How Julee Marcelino Makes TrueBlue’s Stand-ups Painless with ScrumGenius
Summary
Easier communication
ScrumGenius allowed off-shore and remote teams to submit their Scrum answers in their own time zone, facilitating the flow of information between different places.
Happier teams
With ScrumGenius, employees no longer have to waste their time in long meetings, and Julee can easily find out if any of her team members needed extra support.
More efficient standups
Simply by automating the stand-up process, Julee is able to cut down meeting times by over 300% and make them much more action-oriented.
Julee Marcelino is an IT manager at TrueBlue, and it’s her job to oversee the off-site teams at her company. Her teams are spread out all over the world, including onsite in Tacoma, around Washington state, Colorado, and off-shore in India.
But remote teams come with their own set of difficulties, and Julee finds that communication between team members in different time zones is often highly inefficient and leads to a lot of wasted time during the workday.
She and TrueBlue use ScrumGenius to cut down on wasted time in in-person stand-ups and better connect with off-shore team members.
The Problems
Julee’s job managing TrueBlue’s application and database teams keeps her busy. Before ScrumGenius, one of her tasks was to manually collect everyone’s standups and send them to her director.
Julee found that the entire process was inefficient. When she first took over the team, they were implementing a daily stand-up that required people to gather in the morning for at least half an hour to go over what was going wrong and what everyone was working on.
Unfortunately, the person who held these meetings wasn’t gathering these details beforehand. Instead, he was taking notes during the meeting, taking up a lot of crucial time. And because they had to go through the entire team, they couldn’t spend time on individual things that affected workflow—meaning blockers and goals often went unsolved.
This problem was even worse with off-site team members. Julee wasn’t able to get the information she needed from them, and the distance made communication during the workday hard.
Julee needed to find a way to automate the process and take out the inefficiency in communication within her different teams, and she used ScrumGenius to do it.
The Solution
ScrumGenius allows Julee to review her team’s Scrum reports before her daily standups, so she knows what questions she needs to ask to keep up productivity. This means less time is wasted taking stock of everyone, so meetings can be much more discussion- and action-oriented. ScrumGenius is particularly helpful for her off-shore teams, who can simply report their blockers and weekly accomplishments through their standups in their own time zones.
Julee also enjoys ScrumGenius because it allows for easy customization. She runs two Scrum reports; one is her daily standup for in-person meetings, and the other is a weekly report that allows employees to log what they’ve accomplished. Julee also adds targeted questions depending on the day, such as whether employees are working in-office or remotely and how many tickets are in their queue. This, on top of questions about tasks, goals and blockers, allows her to have a better idea of her team’s productivity.
Julee and her director also carry out “temperature checks” on their employees through ScrumGenius to make sure everyone is in a positive headspace.
In addition to their normal standup questions, this lets Julee know if a team member needs extra support.
The Results
With ScrumGenius, Julee’s standups have been cut down from over half an hour to just ten minutes long. No one has to take notes or spend a half hour on setting up for the meetings anymore, either.
The weekly report also helps Julee’s team fill out their year-end goals list. Through tracking their accomplishments and challenges every week, team members now have all the information they need for their goals list easily accessible.
Employees now miss less information, so their reports can be more complete and more accurate. Even better, with a weekly record to review, team members can identify patterns or problems that get in the way of productivity and work to get rid of them, creating a much more efficient workflow.
ScrumGenius also makes Julee’s job much easier. With the previous system, she had to go after her team and make sure they gave her their reports so she could prepare them and send them to her director on time. Now, ScrumGenius sends everyone’s reports straight to her director, making everything much more efficient. ScrumGenius also sends her team members reminders to fill out their reports, meaning Julee no longer has to manually hassle them for information herself.
For Julee and her team at TrueBlue, ScrumGenius allows them to get rid of wasted time and better communicate goals throughout the company.
ScrumGenius packages it up. It doesn’t require prep work, and we get the information my director needs. It’s really made things easier for everybody.
Julee Marcelino
TrueBlue
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