What helpful practices have you and your team adopted?

[#1]

While you probably know the people at Atlassian for our apps, most of us are practices geeks, too 😆

(What’s a practice? To me, it’s any non-tool solution that you and your team use to work better, like agile, DevOps, ITSM, Pomodoro timers—you name it!)

My team (Learning Content Design) uses all sorts of practices along with our apps. You can read more about how we use Jira + agile, but I think my favorite practice we’ve adopted is the Team Health Monitor play. Basically, twice a year, our whole team gets together for a 90-minute meeting led by our program manager. She leads us through a series of prompts on our communication, collaboration, creativity, celebration, ideation, and more. We count down from three and all vote if that area is 🔴 red (needs a lot of work), 🟡 yellow (room for improvement), or 🟢 green (we’re good here!). Then we get to chat openly about why we all feel that way. It has created so much trust and really helped me get more familiar with the problems and successes that everyone on my team experiences, even if we don’t all work on the same projects.

My personal time management has also been so much better since my teammate @Chelsea Yang created the Redesign your workweek course. Avoiding the “striped” calendar, where you have 15-30 minute gaps between several consecutive meetings, has been so helpful.

(If you’re interested in practices content from Atlassian Learning, we have a bunch of free courses on practices for all kinds of teams, as well as some on ITSM and agile.)

So what about you? What practices have you and your team adopted? What do you like about them, and how did you get there?

[Julia Eddington]

+1 to the Team Health Monitor play

[Frank Reitel]

Similar to the obsessive use of S.M.A.R.T. goals (which is basically a bare minimum of goal setting - and only that) a team play, pomodoro, retrospectives and sprints are only targetted on effectiveness in a single interation. What they all leave out and desperately need is a tracking, updating process around it and a fixed or somewhat scheduled frequency. 

Events like team plays and retrospectives can only solve a purpose of making everyone feel heard and to build something like a group feeling. Besides of that when there are no actions on the findings and there is no integration into some direction to improve the ways of working, they are basically a waste of time.

If someone doesn't know when the last retrospective was and has no idea of what the action items were and there was no check in it was not much helpful. 

After long vacation ofc people may not have anything at the top of their head but generally speaking the meta level above those plays and events can only give them worth and a purpose or direction.

E. g. if you schedule retrospectives in a specific interval, have checkins and responsible "leads" for the topics it is more likely that those topics don't pop up as a pain point over and over again

[Chelsea Yang]

100% agree with the impact of the Team Health Monitor play! The open, honest conversations really made me feel more comfortable especially as someone new to the team.

Also, I'm so glad to hear that Redesign your workweek has helped in making your days more productive!

[Amanda Barber]

My favorite play/practice is User Manuals! Which reminds me, I really want to run this play with my new team. 

Atlassian has a play for these, but I also really like Khe Hy's example here.