Responsiveness
- Chris Boys
What is it
Responsiveness measures the time taken for a team member to respond to a request of another team member or of the whole project team.
Why it matters
Members of a responsive team are able to remove blockers and progress with their work quicker than less responsive teams.
What ‘good’ looks like
Mature teams will determine their own guardrail for acceptable levels of timelines when getting responding to requests for information. Setting these expectations is especially helpful for teams working remotely or in a distributed manner across different timezones.
How Umano measures this
Umano determines the speed of a project's communications by looking at:
The time between questions and answers sent in communication tools such as Slack
The time between questions and answers sent in project management tools like Confluence and Jira
What’s included?
Included | Not included |
|---|---|
All messages in public channels in Slack, comments on Jira tickets, Confluence pages and Bitbucket PR's that have a question mark '?' and mention a team member '@name' and feature request oriented words in all selected channels, boards, spaces and repositories such as ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘should’, ‘could’ etc. | Direct messages or private channels Creating or editing Jira descriptions, custom fields, labels etc. Creating or editing Confluence pages Creating or editing Bitbucket PR descriptions Any communication from people outside of the linked team members. |
Practices that influence this
the percentage of requests that are tagged
the percentage of requests answered from previous sprints
the percentage of unanswered requests at the end of the sprint
Tips for quicker responses
Include a check in your daily stand up if anyone is waiting on a response from one of the team members. Especially if there is a lower score (for the previous day)
With the wide range of tools most teams use, it is not strange that notifications can get lost. Keep a personal record for pending questions.
Set clear expectations on what’s an acceptable time to respond to request for help from one of your peers, especially if your team is working across multiple time zones
Supporting Resources
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