Bold Boundaries
A story shared by Nkengafeh Ekokobe-Mbezi with Michelle Pauk.
As illustrated in this story and a previous post, Nkengafeh Ekokobe-Mbezi deftly addresses resistance by establishing appropriate boundaries for her own role, gaining leadership support, and respectfully confronting the status quo in service of better collaboration.
The team with the developer-less daily standups had another meeting where developers were noticeably absent. Instead of a Sprint Review, the team had a weekly project status meeting where a business analyst would update business stakeholders on what the team was doing and showcase the developers’ work.
When Nkengafeh started working with the team, the team’s management had hoped she would start leading these weekly status meetings. Two things about this really didn’t make sense to her.
First, she felt it was very important that the developers be able to showcase their own work and hear feedback directly from their stakeholders.
Second, she wanted to serve the team as a Scrum Master, not a project manager. Several items on the weekly status meeting agenda were outside her expertise, including project budgets and other traditional project management activities.
So Nkengafeh spoke to her manager about the situation. “I made a really bold move. With my manager’s permission, I decided to stop showing up to the project status meetings, which was pretty scary because it actually could have been something that I lost my job over. I don’t know what gave me the courage to do that. I suppose because I’d asked my manager first, I knew I’d done the right thing.”
Then she designed a more inclusive, agile-friendly alternative. “I created a Sprint Review meeting at the end of the sprint with the developers there. And I told the team and stakeholders, if you want to see what the developers are doing, just show up to this meeting.”
Everyone showed up at the first Sprint Review. Afterwards, the developers shared with Nkengafeh how happy they were to showcase their own work. “It was nice for the developers to hear directly from their clients that the work they’re doing is good, that they’re appreciated.”
So what became of the project status meeting? “They ended up canceling the status meeting because we were able to show the stakeholders the value of direct communication with the people that are doing work for them and not having middlemen reporting back to them.”
