How ScrumGenius Helps New Zealand’s Regional Government Communicate Better
Summary
More efficient and effective standups
With ScrumGenius, Daniel has been able to cut down meeting times by over 300% and allow more room to discuss issues getting in the way of workflow.
Higher team engagement
The ease of submitting automated stand-ups has vastly improved response rates and motivated employees to submit their reports on time.
Less email clutter
ScrumGenius has cut down the last-minute email Daniel gets by about 90%, because issues and blockers now take the focus in stand-ups.
As a continuous improvement coach, it’s been Daniel Houppermans’ job for the last seven years to establish the tools to foster creativity and improvement in the workplace. Yet he found communication between co-located teams often fell short, and standups often missed crucial info that enabled team members to do their jobs efficiently.
With ScrumGenius, Daniel has been able to maximize his team’s productivity, communicate more efficiently and make better use of external programs.
The Problems
Daniel’s team is co-located around eight different offices. All team members move around between locations as well as work from home as well to better suit their differing projects.
This lack of a central meeting space made communication difficult. Not everyone could attend the same meetings, leaving Daniel’s team with an uneven knowledge base. Weekly team meetings could take hours and often became sidetracked by going over the previous day’s tasks. And even outside of meetings, Daniel found that his inbox was continuously cluttered with emails asking for clarification or sharing missed details.
Finding a system that worked for Daniel’s team was also difficult. The setups that did work often required info to be spread across too many platforms, making work inefficient. And switching platforms was met with increasing resistance from his team, who feared that online standups would become a way for managers to micromanage staff.
Daniel had to find a solution that fit just right. And that’s when he came across ScrumGenius.
The Solution
Daniel uses ScrumGenius with Microsoft Teams to directly fix the uneven knowledge base within his team. For them, ScrumGenius acts as a single location to record and share information among employees, allowing for easier communication between people in different places.
The integration between ScrumGenius and Microsoft Teams is vital for Daniel’s team, as the ease of submitting standups with the click of a few buttons motivates members to submit their reports on time much more than a general email or chat-based system would.
The team’s fears around implementing ScrumGenius were soothed by showing the team demos of the product so they could see for themselves how it works. Team members quickly realized that instead of facilitating micromanagement, ScrumGenius actually allows for less oversight. As it connects managers directly with the everyday goings-on of their team, managers now have to contact their team for updates less.
Instead, Daniel’s team can simply look at the reports and know what everyone is working on.
The Results
ScrumGenius has cut down on the in-person meeting times for Daniel’s team. Now, their meetings last only about twenty minutes, less than a third of what it was before. By trimming down the fat of previous “catch-up” work, Daniel and his team can now connect better and leverage more opportunities.
The amount of email Daniel receives from his team has also been cut down by about 90%, as team members can now focus on what they need to discuss in meetings instead of getting distracted by going over the previous day’s tasks.
Daniel and his team rely on ScrumGenius for their daily stand-ups and are very satisfied with the product. Daniel has even recently recommended ScrumGenius to a business connection, as he hopes it can facilitate the kind of efficiency for them that it has facilitated for his teams.
ScrumGenius has eliminated a tremendous amount of waste from the previous meeting format. It helps us keep up to speed with what we’re all working on.
Daniel Houppermans
Waikato Council
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