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Archive for the ‘Scrum’ Category

Scrum intentions, Scrumbut, Scrumand and Shu-Ha-Ri

Posted in Agile, Agile Practices, Scrum on March 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

I have been probably one of the longer running candidates for being a Scrumbut user. scrumbutBack when I started Agile 11 years ago, the rulebook was slightly different – retrospectives were part of XP and not Scrum and many blended XP and Scrum effortlessly without issues. This time could be described better as doing ScrumAnd. However I also spent a lot of time experimenting, even whilst myself and my teams were in the “shu” phase.

I was an early breaker of the “must be four week Sprints” rule, trying three, two and one weekly Sprints. I eventually settled on two weekly Sprints for large (ten person) teams and weekly for smaller teams.

In smaller teams of 2-3 people I experimented with part time Product Owners – people who co-located with the team for a few hours, but were otherwise contactable at any point in time by phone.

I played with having taskcards, removing Sprint Burndowns and replacing it with stronger visual observation as a marker for Sprint goal failure risk.

Release Burn Downs became Release Burn Ups. The relative worth of a Scrum Master full time versus part time was played with.

I did all this because in those early adoption days guidelines, blogs and books were very limited. I did this because the manifesto said “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. I saw Scrum as a process but it did not govern or supercede the manifesto and so I played with the rules hoping to test under what conditions ‘Individuals and interactions’ was better realised and what size of Sprint lengths allowed more effective delivery of working software.

If Lean Startup had been around in those days, not only me, but many of us would have been seen to be setting hypotheses, building, measuring the effectiveness of the change in process because we certainly needed to learn what worked and what didn’t.

I believe, to an extent, that Shu-Ha-Ri is applicable, but there is no clear point to me, nor do I think there should ever be a point when experimentation is not allowed. What early adopters have learnt are the conditions and root causes why certain elements should and should not be done. I only think it appropriate that Ri experimenters delve into the unknown with their eyes wide open to the risks that the previous experimenters have found. This is where the learning can be daunting because this is where the rulebook changes into guidelines and there is a lot of information out there to sift through.

I have seen a team successfully deliver a project with no product owner using a combination of Scrum and Lean Startup. By a strict classification this would be considered Scrumbut, however it was a very successful project (probably more than many others I know because we could prove benefits realisation rapidly and the customer was ever present in the data).

I have seen successful teams have a board of Product Owners. In fact, I am a member of such a board right now. It isn’t detrimental. Prior to the beginning of each Daily Scrum, as a board of Product Owners we collectively decide on priority. The card colour denotes the Product Owner and if the team has queries they know easily who to go to for immediate feedback. Problems with process are only problems if you let them be.

I see teams follow Scrum by the letter and fail – the wrong person was the product owner, cards weren’t broken down enough, the list could be quite exhaustive.

There is always risk in experimenting, but in saying “shu” learners should only go by the rulebook, without encouraging any critical thinking, is only further encouraging the lack of movement into “ha”. When we (as trainers) teach “shu” I believe we should have a responsibility to seed “ha”. It isn’t just about “do x, y, z”, it is “x works best when …”, “x is hard to do when …”, “you may want to consider to also do w when you do x”, in essence, it is the:

  • what (approach)
  • why (purpose/intent)
  • who (is involved and to what extent, RACI is a good model for this)
  • when (how often, how does the time impact other elements) and
  • how (does it feel when it is working right versus working poorly)

We need to teach people how to think, learn and critically assess, not just give solutions. We need to stop telling them off for experimenting. If that had happened in the early days of Scrum we may have never learned of the value of shorter Sprints and of the hundreds of useful tips, techniques and tricks that we apply each day.

Scrumbut is and has always been a terrible name for deviating from the standard definition. You might argue that what I do is Scrumbut. I would say I do Agile -

For my team and my organisation, I endeavor to improve the cost-effective delivery of value to customers through the establishment of a collaborative, safe, supportive and ever positively evolving environment.

Shouldn’t that be the intent of Scrum too?

Note: This blog is a reply to the great conversation and blog by Bernd Schiffer. This is by no means a statement that I agree or disagree with Bernd, I just wanted to offer my perspective. 

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Sprint 0: The Goal, Activities and the Term

Posted in Agile, Agile Back to Basics, Scrum on March 13, 2013 | 3 Comments »

In a recent tweet,

If you must do some pre-project prep, so be it. Please don’t name it “Sprint 0″ that makes it seem valuable. It isn’t.

Delving further into the tweet I learned that “many use Sprint 0 to enable bad habits” (don’t disagree), that it maybe should be called “project chartering” instead and that a more common definition of a Sprint is “a time-box for delivering a Product Increment”.

So what is the common goal of a Sprint 0?

Starting-Line-300x200The Sprint goal (by my definition) behind a Sprint 0 is “being ready and able to deliver business value that is usable and potentially releasable”. If you are ready to deliver business value then Sprint 0 is officially done.

Do all projects need a Sprint 0?

I say projects here quite deliberately as a team that is already functioning and already delivering are highly unlikely to need a Sprint 0 unless a specific set of features coming up dramatically impacts the ability to deliver business value inside of the Sprint.

If your organisation is onboard the DevOps train and XP practices are well established then you may not need a Sprint 0. If environments can be created and built upon in a day, if standards and frameworks are well understood then you may be ready to start delivery business value straight away.

This ultimately is highly dependent on your organisational capabilities.

Where does story elaboration fit in with respect to Sprint 0?

Teams quite commonly use the time whilst in Sprint 0 to also elaborate further the User Stories for the first value delivering Sprint.

You don’t have to have elaboration one Sprint ahead, but it can potentially help reduce carry overs, reduce time spent in Sprint Planning and ensure that task cards (if you use them) are well defined.

In an ideal world User Stories would be small enough and complexity low enough that carry overs are minimal and elaboration can occur within the Sprint.

What cadence activities should occur in Sprint 0?

Sprint 0 should be, from a process perspective, exactly the same as any other Sprint. It should be planned upfront through Sprint Planning, work should be broken down into items that are achievable within (ideally) 1-3 days, it should be slapped up onto a story wall/task board and tracked, Daily Scrums should talk about what everyone is doing and enable collaboration and sharing. At the end of the Sprint you should demonstrate what you have achieved within the Sprint Review, “Hey take a look at this box, this is the box that builds our code and automatically deploys it. Here look at it compiling and this is the result (good and bad) that it generates”. The Product Owner may not care but I can assure you the rest of the team will. Additionally it is a great opportunity to start reflecting about how you have worked together as a team and see what can be improved.

Just as per other Sprints the work that is done in Sprint 0 should be prioritised. If it doesn’t enable you to deliver software in a Sprint then it probably isn’t high in priority.

So in essence, all the standard, normal Sprint activities that occur when business value is delivered should also occur in Sprint 0.

How long should Sprint 0 be?

Just like value delivering Sprints, Sprint 0 should be timeboxed. The ideal value to set this timebox to is the same duration of your value delivering Sprints. When you do this it is a great test to see if the Sprint length works for you and also a great test of your planning process – were you able to achieve what you had planned?

The trouble with this is that in almost all cases the team’s velocity has not been established and consequently the likelihood of not delivering to expectations is high. If you are going to fail on estimation versus delivery (which I can safely say you will) then this is the time that it first shows itself. This then sets the team on a slippery slope as already from the first Sprint you are behind expectations. How will management react to this message? How long will it take for pressure to be pushed onto the team?

For low DevOp maturity organisations it is entirely possible that the time it takes to get ready to deliver value is longer than a Sprint. This is where the concept of “Sprint 0″ as a term fails and you see people then try to fix it through using “Sprint -1″, etc. This slippery slope further erodes management trust.

I fail to see a magic bullet for this particular problem other than having good planning upfront and always asking “do we really need to do this to begin delivering value?”

What if the team is able to deliver value earlier than then when the Sprint will end?

Then start delivering value. If it is a week earlier, you might want to re-organise the Sprint start and end dates. If it is a few days then it is probably a good idea just to let the Sprint run its course and ignore the velocity for the Sprint.

What if the team is unable to deliver value by the end of the Sprint?

If there are just a few outstanding items then start the first business value delivering Sprint, being cogniscent that it will impact your velocity a little. If there are considerable outstanding items then this should be discussed in detail at your retrospective. Why did this happen? Was it because impediments were not removed? Should an additional Sprint be added? If another Sprint is added then does it affect the ROI of the project? Should we just call it quits now?

How long after Sprint 0 is finished should you wait to start doing Sprints?

Don’t wait. Get started delivering that value!

Where does team onboarding fit in?

The day you start Sprint 0 is the day all the team should be onboard. Arguably they should have been onboarded earlier when you initially created a Product Backlog through Inception workshops.

What are the common pitfalls of Sprint 0?

The obvious one is that teams never get started delivering business value. They stay in this mode of never being ready and there is no drive or motivation to move out of it. Sometimes this is for very valid reasons, for example, developers don’t have PCs or an environment to work in; but often it can be just rats and mice outstanding.

This is why it is important to have Sprint 0 considered a Sprint because the Scrum Master should be driving the team to the goal of delivering value in a predictable manner.

So what is the Scrum Guide definition of a Sprint?

The Scrum Guide defines a Sprint as:

The heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a “Done”, useable,
and potentially releasable product Increment is created. Sprints have consistent durations
throughout a development effort. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the
previous Sprint.

So by the above definition it is wrong to call everything that I have said above a “Sprint” because it doesn’t result in a potentially releasable product.

But the Scrum Guide goes on to say:

Sprints contain and consist of the Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Scrums, the development work,
the Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective.

which aligns with the above activities that should occur as you prepare to deliver business value. Not surprisingly the Scrum Guide does not say anything about Sprint 0, mostly because anything that is before Sprints fails to exist as a process step or activity (the initial backlog creation being a great example).

What’s in a term?

If you should have for Sprint 0 a Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Scrums, dev work, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective why would you not have a term for this special case that does reflect the word “Sprint” in it, after all, three of the cadence activities in them have the word “Sprint” in them.

If you want to use a different term, lets say “Project Chartering” then you are still having a Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective… but not in a “Sprint”. This seems a little odd and misleading to me.

I feel that the messaging to people starting Agile should be clear and simple and removing the word “Sprint” does not align logically with that. I feel that the word “Sprint” is incredibly applicable and that the definition of “Sprint” in the Scrum Guide needs some common sense flexing of interpretation. I don’t expect the Scrum Guide to change, but do expect some guidance somewhere about how this pre-Sprint is a special exclusion from the delivering of value component in the guideline.

You could always just change the name of all the cadence activities but I think that goes back to not having a simple message.

So what would I call it? I agree that the ’0′ in ‘Sprint 0′ is misleading. I would call it something like ‘Delivery Enabling Sprint’. Make the implicit explicit.

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Purpose Driven Versus Opportunistic Agile Coaching

Posted in Agile, Kanban, Management, Scrum on March 8, 2013 | 2 Comments »

purposeSometimes there are moment in life when like a bolt out of the sky you have a major self realisation. I had one of those moments recently when I realised that for a majority of my coaching life I have been pushed and prodded by my leaders/managers to behave as a Purpose Driven Agile Coach.

What is a Purpose Driven Agile Coach?

It is a coach that is asked/told that when they implement Agile that there needs to be a plan to improve capability. Targets are set and tracked weekly. An example could be, “Improve stand-ups within the month”, it is still very open ended but the practice it is linked to and the time frame is set.

I would imagine that this is quite common in organisations with low Agile maturity and very strong old school management mentality. In these cases, organisations want to predict and understand the value that Agile Coaching provides. Often this is linked to definable metrics, before and after of Agile capability in teams, but I often felt that this capability was shallow. I would be pulled and moved onto another team before I had a chance to really embed the change and ensure that behaviours didn’t regress. I was often only given the time to teach the ‘shu’ basics and never the time to allow for trancendence to ‘ha’ (and certainly not ‘ri’).

But lately I have been less pressure bound from a coaching perspective (I still have pressure, it is just different). This release of pressure to not plan has resulted in me using a different model – Opportunistic Agile Coaching.

What is an Opportunistic Agile Coach? 

It is a coach that only course corrects or teaches based upon the moment, taking into account both team and individuals mental model readiness, change value and change fatigue. Let’s break this statement down some more.

Mental model readiness is about whether the team or individual is in an intellectual state of readiness to receive the coaching advise/support/inception reflection idea. For example, I might personally believe that the benefits of estimation are limited, but the team may have given the concept little thought. Mental model readiness is about whether they have been asking the same questions themselves or whether I have introduced the inception reflection idea. I say ‘inception reflection idea’ because it really is like the movie Inception – you want to seed the idea or consideration in the team as to whether the practice is worthwhile or not and give them time to reflect on it.

Change fatigue should be fairly simple – how much change is the team or individual currently dealing with? If they are completely new to Agile or are mentally still coming to grips with some concepts of Agile then I am less inclined to make drastic changes. For example, if they are familiar with Scrum terms such as PBI and Sprints, where as I am more comfortable with saying Stories and Iterations, I will just go with their flow and not introduce name conflicts for the sake of it.

Change value is about whether the team or individual will get much (if any) improvements from the change. By improvements I mean faster client feedback, improved customer value, improved personal engagement, etc.

Regardless of which Agile Coaching method, I have always started by mentally creating my own backlog. It is easy for me to see what practices need to be improved and where. Sometimes if there are a lot of issues or the complexity is significant I will write it down as a real backlog and estimate it. To some extent, I have always done coaching with opportunistic elements – ie I gauge priority by change value and do take into account mental model readiness, but when there is no set plan, then it is really very liberating.

As a problem or situation crops up I can assess it against where the item fits in my mental backlog. If it was bubbling up closer to the top then I will use the opportunity there and then to address it. I might let certain opportunities pass as they are still very low on the list, but what might have been tackled four weeks later in a planned approach is addressed on the spot, with immediate context and relevance.

Relevance to revolution vs evolution in Agile models

My realisation of the existance of two Agile Coaching approaches, purpose vs opportunistic, made me then immediately think of the revolution versus evolutionary debate in the Agile community. A purpose based approach is more closely aligned with a revolutionary approach where mass transformation is expected/desired and cookie cutter conformance is achievable due to standardised but complicated teams. A opportunistic approach is more closely aligned with a evolutionary approach where incremental change is made based on team readiness and self-realisation – there is no cookie cutter conformance and there is a realisation that there is no such thing as standard teams, or that teams that are dealing with complex problems.

Conclusion

I know we would all like to think of ourselves as opportunistic coaches, but how many of you are really doing purpose based Agile Coaching and is there a right/wrong way?

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Top 10 Things the State of Agile Development Survey REALLY Won’t Tell You

Posted in Agile, Agile Practices, Kanban, Scrum on March 4, 2013 | 3 Comments »

monkey

Version One have released their annual State of Agile Development Survey for 2012. Co-inciding with this they also released a blog titled the ‘Top 10 Things the State of Agile Development Survey Won’t Tell You’ which I excitedly opened only to find it was a joke blog post. This was slightly disappointing as I love the effort and professionalism that Version One goes through to produce their survey and felt the blog cheapened it. I had hoped that the blog would outline the known deficiencies in the survey, but alas no. So I decided to write what I felt the  blog post may have covered if it took the topic seriously, so here it is – the Top 10 (okay maybe 13) Things the State of Agile Development Survey REALLY Won’t Tell You:

  1.  What the co-relation between those with Agile Development Practice Experience and their role as an Agile Practitioner. I suspect that the 19% of Agile Coaches/Consultants/Trainers would make up a high portion of the 25% group that have 5+ years experience (It would be very scary if it wasn’t true). 
  2. Why is it that 60% of respondents were managers/leaders or consultants – are these the only people that have time to fill in surveys?
  3. Who knows what about Agile? Asking the ‘most knowledgeable’ is a good question, but it only tells a portion of the tale. What we really need to know is the extent of knowledge that each role has in general. Whilst the Product Owner might be considered the most knowledgeable in 1% of teams, overall what is their Agile knowledge – poor, sound, good, excellent? How do we know as a community where we might need to focus improvement without knowing each role’s understanding?
  4. What is the business’s role in all this? A lot of the questions are focused at an IT layer and don’t allow answering and splitting responses based upon business versus IT – for example, are any of the Agile Champions actually from the business?
  5. Where does Lean Startup fit into the Agile Methodology used? I know of a number of teams going down this path and whilst you could argue it isn’t a methodology (nor are most of the options officially), it would be worthwhile having this approach added in.
  6. Where is ‘name your technique’ in the list of those employed? I still have no idea what ‘Integrated Dev/QA’ means – I am guessing it is eluding to a cross-functional team, but why not have the BA’s too? I don’t get Agile Games either. There is no practice or technique called Agile Games, games are a way we learn, it is a learning technique and has no direct relationship with Agile. Then we have the missing techniques – two fundamental ones beings skipped: Product Demonstrations/Showcase as part of Sprint Reviews and Backlog Refinement (formally known as Backlog Grooming). I wouldn’t put Burndown and Team-Based Estimation together either as they are two different things to me. It would be lovely to see Release vs Sprint Burndown split too.
  7. Where is ‘Cost:Benefit ratio no longer being acceptable’ as the major cause of Agile Project failures? Most Agile projects that I know get canned do so because the assumptions that were made at the start of the project no longer stack up and consequently it is no longer worthwhile to continue the project resulting in the project being cancelled. It seems to me that the ‘Leading causes of failed agile projects’ is actually talking about ‘Leading causes of failed Agile Transformations’.
  8. Where are the Kanban practices/techniques? Cycle time is there, what about limiting work in progress, pulling work, visualise and  manage flow, making policies explicit?
  9. Where are distributed teams as an organisational issue? I see this commonly as one of the biggest issues – is ‘failure to integrate people’ the same thing?
  10. How many Scrum Masters also have a ‘Project Manager’ title or responsibilities?  How many Scrum Masters also actually help the team to deliver? I would love to know the answers to these questions.
  11. How effective is the role of the Product Owner? There don’t seem to be any questions around this and I am curious as to whether Product Owners out there are answering questions in a timely manner, with the right information and how many are proxies?
  12. What is the difference in people’s minds between a Bug Tracker, a Taskboard and a Kanban board? To me they have always been one and the same. Where do portfolio management tools fit? What about retrospective tools? How many people are using a physical board vs a virtual (or both)?
  13. How many people are doing Agile versus being Agile? This is the question that I would love answered dearest of all.

So what would you like the State of Agile Development Survey tell you that it currently doesn’t?

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Is managing tasks within Scrum micro-management?

Posted in Agile, Scrum on February 14, 2013 | 7 Comments »

Firstly I do apologise for the long absence on the blogging scene. This was in part due to my shift from Brisbane to Sydney, lack of internet, lack of technology, but also due to illness. So for my first blog back for the year I would like to implore you – PLEASE if as an adult you haven’t had any form of immunisation then go see a doctor and get some shots!

I was under the mistaken belief that I was fully immunised and didn’t need anything further in my adulthood and have been surprised to find that I was not covered when I got hit with Whooping Cough. Having been out of the country when the big Australian hoopla happened about Whooping Cough I was terribly ignorant of it and didn’t realise just how bad a bacterial infection it was. I am now six weeks into a three month problem and every day is very hard. 

micro

Thankfully I didn’t share it with anyone (but sadly my kids did give it to me as carriers). Anyway, onto the blog at hand.

My preference over the years has always been to work with User Stories as my lowest level of work. I have never really felt like I needed to break stories further down into tasks in the manner in which Scrum does. The reason for this is fourfold:

  1. I like my stories to be no bigger than four days. Ideally they are around the 2-3 day mark to deliver end to end. If they are this small then individuals can still be held accountable for progress on the story.
  2. I have rarely seen teams care about how a Story is being delivered whilst it is in progress. The fact that a team member is working on the unit tests now and then will be going onto the database changes has little consequence to the functioning of the other team members. The ‘aha’ and roadblock moments I see coming out of the Daily Standups very rarely arise from technical implementation at a task layer.
  3. The time it takes to break the user story down could be considered waste. For me the value in estimation is not the number you get, but the conversation of assumptions, dependencies and constraints that you have on the way to get an estimate. You can still have these conversations when planning the iteration.
  4. The extra time that it takes to generate a Burn Down chart. I would rather have a look at the where the stories sit within the flow against the current day of the iteration and see if the team is behind/ahead from that. It isn’t a science like the Burn Down chart, but if you really think two to four hours is going to make a big difference you are probably looking at the wrong things. I find that teams that focus solely on hours being Burned Down only tend to have a lot of carry overs due to a lack of focus on getting the story wholly to done.

So recently I started working with a team that, when I joined them, were already using tasks and hours to track.  I made a conscious decision to not change or influence their desire to use tasks and consequently through myself with gusto into ensuring that all stories within the current iteration were fully broken down into tasks, estimated and tracked via a Burn Up chart (at the time there was too much volatility in the iteration from a change perspective to use a Burn Down).

What I found didn’t really change my dislike for tasks or burning down hours in the iteration but it occurred to me that when I focussed on work at an hour by hour basis rather than a day by day basis that I was becoming a scrum micro-manager. I instantly cringed at the realisation and wondered how empowered or autonomous the team felt from when they were being tracked at this layer.

So I asked them whether they felt that being tracked at a task layer, hour by hour felt like they were being micro-managed – the results? 71% of the team felt that it wasn’t micro-management, leaving 29% to feel the opposite. It would be interesting to see how this co-relates to performance, but I don’t think I will go into that on a personal blog.

Two of the team members did say they didn’t feel it was micro-management but expressed concern at the sheer visual weight of the number of cards on the wall. To put this into context at the moment we are mid iteration and have fourteen stories (consequently rows) in scope and around one hundred task cards flooding through the wall. This is ignoring the cards that are being fleshed out an iteration in advance (let’s ignore this slight scrumfall-ish behaviour), the product owner decision cards and the eighty story cards in the event horizon backlog. I do try to clean up the done work every day so that it looks a little less scary visually but at the start of Iterations I can definitely see it being a concern.

So what do you think – is it micro-management to track to the hour using tasks in Scrum?

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The future of Business Analysts

Posted in Agile, Lean Startup, Scrum on November 28, 2012 | 5 Comments »

Seven years ago I was involved in an open debate at an IIBA meet up on the role of Business Analysts within an Agile environment. At the time my opponent contested that Business Analysts were defunct under Agile and were no longer required. I debated that they were still needed but that their role changed somewhat.

My main argument was that they were no longer the provider of lengthy requirements documents written in advance with little to no collaboration in the team. This didn’t mean that Business Analysts were no longer required to write any form of documentation, just the amount of documentation, the collaboration involved to reach a common understanding and the timing of when the documentation is done changed. With this reduced amount of time directly spent writing ‘War and Peace’ requirements they would instead use their time in a new skill set – as facilitators. I saw the role of the Business Analyst as being very compatible with the Scrum Master role, where the Business Analyst could encourage an environment of collaboration and ensure that the ‘promise for a conversation’ occurred. Business Analysts would still need to have skills drilling into the root cause of problems, to understand and analyse and question the business process, but in a good Agile team everyone would also have this skill.

Time has moved on and most of what I predicted for the Business Analyst role has come to pass within Agile environments. But I believe that it is time to make a new prediction.

We have come a long way towards mastering the art of building the product right, our next journey is to build the right product. After all, according to Lean principles, the biggest waste is the waste of overproduction and this can take the form of producing an unneeded or incorrectly targeted product.

Thus, in today’s ever shifting environment, I see the role of the Business Analyst as that of being at the heart of data. I see the role transforming to focus more on data analytics and the understanding of data associated with the product. Some may say that this is the role of the product owner, to which I probably wouldn’t disagree with and as such I see the Product Owner and the Business Analyst roles merging even closer together but with an incredibly strong focus on data.

So what is all the data that is being analysed about? Four things:

  1. Are we improving the number of customers seeking our product?
  2. Are we retaining our existing customers?
  3. Are customers getting value out of our product?
  4. Is our product revenue model generating net profit?

If the answer is yes to the above questions, founded soundly on data then your product is in a great place. If you cannot answer these questions then you really should start working on it (before you go out of business). For those of you familiar with the Lean Startup model then the above discussion should be something very familiar to you, for I believe the Business Analyst role should be centered around enabling the data gathering to support a Lean Startup approach.

You don’t have to be a start up to gather this data. You don’t have to measure once every three months. You can start measuring your existing product and incrementally improving on the four questions right now and everyday from this point onwards. Armed with this data  you can know whether a change you made today will make a difference to your business tomorrow.

Maybe the role shouldn’t be called “Business Analyst” anymore . Maybe we should start to create “Product Analyst” roles instead?

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What is an effective Stand-up?

Posted in Agile, Agile Back to Basics, Agile Practices, Scrum on September 26, 2012 | 4 Comments »

Can them what you will – Daily Scrum, a Huddle or a Stand-up, but whatever you call it a Stand-up is one of the simplest Agile (and arguably knowledge and service management) practices  out there. Three questions are answered by the “core team”:

  • What I’ve done since we last met…
  • What I plan on doing till we next meet…
  • What is impeding me or may soon…

Simple right? Wrong!

These very simplistic set of steps have led many to believe that the key purpose of a Stand-up is as a progress report. To set the record straight:

The key purpose of a Stand-up is the opportunity to collaborate, share and support each other in the delivery of valuable outcomes.

For those that may not have heard of the above interpretation of a Stand-up’s purpose then let’s take the opportunity to understand it further. As each person answers the three questions what the rest of the team should be doing is listening and wondering to themselves the following questions:

  • How will this impact me?
  • How will this help me?
  • Will my work impact them?
  • Can I help them?
  • Can I potentially learn from something they are doing?
  • Can something I’ve done in the past be useful so that they can learn from it or re-use it?

If the answer is ‘Yes!’ to any of these questions then the team member should pipe up and respond. An effective Stand-up isn’t just the team turning up on time and answering the three questions – it is where teams work together to deliver and reach the delivery goals whilst always upholding the values and principles.

Another common Stand-up myth is that they should be 100% valuable to 100% of the core team 100% of the time. This is simply not the case. As we now understand what an effective Stand-up is you will be lucky to find these opportunities consistently and rarely more than three times in a single Stand-up. In fact, you might go through a few Stand-ups before such an opportunity arises – these uncommon instances of “I’d love to learn more about how to do that, care we pair?”, or “I’ve had a similar problem on my last project let me send through to you what we did”, or “I know that person well, let me talk to them and try to push the impediment out” are what make good Stand-ups.

We’ve all heard of tips like taking difficult conversations offline, ensuring everyone can be heard and timeboxing each person to no more than 2 minutes but here are a few tips that I would additionally recommend to make Stand-ups a little more effective:

  1. Touch your cards. If you don’t do this as you are talking the team is mentally trying to match the first sentence of what you said to the Story Wall. As they are doing that mental matching they are no longer listening to what you saying which consequently invalidates the value of the Stand-up.
  2. Take 2-3 mins before the Stand-up to jot down what you want to remark on. If you don’t do this you dramatically increase the likelihood that you are spending time, whilst others are talking, concentrating on what you are about to say. You need to be in the moment of what the team are saying, not what you are about to do.
  3. Jot down any issues or risks remarked on. Ensure that they are visibly attached to stories with clear owners and status/actions.
  4. Hold each other accountable if a team member is talking about work that isn’t reflected on the Story Wall – get the story written up and prioritised against everything else on the go.

Note: Astute Agilistas will notice the subtle changes in the core three questions. Primarily this is because I have seen effective Stand-ups that whilst they are regular and frequent shift away from the activity being daily. Additionally I like to tack on the “or may soon” to the last question because whilst the question focuses on issues the “may soon” is a focus on possible risks.

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Dazzling Dones: Using the Done column more effectively

Posted in Agile, Agile Practices, Kanban, Scrum on September 18, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Jvonvoss at Minds.coremedia.com recently did a very interesting blog – A World without Burndowns: The Unified Taskboard. It was an interesting concept – use your done column to replace your burn down chart.

Normally a taskboard will look like this:

 

The done column is just a list of everything that the team has achieved. Colour may be used to denote expedites.

Using Jvonvoss’s advice a standard Iteration Wall would have the Done column split into each day of the Sprint:

 

In this example, whilst on day 9 we know with certainty that we wont get through all the cards within the next two days as we have been consistently achieving 2 cards per day.

 

In the above example knowing whether we would finish all the cards by the end of the Sprint would be harder to work out – but the interesting reason is why. We can very easily see that the daily throughput is spiking up and down a lot. There is a constraint in the system. You would likely be able to see this as well in a Burn Down chart but visually this would pop more for visitors or managers that walk by.

Using Kanban, similar concepts of visualisation within the Done column can be used to track cycle time. In the example above we can see some outliers, but a majority of the cards are being done within three days and expedites are getting done on the same day. Again this won’t necessarily replace other graphs but the transparency is more apparent.

 

 

Lastly, how could you use a wall to track demand over time within the service industry? Cafes commonly print orders on dockets and add them to a backlog of beverages to produce. As the Barista becomes available they take the next priority item in the backlog and begins working on this. Imagine that when done putting the docket up on the wall by the hour that it came through – what would this enable a cafe owner to do? You can see from the above image that the peak time is 8-9 – you would make sure the majority of staff were on at this time, between 12 and 2 you would likely rotate lunch breaks and you might choose to close down earlier than 6 given how few the orders are in that time slot.

What other ways could you think of using the Done column?

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The purpose of a Scrum Master

Posted in Agile, Agile Back to Basics, Agile Practices, Culture, Leadership, Scrum on September 3, 2012 | 26 Comments »

I have been pondering lately what the purpose of a Scrum Master or Iteration Manager is.

Many believe that it is a 100% full time role. Some are even concerned that there are formal positions springing up for this role.

Here is my stance (and work in progress model) on the role:

The purpose of the Scrum Master role is to create a self autonomous team through the usage of Agile.

  1. It should never be considered a 100% full time role.
  2. It is a transitory role – there to enable a change in the team.
  3. The change is a change from an environment of Command and Control to an environment of autonomy and empowerment.
  4. The goal is to deliver value to customers frequently and regularly through creation of this environment. The goal is not to have a Scrum Master job for life.
  5. They do this through a series of steps.
  6. These steps are based on Situation Leadership with some tweaking:
    • Directive – The Scrum Master is telling the team what to do and how to do it. This is sometimes common when the team is new to Scrum/Agile and are still learning the rulebook.
    • Facilitative and Advisory – The Scrum Master facilitates cadence activities and advises the team on possible options but is not the final say.
    • Cross Facilitative – The Scrum Master engenders an environment where other team members are starting to facilitate the cadence activities. At this stage the Scrum Master is no longer rounding up everyone for the Daily Standups, instead the team self form and remind each other.
    • Coaching and support – The Scrum Master is only there to course correct and even then only does it through team reflection. They don’t advise on options, instead they engender an atmosphere where the team can come up with their own solutions.
    • Double loop learning – The Scrum Master is ready to hand over the team to itself. The team reflect not only on how they are working together but why they are doing practices in a particular way. It is creating an atmosphere of learning transcendence.

So what, you may ask, does a Scrum Master do as their time with the team whittles down? They do what any good team member in a Scrum team should do – they deliver User Stories!

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Sad Puppy Scrum Extentions

Posted in Agile, Scrum on July 18, 2012 | 1 Comment »

I know that I am not always the biggest advocate for Scrum. It isn’t that I don’t believe that using it and other Agile techniques doesn’t work. I do believe that there is considerable value in Scrum. But if you read over my other Scrum posts you will understand that I don’t think Scrum has moved with the times nor sufficiently answered the handling of production defects problem.

You can imagine my joy when earlier this year Scrum proposed a framework to allow extensions.  I gave it some time, watching from the sidelines. In May I had a look over the three proposals. Admittedly I was disappointed with the three that got through (one implies an incorrect application of feature teams, another is a renamed practice directly taken from XP), but rather than focus on the negative I remained in hope that more would come that would hit the mark.

So when Scrum.org announced recently that they were stopping the Scrum Extensions program I felt like a sad puppy. I wanted to see this work. What I did really love about David Starr’s post on the Scrum Yahoo group was the lessons learnt:

  1. We confirmed the need is there.
  2. The mechanism we tried to service the need was not the right one. People found it hard to consume.
  3. Quality of several submissions was not sufficient.
  4. People unfamiliar with Scrum found the name confusing.
  5. There are many existing and potentially competing options out there. Agile Atlas looks promising, Agile Alliance resources, etc.
So we learned some things. And we’ll do better in the future. It would be cool to collaborate on this stuff instead of spooling up a new instance of a reference.

David set aside much ego and took the Scrum ethos of inspect and adapt. Arguably it is more a Lean Start-up perspective of measure, learn and pivot, but regardless I hope that Scrum.org continues to try and make something work.

Note: I thought using the term ‘retired’ or ‘deprecated’ was quite odd in reference to the suspension of Scrum Extensions. To have retired it implies a life long lived. To be deprecated shouldn’t it have been replaced by something?

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