Developing People and Teams [P1]: Facilitation - When, Why and How Facilitation Skills Help Scrum Teams

Question 1

How can a scrum master know how much facilitation they need to do?

Answer 1

• Healthy and self-managing Scrum Teams don’t always need explicit facilitation.
• Two factors that can help a facilitator decide the level of facilitation (none, light, medium and strong) they should apply to an interaction are the team’s effectiveness and their contextual complexity

Question 2

What principles provide a backdrop for the techniques a facilitator can use?

Answer 2

Effective facilitation is participatory, promotes a healthy environment, transparent, focused and purposeful

Question 3

How should silence be treated by an SM?

Answer 3

Silence is okay and acceptable as an opportunity to invite silent reflection if a facilitator helps participants offer their opinions and ideas in alternative ways ensuring that they are heard, especially in a sea of louder voices;

Question 4

How should an SM treat conflict?

Answer 4

Facilitators should not quash conflict in team discussions for the sake of “harmony,” because not only will the tension escalate, but conflict is a mechanism for discovering diverse ideas;

Question 5

What two characteristics are needed from a SM?

Answer 5

Facilitation requires mindfulness and adaptability and is a skill that can be developed to help teams focus on reaching their desired outcomes, not just many elaborate techniques.

Question 6

Define team effectiveness

Answer 6

A team’s ability to collaborate effectively, deliver value, self-heal and self-manage

Question 7

Defined contexture complexity

Answer 7

The complexity of the situation, the type of agreement, consensus and commitment the team needs within their context. Factors include the internal and external environments teams operate in and where individual team members are located (all face to face or remote vs hybrid)

Question 8

Explain the Levels of Facilitation graph

Answer 8

[SEE GRAPH]

Question 9

What five core principles can a facilitator rely on?

Answer 9

• participatory - full participation and engagement, shared responsibility
• healthy - safe env, raise differences and conflicting perspectives, respectively learning
• transparency - only exits when there is a shared understanding
• process - enable team to progress towards objective of interaction that is collaborative, inclusive and leverages diverse perspectives
• purposeful - clear objective that everyone is aligned to and works towards

Question 10

If you are external to the Devs and internal to the Devs i.e. Dev and SM, what can you do to help make it clear when conducting decision making?

Answer 10

clarify when you’re participating as a team member versus facilitating