Dolly Parton Can Improve Your Teamwork... - Mike Cohn

Dolly Parton Can Improve Your Teamwork... - Mike Cohn

Would you like to get a check from Dolly Parton for $500? I would.
In an effort to reduce the number of students who dropped out of high school in her home county, she promised all 7th and 8th grade students she would give them each $500 if they graduated from high school.
She added a catch: They’d only receive the money if a buddy they chose also graduated.
Dolly’s Buddy Program reduced high school dropouts from 35% to 6%.
She clearly understood the importance of accountability to one another: a student contemplating dropping out may not when they factor in the financial impact on their buddy.
I wish Dolly Parton would make a similar offer to teams. The best teams understand that they succeed (or fail) together.
No one benefits when the programmers finish coding on the last day of an iteration, and leave testers no time to test.
When shared accountability pervades a team, people help each other. Programmers may write more unit tests if they know testers will be challenged. Or they may execute some tests themselves.
If testers are concerned that programmers may not finish, they can help by identifying earlier and sharing the edge cases that programmers may overlook.
There’s always something you can do to help your coworkers. Beyond helping out in a pinch, here are some practices that help a team succeed together:

• Small backlog items that flow through the process more smoothly
• Small, frequent handoffs to reduce waiting
• Close collaboration to improve communication
• Overlapping work to avoid leaving too much testing until the end
• Daily scrum meetings to encourage accountability to one another

Fostering an attitude that everyone succeeds together may not get you a $500 check from Dolly Parton, but it will help you succeed with agile.

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