Shifting into a New Mindset by Creating a Shared Understanding

Through Cloud Co-Engineering, Sketch Guides Healthcare Client Utilizing Sketch- Generated Strategy

The Setup

After attending Sketch’s webinar, “Crafting Retros Your Team Can’t Wait to Attend,” a university contacted Sketch and expressed a desire to improve the agile processes in which their development team operated.

The Challenge

The team was trying to replace an application for students to register for classes and needed to improve the way they work to achieve the deadline with the appropriate product. While it was understood that some members of the team had some prior awareness of agile mindsets and had already been leveraging some of these practices, there were others who were further behind or had little agile practice.

The Solution

Sketch conducted a lightweight team assessment and identified three ways to improve:

Create shared understanding to alleviate reliance on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and ease daily team operations
Identify one central place of truth for work (to avoid confusion, gaps, or duplicate work)
Establish cadenced retrospectives and refinement (to help the team’s continuous improvement journey)

The Results

After the assessment was complete, Sketch began coaching this team by introducing improvements based on the recommendations made. Our coach paired with the Product Owner (PO), Scrum Master (SM), and team with one-on-one coaching sessions and during Scrum ceremonies. The coach also facilitated a workshop to tackle some key issues such as: designing customer personas, creating a team mission and product vision, agreeing on DoR (Definition of Ready) and DoD (Definition of Done), and more.

After the workshop and 4 weeks of coaching, our coach already saw a lot of progress. The PO began facilitating refinement with the team. The SM began facilitating cadenced retrospectives with the team. And both started tracking all tasks through TFS with plans to upgrade to Azure DevOps rather than the spreadsheets and emails they were using before. It was a focused start with big improvements

Engagement Recap

"As I was coaching this team, it was really great to see them have a significant mindset shift. They went from singling someone out and wanting that individual to get knowledge from their vendor to realizing everyone needed to get the knowledge they needed and were looking for and working as a team. Having this simple shift removes just moving the bottleneck from person to person to actually removing the bottleneck.”

– Steph Weisenbach | Delivery Strategist

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