Category: Adoption

3 Pillars of Scrum – Core but easily forgotten

Screen Shot 2016-07-17 at 8.03.49 AM

What are the 3 pillars of Scrum? This is a one question I love to ask leaders, Scrum Masters, Product Owners and members of development teams as I engage with them, trying to help with their agile adoption. The statement “our team is already agile” is commonly heard but what is being referred to is the fact that the teams are conducting Scrum events (sprint, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review and sprint retrospective), connecting these events to agility and keeping the ideas of transparency, inspection and adaptation on the side.

Limiting the idea of agile adoption to just events and practices is a clear indication of the missing understanding of the core mindset of agile and Scrum and instead, the use of Scrum as a process control method.

The simplistic design of Scrum framework and the embedded practices are the heart of creating a agile culture for software development. Every event in Scrum is conducted to constantly put the 3 pillars of Scrum in practice to not only ensure adherence to the framework and its practices but also to have agility embedded to the people and process aspects of product development.

Most common examples of situations when transparency, inspection and adaptation are overshadowed by other “not” important decisions are:

– What is the buffer we should account for during the sprint to account for unplanned work? This is a step in the wrong direction from a transparency perspective. Team should rather allow for unplanned work to impact work so that delays become visible and the team can assess the reason behind unplanned work and adapt by working with the Product Owner to make the right decision.

–  Our/Your burn down does not look good. This is commonly bought up as an issue by the Scrum Master or the management and can take the focus of the team from getting the sprint forecast accomplished to making the burn down look good. It is important to understand that the burn down was not created to paint a good picture of the team but to transparently surface delays so that the team can collaborate and plan for the work to be done to possibly meet the forecast.

– Get the stories to “done” by moving the undone tasks to a new story. The “Definition of Done” is sacred to the team and is created with an intent of ensuring that the story accomplished is in a state to be released into production. However; creation of new stories with an intention of claiming browny points for work done or delaying defects for later is a common cause of delays and reduced quality.

There are many such behaviors and conversations that you will observe in your teams and the easiest way to make the right decision is to go back to the 3 pillars and make a decision keeping them in perspective. This is what I do while coaching team and it is what teams should do to create a culture of agility.

Remember, Scrum does not solve problems, it exposes them

Agile transformation – Working with shared services along the way

Screen Shot 2016-07-05 at 1.27.38 PM

The concept of shared services is prevalent in most large organizations. A centralized user experience or architecture group or services group can be commonly spotted. A lot of times, component team setups are given a flavor of shared services.

No matter how much dysfunction it causes, shared services continue to live for many reasons including:

  • Organization’s inability or hesitation to make structural changes
  • Fear of being exposed in getting outside of their comfort zone
  • Fear of change in general
  • Focus on local optimization
  • Others…

The fact remains that shared services are generally not economically viable due to associated communication overheads and increased cycle time to get work done, however; the idea of shared services will not go away anytime soon. So what are some of the ways to work with shared services setup in an agile organization? Saying that organizations need to completely change from a shared services structure to feature teams capable of delivering end to end functionality will sound lame and unrealistic. Below are some techniques that can help organizations work with shared services, trying to transform to the agile way of working:

  • Vision – The environment in a shared services setup is generally chaotic as consumers always have a high priority need. At this time, it pretty much becomes a bidding game. The person or team that shouts the loudest or the person with the highest level of influence is able to get their work prioritized to the top. This is followed by the lengthy process of knowledge sharing where the member of the shared services team spends time in understanding what to build and why. This causes the shared services team member to take a very narrow approach to quickly build what is being asked without understanding the vision and move out to the next ask. This sounds pretty much like a robot in a manufacturing environment that just gets its work done without caring about the end result.

vision

For agile teams, having a common understanding of the vision of the overall product or just a single release is of paramount importance to ensure that every single activity is focussed on achieving the vision. When working on large product backlogs, it is recommended that teams (I mean the whole team and all the teams) get together to create a common understanding of the functionality targeted in the next release. All teams involved should participate and help in sequencing the work to be done to be able to assess when the consumer will need something. This generally calls for investment of time from all teams but the outcome overshadow the cost.

Where there exists a clear vision and a clear understanding of what is needed from the teams, team members remain excited about what is being developed and look forward to their contribution and stay engaged

  • Alignment – “Change is the only constant”. A sequenced backlog should not be treated as a project plan. Once a vision has been established and the backlog has been sequenced, all involved teams should come together on a regular basis to inspect the progress and resequenced their backlog as needed. Four-Dimensional-Goal-Alignment

This will specially help the shared services    teams to reprioritize their work to make sure that the next highest priority deliverable goes out quickly.

  • Collaborate – Coming together frequently to align is part of collaboration. Additionally, having someone from the shared services team attend the consumer team’s daily Scrum and other Scrum events and vice versa will help both the shared services team and the consumer team to stay informed about the progress being made and plan their work appropriately.
  • Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – Achieving discipline through working agreements is important when it comes to collaboration between teams. To use a metaphor, car manufacturers rely on multiple suppliers to provide various parts of the car to be able to assemble the end product. Each of the suppliers have to agree to certain processes and protocols to make sure that the assembly line does not come to a halt due to shortage of parts. Each part has a assigned reorder inventory level at which point the order system automatically places order for the next shipment. 3771.PPP_PRD_165_3D_people-Binding_Agreement_1FA08461Not only is the vision of the system clear to each supplier, the suppliers ensure delivery of products on time and are also liable to penalty if the agreements are not adhered to.

The key focus agreements is to build the environment of collective ownership, collaboration and focus to ensure quality and timely deliverable while maintaining a flow.

  • Use a tool – Tools can come in handy when it comes to collaboration and keeping shared services teams informed about their commitments. While I am a huge proponent of physical boards for Scrum teams, I do have to acknowledge that physical boards become a limitation when trying to keep shared services teams informed about the needs or the change in needs of the consumer.

tool-icon

Additionally, tools can be used by teams to generate metrics to assess their performance in being able to meet their SLAs, get notified about key milestones and provide data specifically targeted towards continuous improvement.

 

————————————–

While I truly believe that structural changes are a critical part of a successful agile transformation, it is not always possible  right from the word go. Organizations are generally resistant to radical changes fearing impact on running the business. While baby steps are taken to impact structural transformation, the above mentioned steps will help in the interim to help the organization get started on the journey of agile transformation.

If you have other ideas/techniques that you have used in your engagements, I would love to hear from you.

 

 

 

 

Have you read the scrum guide lately

Screen Shot 2016-05-24 at 4.21.31 PM

Every conversation around agile and scrum is a conversation about empirical process control. The term empirical is derived from or related to experimentation and observation rather than theory.

You must be thinking what has this got to do with the scrum guide. Well, there is a connection.

When experimenting, a big part of the experimentation is based upon the rules of idea or a entity that is being experimented with. As a example, when experimenting with chemicals in the lab, there are clear rules on when a chemical compound can increase risk or be harmful. However; scientists and researchers have continued to study chemicals from the time they were discovered to now to explore opportunities to leverage the properties of the chemical for general well being or further analysis. The study never stops.

In a similar way, some of authors who wrote some of the world’s bestsellers have continued their research, aspiring to make the results of their research more proven, well supported with success stories and case studies. More often than not, the key set of rules around the study has remained the same.

Looking at the history of scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber conceived the Scrum process in the early 90’s. They codified Scrum in 1995 in order to present it at the Oopsla conference in Austin, Texas (US) and published the paper “SCRUM Software Development Process”. With the first publication of the Scrum Guide in 2010, and its incremental updates in 2011 and 2013, Jeff and Ken established the globally recognized body of knowledge of Scrum.

The scrum guide has gone through it own share of revisions. For the most part, the core to the revisions has been the need to keep the guide as simple as the scrum framework itself and to adapt specific terminology to make it more in line with how the industry has adapted the framework itself. The present version of the scrum guide is only 16 pages long with focus on the core framework.

I first got introduced to scrum back in 2007 when I spent 2 days with Jeff Sutherland, participating on a CSM class. Since then, I have been of the assumption that scrum has remained the same till very recently when I happened to attend another class while being in middle of projects. I was surprised to unearth some serious gaps in my understanding of scrum and when the current scrum guide says. I spent the next few days going through the guide multiple time to bring make my understanding of scrum current.

Additionally, talking to may coaches and scrum masters, I feel people have not felt the urge to go back and read the guide recently and have been teaching scrum to teams and individuals based on their past understanding and using the old terminology. This has impacted me so much so that one of the first questions I ask candidates in an interview is “when did you last read the scrum guide?”. This helps me assess how current is their understanding of the framework and the kind information I should be ready to digest.

While some might argue that the changes in the guide have been minimal, I believe the current guide is much simpler, gives a good understanding of scrum in least possible number of words and is definitely the best source to assess your understanding of scrum.

I can confidently say that just going through the guide will help you make the mental decision about the quality of your adoption of scrum without the need to go through the long and formal assessments.

So “have you read the scrum guide lately?” If not, I highly recommend you take a quick refresher and ensure you are doing scrum right. Click here to print the latest version.

 

%d bloggers like this: