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This newsletter will arrive in your inbox every Friday. In each issue you can expect to read about something I’m loving that week, a useful tool, my favorite read, one tip and one lesson.
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This week I’m loving
Generalist project managers are empathetically inclined, and when we lean into this strength we can be powerful facilitators.
There is no more important facilitation role than hosting productive meetings on your projects; but, a key understanding as a project manager is when to hold meetings and how to ensure they are productive.
Data from Wrike’s the Dark Matter of Work report found that 69% of business leaders want to reduce the time spent in meetings but don’t know how. Meanwhile the average knowledge worker spends over 18 days of elapsed time in meetings per year.
Enter this week’s love worthy publication from the “business chemistry” team at Deloitte, talking about creating inclusive meeting environments that ensure we get the contributions we need from every meeting attendee. The findings reveal plenty of clues to aid facilitators in this effort.
Over 80% of people won’t contribute in a meeting with too many people talking and not listening to each other
3/4 of people are deterred by dishonesty in meetings
2/3 of people won’t participate if the environment is tense or combative
Over half of people won’t participate if the meeting is dominated by a few people or engagement is generally lacking
As a facilitator, we need to ensure we create space for people to contribute. I have often felt that many organizations have meeting cultures that favor extroverted people - where discussion is loud and boisterous and people just jump in. What space do we have to create for introverted people to join these discussions?
The article has a great analogy that we should take to heart.
An intriguing aspect of group dynamics is that each person in the group is likely to be affected by those dynamics, but each person is also part of the dynamics. It’s like traffic—people often complain about traffic without recognizing that they themselves are part of the traffic.
Project managers should be especially conscious of how the meeting design and facilitation we bring to a group contributes to the group dynamics. We can choose to ensure that we create spaces for participation by all team members using our knowledge of their individual styles and the impact of key facilitation techniques highlighted in the article.
The Power of Pauses
Encouraging playful critique
Requesting contribution or deferring to someone who hasn’t participated to encourage their participation
Choosing alternatives to large group settings to gain insights from quieter contributors.
If you try out some of the suggestions in the article I’d love to hear how it worked!
Tool of the week
I’m pretty passionate about properly written acceptance criteria that follow the Given, When, Then format. I find that we learn a lot by being challenged to create testing scenarios described in this manner from a user story or set of requirements.
However, many people find writing acceptance criteria in this format challenging and commonly make mistakes, creating invalid testing scenarios and reducing the value of acceptance criteria.
But it occurred to me that this might no longer be a pain point as we might be able to get AI to assist us in turning a user story into acceptance criteria.
I tried this out with Chat-GPT. Here are the prompts and the results.
When using large language model (LLM tools) the secret to getting great results is to set up clear constraints. So first, I set the stage:
Prompts:
Results:
I’m going to play around with this some more, but I was impressed with the overall result. Try it out and let me know if it works for you!
An interesting read
This week I’ve been teaching a seminar that introduces agile project management and Scrum to continuing education students in a university setting who are pursuing a project management certificate. As a result, I had Scrum on the brain when this week’s interesting read caught my eye.
I have worked for a few organizations who got all excited about scaled scrum as supposedly espoused by Spotify and this week’s article is focused on debunking the myths surrounding this false legend.
At one organization where I watched this implementation first hand, there were many of us who knew instinctively from our agile experiences that the supposedly implemented model couldn’t possibly work. So it was vindicating to read this little gem that talked about how the hype became the terrible trap that many a waterfall expert looking for a scaled scrum solution that seemed palatable has fallen into.
In case you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, there was a notorious article that featured a unique implementation of scaled agile depicted as below:
Image credit: Agile Pain Relief blog
The moral of this story is:
You can’t copy and paste someone else’s approach to Agile. Their approach grew from their people and their culture.
At the end of the day agile success is driven by simple principles that every organization can use to design what will work within their processes and culture.
A focus on value
Fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Ensuring alignment
Creating psychologically safe cross-functional teams
Inspecting regularly for opportunities for improvement
Cultivating an environment of optimized flow
Engineering for quality balanced against simplicity
We all need to ensure that we focus on agile implementations that suit the organizations we are part of and get back to the basics.
Happy reading!
A tip
A lesson
Loved this reminder:
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