We moved away from Scrum. Found a better solution to keep my team motivated
Scrum started as a religious practice in Inkmonk ten months back. Now we realised it added zero value to the team as a whole and scraped it off for a better solution.
During initial stages, while we were developing the platform for the first time, we had to be very fast in executions and get the product ready for customer data & feedback.
At the beginning Scrums were very brutal at Inkmonk. Everyone had to update what they pushed live, developers on what is accessible on the website, sales team on what deals have been closed and marketing team on what campaigns are live.
The total time taken for Scrum would not be more than 5 minutes for entire 10 member team. That’s because you will only have to give sensible updates every day (P.S: we do not talk about “what I am working on today”). Overtime, you start having this guilty feeling when your team mate has some update and you do not which leads you to push more and give an update tomorrow. This works good for short sprints for a milestone not more than a week.
Everyday scrums did not make any sense once our short milestone was reached. Everyday 5 minute meeting turned out to see each other faces for the sake of seeing, I realised it did not motivate anyone. In fact it became like a school attendance to let everyone that you are present, working on something.
A better solution — Centralise motivation (positive) and decentralise harsh feedbacks (negative)
Centralise motivation
The logic is very simple. Anything to keep the team motivated, share in a centralised system and let everyone participate and stay motivated. We created a group called Yay!’s on our official Slack chat system. In this group you talk about things listed below as example.
Closed a 10,00,000 worth of deal from Google
We are ranking #1 in top 20 keywords for T-Shirt category
We pushed xyz feature today for customers and it is going to have a big impact on orders.
This customer has praised us “xyz testimony….”
The moment this group was created this was the first message shared.
Decentralise Harsh & Real Feedbacks
We have small groups who share common tasks and short milestones. Harsh or real feedbacks that would leave to personal or team improvement is shared in small groups of 2–3 members.
Example: If development team has missed a deadline they get together, prioritise and come up with a fix. Same goes for sales team who sit together and sprint on closing the targets and give real feedback amongst them if someone is slowing down and needs to push more.
Everyone cannot be 100% best all the time. You need to understand reality and come up. For this you need motivation to push yourself. You need motivation to learn and be better at what you do.
So we made all motivating positive factors centralised and known to all while feedbacks and harsh reality status are offline and within 2–3 people.
Things are getting better… Much better than how it used to be…
Disclaimer: This is an Contributor post from Isaac John Wesley (CEO & Co founder of Inkmonk.com). The statements, opinions and data contained in these publications are solely those of the contributors and not of TamilEntrepreneur.com.
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