When I first learned about Kanban, I also learned about “Swarming”. Swarming is when the whole team pitches in to work on the same thing. That same thing is often a blocking task that WIP limits helped surface. Can’t work on “your” tasks because you reached the WIP limit? Go help clear that blocking task up ahead!
Swarming with a team is not unusual and works pretty well. Some teams try to always work on only one story together so they’re swarming non-stop. And you can turn up the magic and swarm with large parts of the company.
Let me give you three examples of what you can achieve if you join forces and people do tasks outside of their normal job description.
1) Patch all the code
Some years ago we had a legacy product that was in use and earning money while not being actively maintained. Suddenly a wild security hole was revealed. It was a problem for everyone using that version of the specific language we were using. (Yes, you’re right, it was PHP.)
Not fixing the bug would have been irresponsible. How could we make it secure again, given that no team was taking care of the product and nobody really knew the code base anymore?
Drag 3 developers from their teams and go at it for a month? Takes long and these people are missing in their respective teams. And you make these 3 people rather unhappy. No, let’s stop and fix. Let’s take 2 days with all developers, spread the burden evenly and get it over with.
Fortunately the bug was least easy to search for. Two developers prepared a big board with a slip of paper for each and every instance of the bug in the legacy code base.
On Monday morning all developers met and paired up – one person with faint memories of the code base and a newer hire. Each pair took a slip and went on their merry way. All developers together finished that task within 2 days and with a high sense of community.
2) sipgate calling
After handling outstanding payments pretty badly for years, we decided to wow our customers in a commonly negative situation. Instead of passing late payers to a debt collection company we switched to writing friendly “Hey, maybe you forgot to pay us?” emails.
As part of switching from old to new way of handling we wanted to personally call about 200 customers with overdue payments. 200 is a lot of calls for the 3-person team that was wowifying our reminder process. 67 calls per person is daunting.
That’s why they asked the whole company to volunteer. They asked for people willing to help call customers at a certain time and date. They kicked it off with a short training and then some 20 people were calling up customers, nicely asking to update payment details. 10 calls per person is a lot more doable than 67.
3) Got a minute? Answer a ticket
In times of needs you can ask for quick help on Yammer. Sometimes customer support tickets pile up. That can be due to an incident or unusually few people to tackle tickets or both. In these cases you can rally the troops:
“Due to $reasons we have 4 times as many tickets as we normally do. We’re a bit overwhelmed. If you’ve got a spare minute and a Zendesk account, please check if you can resolve any of the tickets in our queue -> link”
At least once, yours truly did have time, read about 30 tickets, decided she could help with about 10 of them. Of these 10 only one popped back open because my answer didn’t help with everything. Which means I closed 9 tickets as a non-customer-support-person. Sweet!
Did I take longer than a proper CS person would have?
Definitely.
Isn’t it wasteful then?
No! Not to me anyway. Sharing your colleagues’ burden in that way strengthens relationships.
Okay not wasteful then, but it’s still inefficient for people to pitch in with tasks they don’t have routine in…
Probably. But then again, I don’t care about being efficient. I care about being effective. And that’s what swarming is. It cuts a big, intimidating mountain for a few people into realistic hills for many people.
And yes, that last example only worked because a lot more people have Zendesk accounts than just customer support people. These licenses are pricey. It’s a trade-off. We opted for the ability to act effectively rather than (money-) efficiency.
To say it with the words of my former choir leader:
Viele Hände, schnelles Ende
Many hands, fast end
Smart chap, that choir leader 🙂