Wouter FennisIt’s something people can look forward to months in advance: Good weather, nice scenery, not having to think about work, and always a bit on the short side once it’s coming to an end. The Summerbreak. Although let’s not forget the heroic colleagues that stay behind, plowing on, waiting for the postcard you always forget to send from your destination. In this article I’ll zoom in how a team can prepare itself for this period and how to get back together in the original formation in the months that follows.
Preparation is half of the work
This is probably the most difficult part, but there are a few subjects to keep in mind
Register everyone’s vacation period
It may sound simple, but perhaps normally during the year it isn’t a big deal if someone takes a few days off but losing perhaps half of your team’s velocity is something you want to be transparent about. Not only towards your team, but also the company and management. It gives your team time to organize itself to have knowledge sessions and handover remaining work.
What to handover, and what not?
It might feel good to hand over everything you’ve been working on before you hop onto that plane. When you’ll be back you can start with a clean slate! Well… no.
In my experience your team members will take care of the urgent matters, but work that can wait a few weeks, will wait a few weeks. That is OK! It means the team is prioritizing and that should be encouraged.
So be realistic when leaving work behind. Think about the capacity, available expertise and expected velocity and prioritize the work together with the Product Owner accordingly.
Prevent disappointment, be rather surprised.
Instead of handing over work, think knowledge:
- What is the first thing they are going to miss when you are away?
- Are the ongoing conversations, in chat or mail, that can be transferred?
- Does everyone have the minimum amount of access rights and manuals to maintain running systems?
- What are the ambitions and insecurities of your colleagues during lower capacity of the team
What about Scrum?
Working with a skeleton crew for a few weeks Scrum can feel a bit bureaucratic, but it might be more important now than ever. With less people but equal responsibility, prioritization is key. The only way to know if the team has to steer itself is transparency. And guess what all the Scrum rituals have in common? Exactly, transparency. But hey, it can be done informally. As long as you know what everyone will be doing that day and week, including yourself.
This might also be the time of the year to see how your team performs while the lead developer or database specialist for example is away. Do others pickup the role? Is a knowledge gap exposed? How do the members organize themselves? Is the team still performing, or is it all falling apart like a house of cards..
Although confronting, it is valuable information to process once the team comes back together in the following weeks. Perhaps people were forced to learn new skills and would like to keep using them or Introverted people had to take the initiative more often, stretching their comfort zone in both situations.
These new insights can push a team back into the Storming phase. Actually the team might go multiple Storming phases as during the Summer Break as the arrangement of the colleagues keeps changing as they come and go from vacation.
In the end, the team probably won’t be and act the same way as it did.
It’s important that the team comes out of this stronger and more confident as before. So keep performing the retrospective and planning sessions during and after the Summer Break, so people can express their difficulties and desires.
Post Summer Blues
Vacations are fun! So returning to work can be a sobering experience (literally). Of course work you and others left behind didn’t all get finished by the skeleton crew. But if you all prepared accordingly, the really important stuff should be taken care of. Make sure there is an informal moment preferably at a location where the whole team can come together and talk about everyone’s Summer Break stories. In the following Sprint Planning discuss how the team should organize itself with the hopefully new insights and shared knowledge to bring into practice. Don’t try to get the team back into the setting it was a few months ago, but move forward!
