What to do when projects change?
How to navigate on a team in transition.
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Have you ever been on a team that was restructured? Or in the middle of a project that needed to pivot significantly. Maybe that’s where you are now, and you’re wondering…
What’s going to happen? Is all my work now for nothing?
How will I stay motivated?
What should I do when my project or team changes?
Change isn’t always a bad thing, but uncertainty causes stress for many people. Each person’s context is unique, but this article will help you by providing a checklist to assess your situation and questions to ask your leader. I’ll end with some thoughts and reflection questions as you chart your next steps.
Decode the situation.
Sometimes the most stressful part is the unknown. Here is a checklist of questions you can use to identify what you know and what you can salvage from your situation.
Checklist
- Do you know why change is happening?
- Do you know yet what is going to change?
- Are they ways to repurpose work you’ve already done? Can it be used by another team or on an adjacent project?
- Even if you don’t use what you’ve already done, what have you learned by doing this work? Learned about the user, the tech, your team…
- How can you (your team) proactively make the shift together?
The first two questions are just taking stock of your circumstances, and the next three help you begin to navigate possible next steps.
Look for more clarity.
At this point, you are probably still looking for more clarity, and a natural place to start is with your leader.
Here are three simple questions your leader should already be answering during a transition. But if they aren’t proactively communicating, you can ask these questions.
- What do you know about the changes?
- What does that mean for us (our team)?
- What will we (our team) do?
During a change, information cascades down, providing new details daily. So just because you’ve asked these questions once, don’t hesitate to ask them again. Navigating a change is like all the minor adjustments you make to a steering wheel when driving. You’re always observing and adjusting.
You can lead up as you seek clarity.
Just because you aren’t the leader doesn’t mean you can’t lead up amid change. Here are three ways you can lead up.
- Regularly asking for clarity. Keep asking to normalize a consistent flow of information.
- Don’t hoard information. Your friend in accounting might know more than your leader. If you and your team aggregate what you know, you’ll be better prepared to navigate together.
- Reflecting implication to leaders. Often those making the decisions don’t have enough proximity to the work to understand the implications of the decisions. When you learn something that will affect how you or your team works, reflect that with a sentence than begins with, “Here’s what I see that meaning…”
Related Guides
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Learn and grow.
So maybe you’re stuck in the limbo of something is going to change, but it’s not clear yet what’s actually going on. Those can be awful days, but they don’t have to be. You can take the moment and invest it in yourself and your team. Here are a few growth-focused ideas.
- Lessons learned register. This is a good practice even when there isn’t a change. If you have extra bandwidth take time to capture what you’ve learned. This will help you and anyone who may engage your team’s work later on.
- Celebrate growth. As you reflect on what you and your team have learned, take a moment and celebrate. Bring donuts and have everyone share how they’ve seen others on the team grow.
- Rest. There may be a lag of downtime. Take the freedom to rest, you don’t know how long it will last.
- Sharpen the saw. Take this time as an opportunity for development. What skills have you needed in your role that you can invest in now?
Scrum has a lot of meetings and it can be hard to keep them straight, especially when you're getting started.
The Scrum meeting checklist has all the details you need to run effective Scrum meetings.
Related Guides
I hope this article is helpful if you're navigating a change. If you’re leading in the midst of change, I encourage you to check out Practicing Agility As A Leader [What To Do When You Have To Start Over As A Leader] and How to change direction after you’ve already invested a lot of effort? [Overcoming the sunk cost fallacy].
Action Plan
To learn more about Scrum, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.
Still not sure about your next step with Scrum? I offer a couple of free coaching sessions each month. You can signup for a free 1-hour coaching session, and we can work together to identify a good next step for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Scrum?
What is the definition of scrum?
Scrum is founded on three essential pillars leading teams to ask the following questions:
- How does this make things more visible? (Transparency)
- Where does this create space to evaluate? (Inspection)
- When does this encourage growth? (Adaptation)
Further explore the definition of scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Is Scrum hard to learn?
This is because Scrum’s simplicity makes learning easy, but Scrum truly changes how you work, and that adjustment can be difficult. It changes power dynamics and expectations within the team and between the team and the rest of the organization.
You can explore further is Scrum hard to learn, along with the pros and cons of Scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
When did Scrum start?
Scrum was initially used as a term related to project management in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in their paper “New New Product Development Game” In the Harvard Business Review. The first recorded Scrum project came a little later in 1993 from Jeff Sutherland.
You can learn more about Scrum’s backstory. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
What do all the scrum words mean?
Learning Scrum for the first time can be overwhelming. There are a lot of new terms and concepts in Scrum. I’ve listed the most common terms in a Scrum glossary.
How to use Scrum
Why use Scrum?
It forces clarity and prioritization, which provides the focus necessary for teams to be effective. Scrum embraces complexity and change by keeping many things simple and iteratively evaluating and adapting.
You can learn more about why to use Scrum and three challenges Scrum solves. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
When does Scrum not work well?
Scrum isn’t always the best option for teams. Scrum can fail when there is a substantial mismatch between organizational culture and the Scrum values. It also depends on the nature of the work you do. If you work if very linear, predictable and tightly defined, you may not experience many benefits Scrum provides.
Find out more about aligning your organizational values with Scrum or how Scrum might fit in your context. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
How do I know when to use Scrum?
Scrum functions at its best when you have a dedicated team focused on developing a singular product. Its agility shines when there are time constraints combined with uncertainty.
Explore the pros and cons of Scrum along with expectations vs. realities with Scrum. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Learning to apply Scrum
How to choose between Scrum and Kanban?
Important factors include your team size and the type of work you do. Kanban is very process-oriented, so you should consider how defined, static, or long your process is?
You can explore Scrum and other agile approaches. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
How does scrum help an organization?
Scrum forces clarity and prioritization, which are critical to organizational effectiveness. It provides a competitive edge by allowing teams to adapt as the market or priorities change. Teams operate more effectively because Scrum combines empowerment of the team members with alignment to top priorities.
Learn more about scrum’s impact on organizational culture. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Is scrum a methodology or a framework?
Scrum is more of a framework than a methodology, and it helps teams adhere to Agile principles and get stuff done. Scrum provides basic rules but doesn’t prescribe how to do the work. It provides principles, values, rules, and some core structure but still leaves a lot undefined.
Learn more about scrum as a framework. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
What’s the difference between scrum and agile?
When people say “agile,” they usually refer to it as a mindset. Scrum is a framework for how to organize people and work in an agile way. If you’re practicing Scrum, you’re working in an Agile way.
Learn more about the relationship between scrum and agile. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Development team
What is the development team?
They are fully focused on the product, owning the whole together. They collaborate tightly with each other to transform the product vision into reality. The team should contain all the skillsets needed to develop the product. As a self-organizing team, they have significant autonomy to decide how to get their work done.
Learn more about the roles and responsibilities of the development team. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
What does self-organizing mean?
They don’t report to the scrum master or product owner. The team has significant freedom to identify how to solve the problems and deliver the features which the product owner has prioritized
Learn more about self-organizing teams.
Explore further how a scrum development team works. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
Does a Scrum development team have to be programmers?
Scrum has been applied extensively to software development over the years, but it is not inherently limited to this space. You can apply scrum with a marketing team, a creative media team, a blogger or even homeschoolers.
Learn more about what it means to be part of a scrum development team. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
What does a scrum development team do each day?
Each day the team meets for a daily standup to share progress, obstacles and plan the current day together. From there, they collaborate to do whatever is necessary to deliver the required value.
Learn more about the roles and responsibilities of the development team. Then browse the most common terms in a Scrum glossary and learn what is Scrum.
