After having written about timeboxing for inexperienced teams, an interesting incident came to my mind that can be helpful to understand the concept even better, and it is, coincidentally, also a great anecdote.
One team working on a complex project of building an innovation team for a client in India had committed to a cycle with 10 working days per person to get applications for the job, preselect on those applications and then conduct an assessment day for the client in India to select the best team for the client.
The team had 4 people on board. Three of them were totally new to the idea of agile and of timeboxing; one person (me) was more experienced. The team decided that I should therefore take on the role of facilitator, which I gladly did.
Along the way, the team worked and I inquired regularly how we are doing on time, myself assuming that it would be totally clear to everyone that our time allowance was 10 days each and that everyone else on the team knew exactly what that meant (false assumption, of course). I also tried to steer the team to have valuable discussions about the use of time and the trade-offs it involved.
I had the nagging feeling that the team was acting in a "we will do whatever it takes" way instead of discussing the use of time and resources properly. But as I was a very inexperienced facilitator at the time (and I will share my findings about facilitating here, to, at some point), I did not quite know how to address the issue.
At the end of the cycle, shortly before the review, the team suddenly started to address the issue of overtime. I was quite astonished and asked them what kind of overtime they had accumulated (because I was aware of none). There were 2, 3 and 5 days overtime in the cycle, so a total of 9 extra days. Ouch.
As a facilitator I realized that I had not fulfilled my role very well and told the team that we would need to take up the issue with the champ (product owner) who had initiated the cycle.
When we did this, there were two very interesting findings:
- In the briefing, it was not made 100% clear to the team what timeboxing meant
- One person of the four had commited to only 7 days instead of 10, but this fact was unknown to the team, so the team falsly assumed they had 3 days more.
Here comes the interesting conclusion that we arrived to when discussing the issue between champ and team: The champ was NOT going to pay overtime (because that would be sending a false signal to other teams and it really was not in line with our agile principles and the concept of timeboxing), but the champ would pay a penalty for not making it 100% clear to the entire team what timeboxing meant and for not informing them that one person on the team was working 3 days less than the others.
The team discussed the amount of penalty that should be paid and how it should be distributed in the team (I, as a facilitator, did not want a share of the penalty because I felt partly responsible for the problem), and the champ agreed to the amount.
I am quite sure that these particular team members will act very differently when working in a timeboxed cycle in the future.
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