Consider the Technical Practices that work for your Unique Environment. The possibilities like pair work, collective product ownership, pervasive testing (test-driven & automated testing approaches) and a robust definition of done will give you & team Continuous Learning, Improvement & reduced Defect Count.

What do You do When work is not complete?

As a Servant Leader, work with the team and encourage them to define the definition of done for stories including acceptance criteria. Also, add release criteria for projects.

What do You do When Technical Debt increases with degraded Code Quality?

As a Servant Leader, Consider Refactoring, Agile Modeling, Pervasive Testing, Automated Code Quality Analysis, Revisit the definition of done (DOD).

Are You Facing Challenges due to High Product Complexity?

As a Servant Leader, Remember the Agile Principle “Simplicity – the Art of Maximizing the amount of work not done. Encourage the team to think What is the simplest thing that would work? This help reduces the complexity.

Are You Facing the Challenge of Slow or No Improvement in the Team Work Process?

As a Servant Leader, Capture no more than three items to improve at each retrospective. You help the team learn how to integrate those items.

Are You in the middle of too much work leading to rework?

As a first step, instead of much upfront work, Consider team spikes to learn. As a next step, measure the WIP during the beginning of the project and see what the team’s options are to deliver value instead of designs. Also, try to Shorten iterations and create a robust definition of done.

Do You Observe Rush/Wait, Uneven Flow of Work?

As a Servant Leader, Plan to the Team’s capacity and not more. Ask people to stop multitasking and be dedicated to one team. Ask the team to work as pairs, a swarm, or mob to even out the capabilities across the entire team.

Do You Face Challenges due to Impossible Stakeholder demands?

As a Servant Leader, Work with this stakeholder (and possibly Product Owner) to control this situation by setting the right expectation.

Do You Face Unexpected or Unforeseen delays?

As a Servant Leader, Ask the team to check-in more often, Use Kanban Boards to see the flow of work & WIP Limits to understand the impact of the demands on the team or product. Also, track Impediments & Impediment Removal on an Impediment Board

Do You See Siloed teams instead of cross-functional teams?

As a Servant Leader, Ask the people who are part of projects to self-organize as cross-functional teams. Use your Servant Leadership Skills to help the managers understand why agile needs cross-functional teams?

Closing Thoughts

The Troubleshooting Experiments always varies based on your specific project environment.

Do You Agree?

Please share your views as comments and also let me know your troubleshooting challenges through dileepav@diaame.com.

You could also view my other Articles on https://www.hangoutagile.com/blog

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!!! :-😊) HAPPY LEARNING :-😊) !!!