Lessons from the polling place: the self-managing Scrum team

This week I had the privilege of being an election official in Virginia, and in the process I learned a little something about Scrum teams.

Election officers are a fairly close bunch.  Several have run the elections in their home precincts for decades. The hours are long, so people are going to be in close contact for some 18 hours.  The pay is only slightly above minimum wage, so people aren't really lining up to take the job.  In short, you need a bit of camaraderie and you really don't want to get overbearing and alienate a good poll worker such that they don't show up next time.

So what we had was a self-organizing team.  The county polling manual provides a fairly detailed SOP for election operations, but only a few of the provisions are actual legal compliance requirements; the rest are just best practices.  Most of the poll workers knew how to do most of the stations, and as people rotated around to deal with the situation of the moment or maybe just to give their feet or butt a rest, even the newbies got the hang of most of the stations pretty quickly.

The major complaint (there'll be another post on that topic) was the replacement of voting touchscreens with the old mark-sense form - talk about back to the future.  We didn't have too many problems to resolve but we did work our way through pretty much every exception case that the user manual contained and then a few more.  Almost every issue required the team chief to "take it off line" (to avoid embarrassing the voter) and often required several or many minutes to resolve.  Consequently, the chief could not have issued too many directions even if he had wanted to. The team just took the actions that needed to be taken and worked out its own task assignments and rotations, mostly by tacit adjustment.

Now at the end of the day, the rule book came back out to actually close the polls, accounting for all the ballots before running the results count.  Although this was tedious beyond belief for a very simple election, there was no grousing and no pressure to skip steps to get the workers out of there.  Some poll workers took it as their duty not to sign off on the results unless every "i" had been dotted; others took it as a point of pride that in case there was a recount (and as it turned out, there would) then the precinct staff would not be embarrassed by being found to have mislaid or miscounted a ballot.  Meanwhile the unoccupied team members just went ahead and put away all the gear, threw away all the trash, and so on.

So much to my surprise, I found myself doing cutting-edge team operations, even in the midst of a business in which the technology is actually regressing