Do you ever feel your client isn’t impressed with your status updates?

Do you hear clients ask you for more information or appear to challenge your status updates?

If you are a team lead, do you feel you need to repeat or talk in place of your team members as their status updates just “aren’t cutting it?”

Do only team leads or managers attend client standup meetings as the dev team isn't able to showcase their own status updates?

Do you want your team to be more proactive about sharing their updates?

If you feel as if you are pulling teeth to gather information from status updates from your development team, this program WILL bring a much desired shift.

It’s only when a developer or team member can articulate what they did, what they are doing, what they will do, their blockers, and approaches for overcoming them (with possible brainstorming to follow), that clients gain more confidence in your team as well.  

So, let’s see how our coaching approach helps your team to merge their current knowledge with team collaboration and communication skills to answer the following questions:  

1.  How do I give a good status update?
2.  What do you say in a status update meeting?
3.  What elements go into a good status update?
4.  How do I showcase my expertise and my team’s knowledge base?
5.  How can we tackle blockers in a status update?
6.  How can we know when to open up the conversation for brainstorming? Can we even do this?
7.  How can I possibly fit in all the important elements within 1-2 minutes?
8.  How can our team become more self-managing when delivering status updates during our standup meetings? 

How Can My Team Understand What Makes a Good Status Update?

We help your team articulate the good and not-so-good news with confidence and expertise through on-the-spot mocks, self-retrospectives and peer feedback. In coaching sessions we identify two to three communication strategies the team member can apply to their particular types of updates. Some of these strategies may include learning how to:

1.  Talk about technical concepts in everyday English (for those non-techie clients)
2.  Express road blocks, what solutions they may have come up, which they may or may not have tried, the results and having the bravery to open a conversation about that.
3.  Identify ways to field questions they can’t answer at the time they are asked.
4.  Identify questions that development teams can ask themselves to better prepare for status updates.  
5.  Articulate how features map to the customer/end user experience when needed. (Status updates are a perfect place for the developers to showcase their knowledge of the client’s business which helps building consultative skills.)  
6.  Weave in or highlighting user stories when required.
7.  Share context to avoid vague or hard to identify tasks.  
8.  Address issue resolution, technical debt, backlog and more.
9. Trouble shoot, identify, discuss and brainstorm roadblocks, preventing escalations and midnight firefighting scenarios. (As noted in some motivational feedback below…)
10. Whenever appropriate, cultural tidbits in working with and impressing US or North Americans are included as the cross-cultural training element.