Mob Team Setup

Yesterday I spoke about my key takeaways from the mobbing workshop with Woody Zuill. Today as team we started on our first mob together.

We first started ,before going through the mobbing rotations, on working out what we needed to do for that day. Then we tried to setup a desktop which would be our dedicated mobbing machine but when we ran into technical issues we switched to one of our laptops and soldiered on.

One of 4 members of our team had not been on the workshop. We explained the process to him and like us at the workshop it took a bit of adjustment in terms of only talking when it was your turn to navigate or after getting the current navigator's permission.

The overall session was quite successful but we did learn a few things:

The mob needs a dedicated team machine
- Where everyone knows the machine password
- No one needs to give up their machine
- The machine is always in the room
A mob GitHub account
- We set this up at the end of the session in preparation for tomorrow
- This was set up against a team mailbox where everyone has access to it
You need to build breaks into the process
- We basically went for 3 hours until someone requested a break
- Ideally you should go for 30 minutes or 45 before taking at least a 5 minute break
Team meetings should be scheduled early in the day
- We had a prescheduled meeting after lunch (in the middle of the mobbing session) which was very disruptive
- Having these meetings in the morning before continuing with the work will help preserve the team's flow
Decide on core hours as a team
- We agreed on what the core mobbing hours are as we work in a flexible work hours environment
- Our core ours are when our hours overlap as a team
- In the none-overlapping hours team members can continue with learning related to the work or other tasks that the team is not working on (they need to give context back to the mob in the morning).

Today's session was very insightful and we learnt plenty going through the process as a team