Building a productive team is decisive. This means I encourage my team to boost their productivity by enhancing their happiness. According to the research journal “A Conceptual Framework of Happiness at the Workplace” (Wesarat et al, 2014), “Happiness” in the workplace refers to how satisfied people are with their work and lives. This thing influences productivity in any organization. Happy people are productive and may pay full attention to any task. As an Engineering Manager, I carry out the Healing Mode to increase the happiness level in the workplace who adopt the Scrum method. Let me tell you how we do it, starting from the product development cycle itself!
Sprint
Sprint is a time limit (timebox) for the development of products that are ready to use or put into the production environment in the context of software development. This process takes no more than 30 days.
Product development using Scrum is done iteratively and incremental so that there will be several sprints in the product development life cycle.
Day to Day Activities
Usually, during each sprint, we always focus on work assignments, even before the sprint ends the team hasn’t finished working on the task already faced with the next Sprint Planning. The effect was that some teams were overwhelmed and psychologically they felt under pressure. As a result, they often deliver less qualified products.
The Problem
The main problem with this situation is that we need to enhance the Happiness Level ****of the Development Team. Happiness Level is the condition of the level of pleasure of a team in Sprint.
The higher the Happiness Level, the more possible the team will deliver better results, and vice versa. Therefore, we need to keep this Happiness Level at 4 out of 5.
Indicator of Happiness Level:
- Mad
- Sad
- Normal
- Happy
- Very Happy
How to Improve
Healing mode is a situation in which Software Engineer stops working on their task, but in their daily, they must:
- Ensure all tickets are already done and ready for QA
- Bug fixing if there’s any bug found related to their task
- Ensure all tickets are deployed on production
- Enjoy their free time to recover from stress
- Playing games
- Learn something new technologies
- Anything
Calendar
After knowing the importance of Healing Mode then how do we implement that? Let’s say we use 2 weeks (10 working days) in Sprint, we can allocate the 7-day development process and 3-day healing mode.
And we called that 7+3 Cycle.
Development Team Calendar
And what does the product team do during the Healing Mode?
We can use the healing mode time by completing activities with Backlog Grooming, Sprint Pre-Review, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Planning.
Management Calendar
The Result
These charts illustrate the comparison of team productivity throughout time, before and after the implementation of the Healing Mode. The match line between the guideline and remaining values is the successful indicator of this implementation.
Happiness Level
Conclusion
If the team has a higher Happiness Level, they will finish the task early and well-qualified.
We build this system to improve our work continuously. Find something interesting? Hope you enjoy it!
#scrum #sprint #agile #projectmanagement
