Pull Planning
When we assign work, the leader who made the plan is the one who owns the plan. Everyone else is just 'helping', but not responsible for the whole. How can we get better engagement?
Context
A group is trying to complete work together, but they're struggling to finish things and support each other. Instead, they have a ton of parallel tasks, and they're all waiting for something. Team meetings don't result in unblocking or faster work, but instead just a continued slow movement.
Or: A PM is in conflict with their team. They have difficult deadlines and the PM is trying to parcel out work efficiently to each team member. The team seems to be slowing down. The more the PM tries to stay on top of things, the slower work moves.
Or: Someone is leading an initiative that needs contributions from many outside of their daily work. People are polite but not enthusiastic in picking up their tasks.
Play
Introduce pull planning, where tasks are not assigned to individuals (push) but rather created and planned by the team together (pull)
Discussion
It drives me crazy, but most teams that do Scrum or Kanban skip this. It's supposed to be a core part of both methods, but teams still somehow miss it.
Instead, most of the time, when a team says they're doing Scrum, they use a PUSH approach:
- some leader makes a list of work
- every two weeks, they have a meeting where they see what got finished and someone assigns (pushes) new work to everyone
- they start out with a daily meeting but then shift to 3 times a week or 'asynchronous' because everyone hates it.