The Week of the Changes 21.03. – 31.03.2017

I am documenting transformation at our little company Kniff here: I call it the „Transformation Log“

Anything new? Oh yeah!

Story Point Scale:

Cascaded from our mid-term goal to have a company ressource-planning tool, we developed our first effort scale! Outcome: Reference projects in 4 sizes 🙂

Next Steps for our future Kanban Wall:

Isabel Thoma started to help us out in designing our future Kanban Wall – it will be spacepowerfully great 😉

New meeting structure:

Almost 6 months ago we came up with a meeting schedule which should help us to address our needs. We couldn’t keep up with the ambitious plan because of various reasons. In a Retrospective meeting we modified the cycles for “Kniffliges (internal team meeting)”, Review, Retrospektive. In addition we added a new meeting codename “Zukunftszeltplatz” (future camp). Every meeting takes place once a month – 2 hours with strict time boxes, with everybody who is in house at the given time and with a guardian role for the meetings. Great team achievement – and the first meeting “Kniffliges” was a success 🙂

Delegation Poker:

After observing our team’s behaviour with decision during a project we figured out strong bottleneck effects in the way we deal with decisions. The managers decide a lot – and the rest of the team is struggling when they are not available. It felt not like a ego intentional managerial power thing – it felt more like the managers are still fulfilling a bunch of roles like – key account manager, managing director, creative producer, etc.

So why not transferring more decisional power to the team to avoid communication confusion and burn out?

I introduced the delegation poker cards from Management 3.0 as a tool for a more conscious delegation of accountability and decisional power to the managers – and they used our new structured team meeting to introduce it to us 🙂

Key Decision area!

During Lunch we discussed if we should hire a new colleague – so we came up with the question: whose decision is it if a new person joins our team? A perfect moment to use our new tool the delegation poker cards. With 8 (out of 11) people present (including the 2 managers) we played it real – 5 x 4 (Agreement) and 3x 3 (Consult). So we all already had a similar understanding of our key decision area and the nice thing about it: it all happened out of the process!

Future Ideas:

I got a lot of fresh ideas by reading the book “Das kollegial geführte Unternehmen” by Bernd Oestereich and Claudia Schröder! Great book! Thank you @OECH6 and @denkequer for that.
Another idea I got was documenting our transformation process via a weblog by regularly posts on things we’ve done, failed and achieved 🙂

Stay tuned! happy weekend!