Conclusion

Job drivers

Categories of job drivers

• Attitudes - personality traits that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. social pressure, corporate culture, personality, expectations of others)
• Background - long-term context that affects behavior and decision-making (e.g. geographic/cultural dynamics)
• Circumstances - immediate or near-term factors that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. environmental factors, work schedule, unexpected events)

Remove impediments

• Attitudes
  • Sometimes program and team leadership do not feel comfortable bringing up impediments because of potential scolding/backlash
• Background
  • In some programs, impediments are celebrated when brought up to encourage open communication, but in more traditional organizations people may be afraid to bring up impediments because it may represent a mistake by the individual
• Circumstances
  • Encouraging and celebrating people who bring up impediments helps to create a culture that focuses on the flow of work vs. previous mistakes

Manage cross-program/team needs

• Attitudes
  • Sometimes teams feel embarrassed asking other teams for help, which can slow down the completion of work
• Background
  • Sometimes, scrum of scrums meetings can fall prey to becoming a status meeting without providing valuable outcomes around cross-program coordination
• Circumstances
  • Focus on completing features vs. talking about what individual teams are working on to help encourage cross-team collaboration to complete work

Manage risks

• Attitudes
  • Sometimes program and team leadership feel that tracking risks may waste time if it can’t be associated with work and if the impact is not understood
• Background
  • Sometimes it is challenging to create an environment that is supportive of sharing information and being transparent on impediments and risks
• Circumstances
  • Lean towards gathering all possible risks and triaging them on an ongoing basis throughout the planning period, as this will help reduce the likelihood of teams experiencing impediments that impact their flow

References

• Program Increment - Scaled Agile Framework
• Read the Scrum@Scale Guide Online
• Program board

Congratulations!