Success with Requirements

Volume 2 :: Number 5 :: 2008
ISSN: 1936-3583

Welcome to our Newsletter

In the March 2008 issue of Success with Requirements I introduced three types of trust that are essential to successful teams and projects: contractual, communication and competency. I described four concrete ways to build trust. In this month's eNewsletter, I share five more techniques that build trust.

I hope you'll find this topic useful. Please email me with your comments and suggestions for upcoming Success with Requirements topics.

~ ellen

Ellen Gottesdiener,
President and Principal Consultant
EBG Consulting, Inc.
http://www.ebgconsulting.com

In this issue:

Spring Sale and Extended Access on Our Self-paced eLearning

Building Trust with Good Requirements, Part 2

Upcoming Events

Resources of Interest

Archive Issues

Spring Sale, Plus Extended Access on Self-paced eLearning

Last month we announced our spring sale on our feature and content-rich self-paced eLearning training Foundation for Requirements Development and Management. Now we'd like you to know we are extending access to 90 days (from 45 days).

This 8-course curriculum teaches essentials of requirements development and management, and features tips, downloads, scenarios, quick checks to test your learning and more. It also includes a copy of The Software Requirements Memory Jogger.

Read more here.

Success with Requirements eNewsletter subscribers get a 10% discount, use code: FRSWR04 when you register here.

See how this course fits in our comprehensive set of offerings by viewing EBG's updated solutions matrix.

Building Trust with Good Requirements Practices, Part 2

In our Part I (March issue, which you can find here) I talked about the importance of trust in the success of software teams. I outlined three kinds of organizational trust: contractual trust (people keep their commitments), communication trust (people communicate clearly, honestly, and openly), and competence trust (people trust one another to do their jobs well).

Then I described four concrete ways to build trust using good requirements practices: define your project's vision and scope, involve the stakeholders, keep a glossary, and set criteria for prioritizing requirements.

In this issue, we'll look at five more techniques that help build trust among your team members.

Make Decisions Transparently

Healthy teams use a transparent, participatory decision-making process for critical decisions.

A crucial part of this process is to develop decision rules and protocols. For example, the collaboration pattern "Decide How to Decide" (Gottesdiener 2001) is a mechanism for explicitly defining your decision rules and the ways team members will participate.

Another technique is a gradient of agreement (Kaner, et. al, 2007), which I've tailored to fit business and software teams. I demonstrate it at the start of workshops and encourage teams to use it for all their participatory decisions. When I work with agile teams, we check for agreement on our iteration commitments using the gradient of agreement and use it during our iteration retrospective to check for agreement on what changes to implement in the next iteration.

Transparent decision making builds and sustains all three types of trust.

Play Around

In Serious Play (1999), Michael Schrage reveals the role of "play" in product innovation. You can build prototypes and create multiple interweaving requirements models at the start of each iteration, release, or requirements phase.

This kind of play increases team competency and supports communication. It also unleashes ideas, confirms needs, and feeds successive revisions of products, enhancing competency and communication trust among business and technical stakeholders.

Work the Wall

In this technique, you display the team's work - plans, charts, requirements and design diagrams, test status, and more. It's about making the team's work transparent and visible. Alistair Cockburn (2002) refers to wall work as "information radiators" and others in the agile community have described how useful visible charts are to team communications.

Wall work builds communication and competence trust.

Better Meetings

Poorly planned meetings are trust-busters. They violate all three types of trust: contractual (the purpose is unclear), communication (the meeting processes are ineffective), and competency (the needed participants aren't there, and communication is one-way and results in little mutual reliance and learning).

My advice: don't have typical meetings. Instead, build trust by communicating in other ways, such as informal daily stand-ups, prototype demos, reviews or inspections, and facilitated workshops.

With facilitated workshops, I contract for the event beforehand using a planning team to balance the needs of all stakeholders (Gottesdiener 2002). To guide the planning, we follow a planning and design framework called "the 6 P's": purpose, participants, principles, products, place, and process. In this way, we build contractual and communication trust before people get together.

When you plan a workshop, seek ways to build trust. Try to identify hidden agendas, and delineate the workshop's decisions and the decision-making process.

During the workshop, the facilitator helps the team stick to the ground rules and stay focused on the workshop's purpose. Through a well-planned process, the facilitator helps the team become competent in the requirements, design, plan, or other work products of the workshop.

You also build trust in workshops by letting conflict surface. Pushing down or ignoring conflict or disagreements promotes distrust. Group competency grows when you explicitly address conflicts. At the same time, the group learns to deal with conflicts, such as competing priorities, in a competent manner.

After a workshop, you should share outcomes, perhaps by conducting a "show and tell" for sponsors and key stakeholders.

Workshops promote effective communicates, build team and individual competency and also can be used to establish contractual trust on projects.

Hold Retrospectives

In a retrospective, team members reflect on their product and process for an iteration, a release, a milestone, or a project. The goal is learning and adaptation.

Retrospectives facilitate transparent communication and joint accountability (which is part of contractual trust). These sessions also enable and build individual and team competency.

Trust is an Asset

Trust among team members doesn't just happen. Like any other asset in your organization, trust must be planned for, championed, implemented, and assessed. I hope that the techniques I've outlined are useful in building and sustaining trust in your work.

~ellen

References

Cockburn, Alistair. Agile Software Development. Addison-Wesley, 2002.

Gottesdiener, Ellen. "Decide How to Decide." Software Development Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 65-70. Available online: http://ebgconsulting.com/articles.php#people

Gottesdiener, Ellen. Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs. Addison-Wesley, 2002.

Gottesdiener, Ellen, "You Know When It's Not There: How Trust Enables and Enhances Collaboration," Cutter Journal, Vol. 20, No. 8 (August, 2007).

Kaner, Sam, et. al. Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Jossey-Bass, 2nd edition, 2007.

Reina, Dennis S., and Michelle L. Reina. Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace: Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization. 2nd edition. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006.

Schrage, Michael. Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate. Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

Upcoming Events

1. Paul Reed will be delivering a full-day tutorial and a presentation at ProjectWorld/World Congress for Business Analysts, San Diego, CA (June 24-27).

2. Ellen Gottesdiener will be delivering several tutorials and a conference "main stage" presentation at Agile 2008, Toronto, Canada (August 4-8).

Resources of Interest

Each month we provide a few resources we think are worthwhile. The resources below are related to this month's topic on observation.

We welcome your comments and suggestions for future issues!

One way to promote transparent communication is with visual charts of team progress. My work with agile teams has reinforced how powerful this simple tool is in promoting trust. Read more from Ron Jeffries on big visible charts.

I mention in this month's article how useful retrospective are in building trust and improving team results. You can find more details on the characteristics, structure and example activities for success retrospectives in my article "Team Retrospective - for better iterative assessment."

Serious Play author Michael Schrage discusses innovation and the need for shared space to collaborate in this brief but informative interview.

Archive Issues

Visit our archive to read our prior issues.

Publication & Reprint Information

I invite you to reprint material from Success with Requirements in other electronic or print publications provided 1) the following copyright notice is used, "Written and edited by Ellen Gottesdiener, copyright EBG Consulting, Inc., [year]. All rights reserved." and 2) a link to http://www.ebgconsulting.com/ is included in the credits.

Please send us copy of the publication that includes our reprint, along with a cover note referencing that it is a reprint.

Success with Requirements is a trademark of EBG Consulting, Inc.