Product Backlog Flows

There are plenty of discussions in the agile community about how agile teams work and develop over time. Often neglected or poorly understood is how that work makes its way from the customer to the team. Below is a blueprint for creating an effective and efficient flow of work. I’ve included details but also left it flexible enough to be customized for your company’s specific circumstances.

- See more at: http://pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/product-backlog-flows#sthash.7ZvUkYFt.dpuf

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Self-Organizing Development Team

Definitions

·        Self-organizing teams are composed of individuals who manage their own work, pick up work based on need, and participate in team decision making.

·        Self-organizing teams must have a common focus, mutual trust, and respect.

By being self-organizing and self-managing, the team brings decision making to the level of the problem. This increases the speed and accuracy of problem solving.

Self-organizing and the Scrum Framework

The Scrum Guide gives the Scrum Master the role of coaching the Development Team in self-organization but doesn't provide insight or guide as how this is accomplished. So …

Tips For Management, Agile Coach, and Scrum Master to organize a team toward self-organization

·       Management (yes, management) must establish any parameters that the scrum team is required to work within. For example, usually only managers can hire and fire people. Otherwise, management should ensure they don’t get in the team’s way. Managers need to support the scrum teams rather than be a distraction.

·       Give a scrum team room enough to fail in order to allow them to succeed. Managers must not ‘step in’ every time they perceive the team is on the wrong track. The team may very well be on the wrong track but there are several inspect & adapt opportunities for the scrum team to correct itself. This is the big reason sprints are short, no more than 30 days, and most often 1 or 2-weeks long. I've seen a development team start a sprint, go down the wrong architectural path, discover it, do a re-design, re-do work they had already done, and still meet the sprint goal. True story. However, the chief architect had chewed his nails down to the knuckle while not saying anything. How proud was the development team after this? Extremely – they were trusted to get the job done and done right.

·       From the start, guide the team to do scrum (scrum guide). Shape the mindset and expectations from the start as this will be harder to influence and change later. Doing scrum by-the-book will not make you good at doing scrum but it will be easier for the team to later learn and adopt the nuances and spirit of scrum. 

·       Help the team become confident in their use of scrum early on. Use examples of how each inspect & adapt meeting can help improve the team’s work and their environment.

·       Remove any misconceptions the team has of scrum. Most teams will perceive that scrum is easy to do but it is actually hard to do scrum right day after day. Anticipate the development team’s reaction to this truth.

·       Use positive reinforcement and build a sense of achievement in the team by helping guide the team to successfully completing their sprints. Do not allow a team to over-commit in their sprint planning meeting based on hope alone. Guide the team to select a sprint goal that is achievable and don’t let ‘hope we’ll get it done’ be the team’s strategy. Hope is not a strategy.

·       Encourage ongoing adherence to scrum and agile practices. Watch for danger signs the team is reverting to older, non-agile ways of thinking and doing. For example, do they want to skip the daily scrum or sprint retrospective. Do they think only one person can do work in a specific area. Are they not forthcoming at meetings.

·       Get the customers and users involved in the process. Customers and users need to be engaged during requirement gathering but most importantly, must be engaged with the scrum team during the sprint review. If the customers or users are consistent no-shows at the sprint review or not showing interest at the sprint results, the development team will more likely lose their sense of purpose and possibly blame agile for their lowered self-worth.

·       Inspect & Adapt over blame. When someone on the team messes up, don’t say “Jane screwed up” or anything like this. I would try and restate it along the lines, “how was it the team allowed this thing to happen and what can the team do to prevent this from happening again?” Encourage the team to re-examine their team processes to see if something needs to change to avoid repetition.  Every effort should be made to make the team, as an entity, the focal point during inspect & adapt meetings and discussions rather than specific individuals. This will help reinforce that the everyone on the team is equally responsible and accountable for the results and outcomes of the team. This is along the “all for one and one for all” philosophy. While it’s important to know someone forgot to get their code, document, etc. reviewed, it’s more important to understand how the team allowed this to happen and to see if there’s something the team can do in the future to prevent it from happening again.

·       Identify team members who hamper or slow down the team’s productivity because of their personal characteristics and practices. Individual personality of team members can be considered more important than skill sets when selecting people for a development team. Work with the team and management to remove people who have difficulties adjusting to agile. This is a hard decision but one that needs to happen quickly; these are not ‘bad’ people but are people who can’t adjust to agile and scrum ways of thinking. Many believe the most productive scrum teams are open, honest, willing to change, and can see the team being greater than the sum of the individual team members. If a person doesn’t have or can’t quickly acquire these characteristics, then they may be an obstacle to self-organization and pose a threat to productivity necessitating their removal.

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Agile Project Manger or Scrum Master?

I find that there's a tremendous amount of prejudice against certain words in the Scrum community and "manager" is near the top. A business can and will give their roles any title they feel is appropriate. I would bet the farm that in some companies, the Scrum Master role is more aligned to a Project Manager of old and that Agile Project Manager role is more aligned to the Scrum Guide’s definition of the Scrum Master. So far no help, right?

Most businesses that are or will be transitioning to Scrum will have an Agile champion on board to guide the transition. I was this person at my previous company and after some time the role of Scrum Master was identified and added to HR’s list. However, before that happened, the person in the Scrum Team coaching and helping the developers and product owner was known as “Scrum Master”. This happened due to training and coaching the software and product management departments received during the transition to Scrum. The internal view was that the servant-leader of a development team was called “Scrum Master”. The external view of the role as projected by the HR department, possibly following 10 – 20 years of tradition, might have still have the role listed as “Project Manager” but now with the added term “Agile” plopped in front. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as the adoption of Scrum starts within the software department and will only spread once the successes due to the application of Scrum are recognised. As the Agile champion, my focus was on the software department and not HR, (in the beginning). After a couple months and Scrum had an obvious foothold in the company, efforts to re-align HR roles and role descriptions (Scrum Master, Development Team Member, Product Owner) began.

 

As a practicing Scrum Master and I saw a job ad that said, “Agile Project Manager”, I would apply with the knowledge that the role is most likely that of a Scrum Master for a company in transition (or possibly stuck in transition). I might find out otherwise at the interview but that’s the point of the interview: the prospective employer and prospective employee determine if there exists a common understanding of expectations and responsibilities surrounding the role. Some may see this as waste but as the interviewee, I see interviews as a learning experience even when the ultimate outcome is no job.

One of the responsibilities of the Scrum Master in the Scrum Guide is, “Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption”. This is where it can be argued that the Scrum Master is charged with aligning the roles and role descriptions in HR with the roles and descriptions found in the Scrum Guide. If the Scrum Master(s) are unsuccessful in doing this today, then it means they try again tomorrow, and the next, and so on. As long as the internal application of Scrum roles is correctly aligned with the Scrum Guide, then this view external of the Scrum Team might be an annoyance but not necessarily a terminal problem.

 

Summary

 

In the final analysis the Agile coach and Scrum Masters need to pick their battles with an eye on impact and results. Getting management and the Scrum Team following the Scrum framework is to me, job one. Pulling the rest of the corporate structure in line with Scrum role descriptions i.e., HR and management, is of secondary concern in my view.

 

 

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Measuring the Success Of The Scrum Master

The Scrum Guide states, "[T]he Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted." Scrum is defined in the Scrum Guide as follows: "Scrum (n): A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value." So, one could logically conclude that the scrum master role is responsible for ensuring the scrum team is "productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value." I think that the CEO, CTO, Development Department Manager will particularly note the "highest possible value" aspect of the scrum master role and want to know if the scrum master is coaching the team toward this goal. Here are a few points to track the success of the scrum master:

• Is the scrum team (development, product owner, and scrum master) following the 12 principles of agile as defined in the agile manifesto?
• Is the scrum master ensuring the scrum team (development, product owner, and scrum master) is following the rules of scrum as defined in the scrum guide?
• Is the scrum master helping those outside the scrum team understand agile and scrum?
• Is the scrum master protecting the development team from interruptions?
• Is the scrum master removing obstacles and problems affecting the scrum team e.g. getting better computers, coffee, baby sitters, listening to problems ...?
• Is the development team moving toward being self-organizing?
• Is the development team moving toward being cross-functional?
• Is the development team enjoying work or do they dread coming to work?

I think most measures for scrum master are subjective but that really means you must exercise greater caution when applying your scientific methods. For example, if the product owner randomly asked ten customers if they liked the user interface to a product and one voiced the opinion that it's bad, then you probably wouldn't change the interface. If however, nine of the ten voiced the opinion that the user interface is bad then this means something even though it's still all very subjective. What the product owner is doing is taking purely subjective measures and objectively applying them to the science of statistics. Could all nine customers be an anomaly with your other 991 customers happy with the user interface? Of course the answer is yes but it's also very unlikely.

 

Measuring the scrum master's performance against the expectations found in the Scrum Guide can follow the same principles as above. For example, measuring the scrum master’s service to the development team in "coaching the Development Team in self-organization", one could use several subjective measures together, with any weighting you choose, and reasonably determine over time if the development team is becoming more, less, or remaining static in self-organizing, assuming the method of measuring and weighting remains constant. These measures might include:

• How does the scrum team rate itself in forming-storming-norming-performing?
• Does the development team pull items from the product backlog rather than having them pushed onto them?
• At the daily scrum, is the development team providing status to the chickens or are they planning the day's work?
• At the daily scrum, does one development team member repeatedly advise others of what work they should be doing?
• At the retrospectives, does the scrum team actively pursue areas for improvement and then execute on these improvements?
• Does the development team often seek outside assist on how to implement a user story?

Enough subjective measures can be found to objectively determine if the development team is self-organizing.

 

What Is Success?

You may often times hear that working software is the measure of a scrum team's success and this is then used to determine the general success of every person in the scrum team, including the scrum master. I would argue that this is not enough since working software doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Think about delivering working software after the company had already lost a competitive advantage or delivering working software that no one wanted or bought. It's also conceivable that some customers, early adopters spring to mind, would tolerate software that doesn't completely work in order to see the concepts and the potential of the product. The Scrum Guide specifically allocates responsibilities to the product owner and scrum master with regards to adding value; not so for the development team. I think that "value" in the context of the Scrum Guide is value for the customer and, consequently, for the business. The rules and practices in the Scrum Guide are there to support the 12 agile principles including the very first, "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." It's the scrum master's role to ensure that the scrum team "satisf[ies] the customer" through the “continuous delivery of valuable software". The scrum master does this by making sure the scrum team "adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules". It's the responsibilities of the scrum master, as defined in the Scrum Guide, that business can use to measure the success and effectiveness of the person given the role of scrum master.

 

 

 

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Before the First Scrum: Management

You're a manager, a process person, developer, or product manager and your business success has been OK but you think it could be [much] better if your development strategy switched from waterfall to Scrum. How will you begin the transition? This entry will provide some advice on what needs to happen to convince a reluctant management team of the advantages of adopting the Scrum framework.

First Steps For Management

You've heard it over and over again that management needs to support the philosophy and practical applications of Scrum in order for it to work and be successful.  In my situation, the R&D Manager and Product Management Manager were both experienced with Agile and were eager to experiment  with Scrum to determine if the results would be better than the waterfall methodology then currently followed. The key point was that it was an experiment and not a full commitment; Agile would have to prove itself and that proof would be measured in the quality of the product and the speed at which the delivery was made. The business itself was not fussed on the means but were very keen on the results. Having the two department managers who are directly responsible for new product development supporting Scrum was, I believe, crucial for our ultimate success of adopting Scrum.

But what if there's no management support or worst, opposition to change i.e., adopting Scrum.

I worked at a defence company in the early 80's and the company's policy was no one would be hired as an engineer unless they had a 4 year college degree. My manager wanted to bring in someone as an engineer but without the necessary 4 year degree. The manager ended up writing a memo (remember those?) and eventually got the person in as an engineer. He later told me that the length of the memo was directly related to the hurdles before him and to get the person hired as an engineer required an eight page memo. The point of course is that the bigger the obstacle blocking your goal, the bigger the effort in making your case to reach that goal. To convince management that Scrum is a better alternative to current development methodologies, usually waterfall, you need to make the business case that Scrum can improve both quality and productivity; get better products out to the paying customers more quickly.

You must sell the idea of Scrum to management starting the first day and every day following without letup. Management needs to learn that through Scrum, there's higher productivity, greater innovation, quick reaction to customer or competitive changes, high visibility to progress (or lack of progress), higher product quality, and more potential evaluation deliveries to customers after each sprint. At a training session given by Jeff Sutherland, he stated that even if you do nothing else but have a daily scrum meeting, you should see a 20-30% increase of productivity. Jeff Sutherland has lots of practical information and statistics that can be used to help convince your management that Scrum can help your business. There are also many, many resources on the web that have anecdotes and other stories that can help bolster your arguments for Scrum adoption. You will need to understand what exactly the manager's opposition to Scrum is and address those issues directly.

I also think that trialling Scrum is a better approach than trying to completely change the way things are done all at once. By trialling, management is more likely to allow a single team to adopt Scrum without, in their minds, risking everything. When my company first trialled Scrum, only one team was formed. After the team was able to deliver a new product in only three months, a feat that had never happened before with waterfall, the CEO asked why all of development wasn't doing Scrum. 

If you have any stories on how you succeeded in winning over management to use Scrum, please let me hear from you.

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