PITA 034
ICEBREAKER: Cards Against Agility
TOPIC 1 - How do you tell people things they will (might) find hard to hear, in a way that they can hear?
Radical Candor - but this presupposes that you have formed a relationship
The Culture Map - cross-border cultural differences
Ask them questions around the outcome of that behaviour/issue and lead them to the answer
Motivation mapping - Empathy maps
The Five Conditions for Improvement | by Roy Rapoport | Medium
The Situation-Behavior-Impact-Feedback Tool - From MindTools.com
When I worked at Redgate, managers were asked to have 1-1s with all their reports each week. Good opportunity to pick up issues early. Everyone also got 360 feedback from people they worked with outside their line management hierarchy.
I went on a “how to have difficult conversations” course, so you can get training on this. Also one can practice. I coached someone who had to put some of his team at risk of redundancy and helped him practice different scenarios for them reacting differently.
TOPIC 2 - How to best use overlapping skills between PM and UX in the same team (e.g. user research)
The voice of the customer is… the customer!
Pair in concrete tasks/responsibilities that sit on the overlap, take advantage of the differences between people to extract richer insights (e.g. from customer interviews).
If everyone thinks that THEY are the voice of the customer, at least that shows that they care.
It doesn’t always have to work the same way - it depends who is best suited to do what at any point
PM’s role is setting the problem to solve taking into account business goals and overall strategy etc - perhaps it’s OK that they are a little decoupled from user insight and UX can bring that context to the problem space
CLAM (Contributes, Leads, Approves, Monitors) - a better option than RACI (RACI Chart Template For Project Managers + Example & How-To )
Focus on who has the most experience with least bias and leading communication - The Mom Test
TOPIC 3 - Empathetic management who thinks someone could benefit from mental coaching / support. How to introduce this / is it okay to introduce this at all??
Cautious about whether offering advice on this can tick HR off; may be better to raise with HR
Make it clear that help is available (indirectly, through company-wide communication channels, and may ask the company to support/offer that)
TOPIC 4 - How do you think about work you/the team enjoy/don't? Work that energises/drains? How do you choose?
Sharing war stories - you had to be there!
“For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun” - Mary Poppins, the first agile coach
Try to find the small wins along the way - and celebrate them!