From Problem Space to Solution Space: How Agile Rituals Matter

From Problem Space to Solution Space: How Agile Rituals Matter

For last few years, we've been using Agile methods such as Scrum and XP in our projects. As a team, we've gained a lot in terms of productivity, client involvement, frequent feedback, and many more benefits. But one most important change that I've observed in almost all the teams I've worked with is the level of ownership each team member wants to take and how they've started making suggestions even to product owners about possible improvements, as well as thinking in terms of finding solutions as a team.

In my early days of my career, when I was working on a big project in the aerospace industry, my manager in U.S. told us that we were always shooting e-mails to the U.S. team about problems we were facing related to technology and domain. While this was perfectly OK for new team members like us, it would be great, the manager said, if we could also suggest some solutions along with the problem, as this would increase our confidence and understanding and would help the busy team in U.S. I liked the suggestion very much and started using this practice in my projects. It requires a team member facing a problem or situation to step into the shoes of the customer or requirement provider in terms of approaching the problem. I know that it's not always easy to think in such terms, but at least trying can provide a starting point for discussing the problem in a more involving way for both team and customer.

When I started moving to Agile practices, I found that most of the rituals, such as daily stand-up, retrospective meetings, etc., give us a nice platform to carry forward this approach of thinking in terms of solutions and engaging with the customer or distributed teams more efficiently.

I started sharing this practice with my teams and call it "moving from problem space to solution space." Some prerequisites make it more effective:

• The team should know what the big picture of its project is, and how...