Using the Roles and Ritual Reset Plays in sequence

[Lisa Yeager]

I'm curious in how folks may have used the roles and responsibilities play in tandem with the ritual reset? We're looking to first explore areas of ambiguous and/or overly ambitious roles and responsibilities.

A related item that people have expressed concerns about on our Atlassian implementation team is the abundance of meetings that we have - some of which are under our control and some of which are not. So once we have ferreted out and addressed gray areas of roles, I plan to do a variation of the ritual reset. 

I'm interested in hearing from folks who've addressed similar challenges using these two plays in tandem. What worked? What didn't? How did you modify (or would you, in hindsight?)

[Christine P. Dela Rosa]

I've been on and facilitated a number of Ritual Reset Plays, some of which have changed roles and responsibilities on the team. But, to address meeting overload issue, it's really the Ritual Reset Play that's helped us most.

When moving types of rituals onto the grid, we see 1:1s, team statuses, check-ins, team representative syncs, analytics reviews, leadership debriefs, and other types of meetings on to different parts of the importance grid. What's most interesting isn't which meetings are obviously in need of a reduction of frequency, but actually, what the less valuable meetings provide us and whether a meeting is the right vehicle to exchange that information.

Coming out of the Ritual Reset Play, the drivers of rituals we discard often have to let go of a responsibility and pass on a new responsibility (in the form of something other than a meeting) to another person (or even a divvy up the responsibility across everyone on the team). So for the teams I work with, roles and responsibility changes tend to come as a result of ritual changes.

However, if you're going the other way around and start with the Roles & Responsibilities Play, I can see how starting with the right responsibility set for each role can trickle down into the right rituals to implement. In this direction however, you won't get feedback on how people feel about the ritual until it goes into effect and the team feels it out first.

Good luck! Either direction of using the Plays seems good, but perhaps Ritual Reset is better for teams who have established rhythms and Roles & Responsibilities is good for teams who are just forming (or re-forming).

[Karim ABO HASHISH]

@Christine P. Dela Rosai recently came across Team Playbook and i was wondering which play suits my team according to our status and your insight is very helpful in this regard. Thanks

[Christine P. Dela Rosa]

@Karim ABO HASHISH - what is your team looking to accomplish and what has your team already tried? If you share a little more about your status I'd be happy to share (and perhaps other group members too) some thoughts.

[Lisa Yeager]

Thanks for your experience in using the plays, Christine.

It was useful for us to start with Roles because we have a fairly young implementation initiative, team members are wearing several hats, and we are bringing our implementation service provider/partner into the picture and up to speed. 

The team identified the need for these areas of reflection coming out of a retrospective, and prioritized the order. 

We anticipate, as you noted, that we have opportunities to move some of the meeting activities out of meetings. Even for these rituals, I modified the confluence templates for them so that folks could do asynchronous work (eg the first several steps) prior to the meeting. 

[Karim ABO HASHISH]

@Lisa Yeager
Hi Lisa, If you will be sharing some of your experience on Team Play application within some teams, i would be very interested to know how it went, for example

1- was the game suitable to the team level
2- was it interesting for them
3- what was their feedback
4- what are learned lessons

Thanks and wish you best of luck helping others

[Lisa Yeager]

Hi Karim:

So far we have just done the roles ritual. We did not address your specific questions, but at the retrospective for the sprint in which we conducted the review, people called it out as being of value. 

We were not able to complete the roles ritual in one session, even with the asynchronous work that we did ahead of time. I think that has a lot to do with where we are in our maturity as a team and the scope of our work. We are focused on enterprise transformation, so we have a fair number of moving parts and roles. 

We found the Confluence templates helpful, but I did need to make a number of modifications to them to align with our circumstances and needs/objectives. 

The ritual reset play in particular was missing a key step for us in that we first need to identify the inventory of rituals to discuss and align on the purpose and owners for those. I built that in as an early step in the process, and modified the play to have 3 specific rounds so that we can stay focused and not get distracted with trying to address too many things at once. 

[Jonathan V.]

@Lisa Yeager, thanks for opening this up for discussion, and @Christine P. Dela Rosa for your super helpful insights.

This is something that I would also like to do, and was wondering if you guys have any templates you could share or any other resources that I can use as I plan on this for my team.

[Lisa Yeager]

Hi @Jonathan V_  - we found the Confluence templates helpful for each ritual, but I did need to make modifications to suit our objectives for each session. 

-Lisa

[Christine P. Dela Rosa]

Hi @Jonathan V_ - you can check out the full Play here - Ritual Reset!

On that^ page you can find links to Confluence and Trello templates, and per @Lisa Yeager's note, you can customize the templates to what your team specifically needs.

[Jonathan V.]

Thanks @Christine P. Dela Rosa and @Lisa Yeager