An Agile Contingency Plan during grief

Life is a roller coaster, full of unexpected events, but all part of the journey of living. We honor it with gratitude, trying to accept all its phases, even when some of them are hard to understand.

Last Sunday I lost a co-worker from a heart attack, a direct report, a great and funny guy, the man that always had good advice for everyone, the one that knew what to say to makes us laugh in the toughest moments. A great friend for many of us and my support on many daily activities in the operation.

This is the first time that I had to handle the sudden death of a direct report employee. I have been doing intensive research about the following topics: How to handle the team and personal grief, How to execute an agile contingency plan respecting the grief, and How to ensure that our operation continues delivering the results that are expected. All of this at the same time.

I hope that none of us have to pass through something like this, but I think that it is useful to share some of the lessons gathered during this process, so it could be helpful for other leaders in similar situations, or at least, it could become an eye-opener so that you as a part of your company or organization can start talking about the design of an agile contingency plan for similar scenarios or events.

Handling the Grief of losing a Co-Worker

Even though we are still in this process, from all the information reviewed and experienced from this first week, I can share the following list of aspects that are important to be handled by the employee direct manager as soon as the news has been informed:

• Communication with Family, HR, Next line Managers, Co-workers & Direct contact providers (in this order). Communicating pertinent information with competence and compassion.
• Set a plan for the first working hours/day after the news was shared, due that it’s going to be full with a mix of feelings and situations that we need to be prepared to handle. In this case what I did was to set 1.5 hours at the beginning of our working hours to give the team space to share prayers, feelings, and special thoughts about our colleague that had left, and in the last 15 minutes, I left a space to talk about how we should organize the day to be sure that everything was covered. This part for me was very important because all the team members felt part of the plan and all decided to be together during the difficulties of this first day.
• Set different specific plans for coworkers that can be more affected. It's important to understand if there's somebody that needs to be assigned to a different task during this or the following days, due that they can’t perform high risk or high concentration tasks.
• Define a space dedicated to the memory of the deceased, being respectful of the team recommendations, avoiding religious confrontations.
• Understand that employees need time to grieve and each one handles grief differently, so you need to have a clear track of each employee and his productivity, to adjust as they are needed, being open that external support could be required during the first 7 days.
• Give some time to clear the deceased employee's personal belongings or desk, to hire a new employee for his position. Like everything, this is a process that needs to be handle carefully, and if the tasks can be covered by the team or by a temporary replacement, it’s better to handle it this way during a couple of days.

Execution of an Agile Contingency Plan

One of the Agile manifesto statements is based on the response to Change over Following a Plan. In Agile, change is expected, and the development teams work under this assumption. This does not mean that no planning can be done because change will come. The teams work in small iterations of 1–2 weeks.

Due to the changes, this first week we had meetings twice a day (at the beginning and end of the day), reviewing the day-to-day results and making small adjustments on the same basis. We worked in a weekly sprint but being open that if we needed to make small adjustments before the ending of the week, we could deploy them if we didn’t affect the agreed deliverables.

Supply Chain commonly is the company biggest engine, and we are responsible for key tasks that have a direct relation with Sales and Customers Satisfaction, therefore it’s critical that we can have clear contingency plans for the processes that we handle so that we can guarantee that operations will continue delivering results even in the worst scenarios.

This wasn’t the subject that I wanted to share this week, but after thinking a lot about all that we had to learn to handle these days, I consider that it was important to share this as new lessons. I really would rather learn this differently, having him back, but this is part of the situations that we need to learn to handle as Supply Chain Managers.

Best Regards,

Keyla Knights B.

Below some references that where helpful:

• Coping With Grief and Loss in a Virtual Team: Offering Compassion From a Distance. (n.d.). Mind Tools. https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/loss-virtual-team.htm
• Shankar, C. (2018, June 5). Essence of Agile Mindset - Chander Shankar. Medium. https://medium.com/@schander10/how-can-you-embrace-the-agile-mindset-2d08f9ce3c68
• Vashishtha, S. (2019, August 29). The Essence of Agile. Agile Buddha : Demystifying Agile, Getting to Its Core. https://www.agilebuddha.com/agile/the-essence-of-agile/
• When a Colleague Is Grieving. (2019, June 18). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/07/when-a-colleague-is-grieving