Agile MethodsAppearance
Confidence Vote
- Subject
- Leadership
- Participants
- Agile Coach/ Agile Master / Stakeholders / Managers / the whole Agile Team
- Facilitator
- Agile Coach / Agile Master
Summary
The method "Confidence Vote" can be used to measure the team's self-confidence with regard to upcoming tasks and to make an implementation decision based on this. "Confidence Vote" is a quick method to gather feedback from small teams as well as from a large group. It provides a better understanding of the confidence regarding upcoming actions of the group. The vote itself shall be as unbiased as possible but still transparent. This makes it possible to get feedback not only from the dominant characters but from the quiet group members, too. By discussing the most opposite opinions you get an insight of possible risks and chances and generate a common understanding of the materia. This helps to find the right and lasting decision how to proceed.
Definition
Confidence Vote gives you a qualitative and quantitative impression of how confident the team is in the implementation of a feature, sprint, planning interval (PI), etc. in order to decide on this basis whether you are ready for implementation.
Motivation
If you involve all the people concerned in the decision-making process, you will achieve a sustainable solution that is supported by everyone.
Results
An agreed and committed decision how to proceed.
Benefit
With "Confidence Vote" you get valuable opinions from the dominant players as well as from the quiet personalities.
Procedure
There are some prerequsites:
- You have to define how the confidence level is defined:
- one finger: there are major doubts and very little to no trust
- two fingers: there are relevant concerns and only low trust
- three fingers: ther are certain reservations and moderate trust
- four fingers: one is confident
- five fingers: there is a high level of trust
(if you play online, you can use numbers insetad of hand signs and type them into a chat tool) - You shall minimize bias, e.g. make sure all hands are raised at the same time.
- The vote has to be transparent so that you can identify who selected which level of confidence and include them into the following discussion.
- You shall define when a decision is accepted (e.g. the mean or median is equal or greater than three; after playing three rounds there will be a top down decision, etc.)
- It shall be defined how many different opinions will be discussed (e.g. based on the number of paritcipants; with small groups you may discuss all opinions, with greater groups only the extrema will be discussed.)
- The facilitator explains the subject the confidence is asked for (e.g. Committment to the SAFe PI / Sprint Backlog / Iteration plan etc.)
- Al participants are asked to raise the number of fingers according to their confidence level at the same time
- The facilitator counts the votes and decides what to do next (depending how it was defined above, how decisions are made).
- When the confidence is identified the result and decision has to be documented
Tools
a digital or physical board to document the votes
Hints
As an Agile Master or Agile Coach you can get an impression about the degree of self-confidence of the complete team or team members e.g. by analysing the spread of the votes.