One interesting example that we often see is the use of meetings to help troubleshoot a problem or clarify an expectation.

Where possible the AgileBI team is always co-located to assist with collaboration and communication.  When a new team starts working together and strikes a problem, they will often book a meeting in everybody’s diary at sometime in the future to work through the issue.  The same is when they want to clarify the expectation for a user story with the product owner, a meeting is booked in the future.

When running three week iterations these delays can kill the successful delivery of the sprint.  Given the team are all dedicated to the sprints there is nothing stopping the team from getting together to discuss the issue when it arises, often by just swiveling their chairs around or by all immediately getting up and standing around a whiteboard.

It’s not until you point this out though that the team realise the latency that these future based meetings cause and change their behaviour.

As with all things Agile, constant collaboration is a major change in the way the team works and often simple behaviours that have been embedded for years need to be changed.