We are experimenting with pomodoro inspired techniques (http://pomodorotechnique.com/) in the team. What we do is that we are doing team pomodoros where we work focused for 25 minutes, without communicating. During the work periods we record all questions and so on that we need to ask, and after the period we communicate and resolve all issues that came up. We don’t do pomodoros all the time, but only when we feel that it is useful. Some days we might do a lot of them and other days none.

What we find interesting is that it has turned out that the important feature is not about NOT communicating during the work periods, but that the communication becomes more focused when we do communicate.

We have added a countdown timer widget to our dashboard to make it really easy to start by anyone.

 
The timer is also handy for all sort of time-boxed activities in the team.

The code for the widget is available at https://gist.github.com/krichardsson/a2c8ad556caa643f822c

There are a lot of things we need to keep track of in Bitcraze, such as customer support, production, book keeping, planing for the future, improving how we work, our servers, forum, the community, source code, new hardware, just to mention a few areas. There has been an informal distribution of these areas between the persons in the company, but it has not been very clear who is responsible. This has led to that we all worry about everything but we still miss to catch some issues. So we have two bad properties: not as good performance as we would like to have and negative feelings. So what to do?

We have decided to set up role contracts. Our version of role contracts is simply to appoint one person to each area that we feel needs continuous attention. The person that is responsible for an area is expected to keep track of what happens to that area, think about how we should improve or change, and notify us (the rest of the team) when we need to take some sort of action. That person is not expected to execute or implement, but make sure that we get it done as a team.

We will update the role contracts at regular intervalls, every month as a start, to make sure we are working with stuff we passionate about and so that we have a dynamic team.

For a background on the “How we work” category, see Self organizing

Next on the agenda was to talk about feedback. Feedback is the oil that keeps the team happy and enable individuals to gain insights about them selfs. Important stuff!

We talked about the self and some techniques/models that can be used to understand our selfs and others (e. g. Johari Window). We discussed how we react when we receive feedback, and what we can do to increase the possibilities that we really listen to and understand the feedback that is given to us. These insights also help us to give feedback to other persons.

The last part of this was a “recipe” of how to compose feedback for someone. Try to include the following

• Observation of a behaviour
• How that makes you feel
• Your needs that created the feeling
• Your wished of alternative behaviour

Some slides are available at Prezi

Finally we practiced by giving everyone else feedback one-on-one. We will continue to give each other feedback over the coming weeks on a regular basis – practice makes perfect.