Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

Create a feedback culture Giving honest feedback to someone who has broken faith with you is not an easy thing to do. Neither is accepting critical feedback from a peer. Teams will very likely need help in learning how to hold each other to account without inciting arguments or driving wedges between team members. Scrum teams, the individuals within the teams, and the organisations they are operating in, all need to become comfortable with the process of giving and receiving feedback on a very frequent basis. We need to be open to feedback about the state of our requirements, our design decisions, our estimates, our priorities, our interactions with other team members, and, most importantly, what we have built and how we have built it. Though many organisations say they value feedback—”It’s the breakfast of champions” is a phrase I have heard many times—when it comes to it, people are either unskilled at, unprepared for, or unwilling to take good, proper, helpful feedback. Ironically, those that think they are best at giving and receiving feedback are often the worst at it. a simple model to start off with is the AID model, which I came across in Max Landsberg’s book, The TAO of Coaching [10]: Actions: What specifically is the person (or team) doing well, or poorly? Be objective where possible and focus on the behaviour not the individual(s). Impacts: What effects are these actions having? Speak from your own perspective; not, for example, “I’ve heard that...” or “People...