Are there Benefits for adding ChatGPT as a team member?

There is evidence that ChatGPT can be beneficial in helping you do your work. Involving ChatGPT today is already occurring in repetitious, creative, and diagnostic type work. Some say it’s inevitable and you should learn to work with many forms of AI. Current uses have shown that it can improve work efficiency, assist with tedious tasks, help you with creative tasks, and facilitate learning. We are also learning that because ChatGPT is based on a large language model, it can act as your assistant; providing personalized responses based on your inputs, helping you work smarter, and boosting your productivity.

As it can help an individual in their work, how about helping a team?  In this article, I explore how helpful ChatGPT can be for a team. In other words, I suggest making ChatGPT a member of your team. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot capable of mimicking human-like conversations so why not be a member of your team? As mentioned, ChatGPT has been recognized to boost productivity so let’s consider the context of a software engineering team who are producing new features and correcting bug fixes to the code base.  To consider this, here are the potential positives, negatives, and limitations of incorporating ChatGPT as an engineering team member. Here are some considerations:

First, let’s start with some Positives:

• Multi-tasking: ChatGPT can handle many questions, inquiries, and tasks simultaneously allowing certain work to be handled more efficiently and scaled to a higher volume of work.  
• Quick feedback: ChatGPT provides quick feedback to questions and inquisitions allowing for more input for potential better options and decision-making.
• Availability: ChatGPT is technically available 24/7 and can work while team members rest allowing for busy work to get completed and tasks to be ready for team review when they are back online.
• Scalability: As an AI, ChatGPT can handle a high volume of inquiries without experiencing fatigue or requiring breaks.
• Database of information: ChatGPT has access to a vast amount of information and can provide accurate and up-to-date answers to team members' queries.
• Human Languages: ChatGPT can speak in multiple languages and can accommodate global teams across multiple boundaries and locations.  
• Programming Language: ChaptGPT has the potential for programming capability across various language platforms.  

Next, let’s move to the Negatives:

• Time from Team Members: Working ChatGPT will take time from some team members. A buddy for ChatGPT will need to be designated to help provide context for ChatGPT, line up tasks, reduce ambiguity of the requests, verify and validate the work done by ChatGPT, and more.
• Lack of emotional intelligence: ChatGPT lacks emotional understanding and empathy, which may limit its ability to provide refined and empathetic output to team members.
• Limited contextual understanding: ChatGPT will struggle to understand the context in which you are working including the complexity of the work, potentially leading to misunderstandings or incorrect responses.
• Bias and completeness fn training data: the database from which ChatGPT pulls has already shown some bias based on patterns and data provided which means it may generate reasonable responses but may be incorrect or biased if not carefully reviewed.
• Lack of creativity: Because ChatGPT pulls from existing data and patterns, this limits its ability to generate genuinely innovative or creative ideas.

Finally, several considerations should be factored in. The first is ethical considerations as ChatGPT may inadvertently generate or reinforce biased or discriminatory responses due to its training data (which includes such biases). Careful monitoring and bias mitigation strategies will be necessary. The second consideration is legal and compliance challenges.  Incorporating ChapGPT into a product team may raise legal and compliance concerns, particularly in regulated industries that require human input, oversight, and/or accountability.

It's essential to consider these factors and strike a balance when integrating ChatGPT or any AI model into a product team. Human supervision, ethical guidelines, and continuous evaluation can help mitigate the limitations and ensure optimal utilization of AI technologies like ChatGPT. Now it is time for you to wrestle with this question: Are there Benefits of adding ChatGPT as a team member? Hopefully the overview, positives, negatives, and considerations can help you with your answer. 

----------

If you are interested in learning more about ChatGPT in relation Agile, Teamwork, or experimentation, consider reading these additional articles:

• A Discussion with ChatGPT about Agile 
• Are there Dangers with ChatGPT for Agile? 
• How to Experiment with ChatGPT 

Applying the Pair Protocol beyond Programming

-->

Pairing isn't just for programming, it can be advantageous to have two people pairing on any type of work. Have you ever had to pair up with someone on a piece of work?  Have you ever launched into the work only to realize that you haven't discussed how to pair up or realized that you aren’t really working well together? There are dozens of different ways to work as a pair so it is important to have protocol on how to work together through a piece of work.  I call this the Pair Protocol.  This is a guideline on how two (or more) people engage together in a piece of work to have the maximum alignment and productivity. The objective is to get two people to work as one. 

Setting the stage 

You need a piece of work, team of people, and the right pairing mindset. The piece of work can be a feature, a user story, a requirement, an increment, or similar that has been refined so the work ahead is clear.  This forms the basis for what you pair around.  You need people who are coming together for a common purpose, know the context around the work, and are willing to work together.  You also need a mindset of “we” and “us” over “I” and “me” as pairing implies that all collaborators of the work in harmony and get the credit together.   

Pairing up 

The first step is for two people to volunteer to do the work together.  This implies each person is ready, willing, and able to do the work. It also means they can self-organize around the work (e.g., to have the option to volunteer for the work and have the ownership to determine how to do the work).  This typically occurs in a session where the work has been discussed and it's time for people to volunteer to do the work. This could be in a form of a planning session (e.g., for Scrum it would be Sprint Planning, for Kanban it would be the Queue Replenishment, and in traditional approaches, it would be a project planning session. The outcome is that two people (aka, the pair) have willingly volunteered for a piece of work.

Working together

Once the pair has been created and the planning is done, the first step of beginning the work is aligning on how the pair will work together. The pair will briefly meet to re-familiarize themselves of the work (e.g., discuss the “why”, acceptance criteria, etc.) and then discuss how they will navigate through the piece of work (e.g., through task decomposition). This includes an agreement and commitment on who will do which tasks, how they will do the tasks, and when they will do the tasks. As this is pairing, there may be tasks where the pair works together. If so, discuss and gain agreement on how this will occur (e.g., working session, etc.).

Capturing Discussion

As you pair through the sprint, increment, or time period, you should capture important conversions and decisions where the work definition (e.g., user story, etc.) is recorded. There may be ‘discussion’ functionality that can be used that allows the pair to remind themselves of the discussion. 

Incorporating Feedback 

It is important to agree on how you will notify each other when a task is complete and what types of feedback loops you will use with each other and with those outside the pair to gain feedback to ensure the work is moving in the direction of value. There should be an agreement on what feedback loops will be used (e.g., review sessions, etc.) and how will feedback be incorporated back into the work. This information can be recorded in the work definition (e.g., user story details, etc.). If the planning or backlog management tool has a “follow” feature, then activating this will help keep each other aligned with the progress.     

Sharing Results

As the work comes to a conclusion, there needs to be a way to agree that it is completed and meet the acceptance criteria. This should occur prior to sharing the results with the greater team or those outside the pair. Sharing results include identifying the venue where the outcome of the work can be shared and discussed. If you are using Agile or Scrum, the Sprint Review or demo can provide the venue for sharing the work and gaining any additional feedback. The pair should also discuss who would demo the work, collaborate on what type of feedback they are looking for during the demo, then jointly agree on whether they’ve met the acceptance criteria of the work, and what are the next steps (if any). 

Do you bring the “Semper Fi” mindset to your Agile Teamwork?

When I think of a strong example of an Agile team, I recall teams that would help each other out, would watch each other’s back, and would focus on the project at hand, working strongly in a collaborative manner to achieve the common goal. 

Interestingly enough, this is what it takes to achieve the ideal Marine mindset.  Semper Fidelis is Latin for “always faithful” and has been the Marine motto since 1883.  This motto guides the Marine to remain focused on the mission at hand and stay focused on each other as part of the unit, as part of the team.  The intent is that once you commit and become a Marine, you transform to something new, something better, where you don’t worry about yourself.  Instead, you worry about the guy next to you and to the success of the mission.  You live a life with personal integrity, courage, determination, and commitment.  These are the same attributes that make a member of an Agile team successful. 

   

Another mindset within the Marine leadership is “to lead by example”.  In Agile, we don’t need people telling us what to do.  We need people who lead by example and who live the Agile mindset.  This is the best way for the team to absorb what is expected by the Agile values and principles and is another way to grow.  

If you want to learn about the importance of teamwork, spend a moment learning about the mindset of a Marine.  As I would illuminate the attendees of my numerous Agile workshops, one strong attribute of teamwork is “no one succeeds unless everyone succeeds.”  Agile team member should bring encouragement to each other, integrity to do what is right, courage to challenge the bad habits, and commitment to see the work through.  This is teamwork and beyond.