Agile lessons learned #3 : Adult day care

Henry had been working for FreeFall for the past 7 years. A bachelor in software engineering, he had first joined up for an internship as a software developer, or has he later learned, as a code monkey.
Along the way he and his friend Pete got promoted to managerial roles in the IT department.

Three years had gone by since he got promoted and Henry had become borderline depressive. He was just coming off a full month’s vacation with his wife.
As with most monday mornings, Henry was late. He dreaded mondays. He never came in on time. But he couldn’t have cared less. None of his employees did.
Neither did his superiors. Actually, it was expected for the higher ups to come in late. They called it working in the boss’ timezone.
As Henry dreadfully packed his frozen lunch into his reusable bag, he kissed his wife goodbye.

“What’s wrong honey ?” she said
“Nothing special honey, it’s Monday you know.”
“Don’t worry about it sweetheart, you’ll be be back in no time”
“Yeah”, he said with dispair in his voice. “Right after adult day care…”
“Adult day care?” she said “What do you mean ?”
“That’s a phrase the guys coined up at work.”
“You know, just like when we were young our parents would drop us to day care ” he asked
“Yeah…”
“Well our job is just like it. The difference is barely noticeable really…”
“You’re kidding me right” she said with a puzzled face
“I’m not joking around. When we were kids our parents would drop us there in the morning and pick us up in the afternoon. At work, we take the commune and it drops us there
in the morning and they pick us back up in the evening”
“Ok and ?”
“At day care, the lady would drop each of us in our own little parks with a bunch of toys so we wouldn’t bother each other”
He took a break to see if she was still following him.
“Well you see at work we each have our own little cubicles or closed offices and we have our computer to play with until our time is done and we can go back home”
She clearly had heard enough.
“Enough with your childish stories. You’re just trying to get late to work. The sooner you leave the house the sooner you’ll be done with it.”
“Off to work you go ” She said as she kissed him on the cheek.

That afternoon, Henry had a meeting with Tim, a former schoolmate who later became an agile coach after completing his major in human psychology.

Henry spent his entire morning Googling details about that Scrum thing and the Extreme Programming practice.

Henry figured, one of the major problems at work was based on communication problems. All his team members were dispatched throughout the office floor in small cubicles with sliding doors.

The entire place was so quiet you sometimes felt like screaming just to see if someone was still alive. Actually, some days you actually felt as if somebody had actually died.

By the end of the week, he couldn’t get his discussion with Tim out of his mind and he booked a dinner between the two on Friday. After a couple of beers, they concluded a deal where Tim would come in at
FreeFall for a couple of month and coach the Agile transition. The team got off to a slow start, but eventually they saw the value of what they were doing popping out of everywhere and they
were really sold on the entire thing.

Eventually, they even got carried away and Tim had to step in and show them how to take the time to learn everything at a proper pace

“Baby steps, baby. Baby steps, that’s the only way my boys ” Tim said. As Henry tried to conceal his laughter.
“What’s so funny ? ” asked Tim.
“Oh nothing.”
“No seriously?”
“Well I find it amusing that you’re telling the boys to take baby steps, while they’re in day care”
“Day care ? ”
“Well you know, we’ve got this running gag about FreeFall being a daycare center for adults and our cubicles play the role our parks did when we were young.”
“I get the picture.” said Tim slightly amused. “Wonder if those Ruby on Rails developers ever thought they were actually building adult rattles….” continued Tim.
“But seriously about them cubicles, can we talk about those in private.”

Tim took Henry to the coffee machine to have a little talk. Tim got Henry to talk about the communication problems the team was having prior to their Agile transition.
They also noted the ameliorations that had occurred.
“You see dude” Tim called Henry “We’ve just made a small dent into the damn that was blocking the communication in your team. Now there’s a little water trickling.” he said passionately.
“Now then, do you want to keep the damn or do you want to bust the damn wide open” said Tim as Henry’s eyes opened up widely.
“Alright let’s do this”.
“You’re giving me “carte blanche” Henry ? ”
“Yeah man.”
“Cool, get ready for a flood come Monday morning.”

On Monday, Henry came in earlier than usual but he still managed to get in last. Five minutes in and he was already purple in the face and storming towards Tim.
“Are you out of your bloody mind ?”
“Pardon me ?”
“You just tore our entire team’s cubicles and replaced them with folding tables ? Are you freakin nuts ? Some of my employees have lost their Window privileges
and are now sitting together with the interns. How am I supposed to justify this to my boss. The union guys will tear me a new …”
“Come on Henry. These are just silly cubicles. Give me a chance to prove that what I’m doing has value. I’ll meet up with the team after the daily scrum and I’ll commit myself to two things :”
“Which are ?”
“First : I’ll do my damnest to make this work for the next two weeks”
“Second : If the results don’t come and they don’t like it, they can have they old ways back and I’ll put my head on the log”
“Fine Tim, two weeks, max. I’m all for this scrum thing, but don’t you make a fool out of me.”
“Promise I won’t Henry”

The end of the two weeks coincided with the end of the sprint and thus the sprint review. At the retrospective, the team had an activity where each member could give out a symbolic flower to a team member
for an extraordinary performance. Some of the team members decided to give one to the ScrumMaster for taking out the cubicles, which most recognised was an impediment to the team’s success.

On the last Friday of the following sprint, the entire team decided to head out for lunch and beers at the local terasse. The sun was warm, the beer was cold, the staff was lovely and the discussions were great.
After a few suds they realized they had seriously busted their lunch time. They could not have cared less. The team spirit was great and they were ahead on schedule.

They came back to work laughing and on their way in you could hear some of the employees grunting because of the distraction.
“Who are those slackers coming back from lunch in the middle of the afternoon ?” asked some of their fellow employees.

They were starting to look like outcasts. Eventually the lunch and beer became a staple of this team and even as the team members came and went, the tradition seemed to hold on.

The following spring, Maurice, the senior member of the team and John the new inmate as they liked to call him decided to organize a fishing weekend for the entire team. Surprisingly, the entire team accepted the invitation.

When they left the office that day, the entire place went back to it’s dead silent state. Had he kept his manager office’s door open, you could of heard senior manager Pete cussing his current director.
Pete was besides himself. How could the director cut off his budgets like that ?
His team had been dysfunctional for as long as he could remember and now things were starting to get personal.

Pete thought he had the perfect plan. He had been working for the past few weeks on a secret team building activity.

All it took to fix his teams’s spirit he thought, was a 4 hour activity which his boss would not finance. Yeah right.

-Nicholas Lemay