Coaching self-organising teams
Interesting Scrumtisch in Berlin Friedrichshain. Though no talk was scheduled for this evening, the room was packed with guests from various companies and backgrounds interested in participating in discussions on Scrum. We discussed Coaching self-organizing teams, Management Buy-In and the new Certified Scrum Professional.
As usual, we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list was rather short. However, it contained several interesting pieces:
- (6 votes) Management buy-in
- (6+ votes) CSP – Certified Scrum Professional – what changes compared to the practitioner?
- (4 votes) Roles of Management in Scrum – how do they change?
- (13 votes) Coaching self-organizing teams – team buy-in.
Coaching self-organising teams – Team buy-in
As prioritized by the participants, the first topic discussed was coaching self-organizing teams – with a heavy focus on team buy-in. The problem described dealt with transforming waterfall teams that are used to receiving their work items into self-organizing teams that voluntarily accept responsibility for the whole project instead of just their own little work package.
The definition of self-organization here really concerns teams that have no (and need no) dedicated team leader. On the contrary, leadership is automatically transferred to the person who, based on his skills and experiences, is best suited for the user story being implemented at any given time.
The problem the question targets are teams that are not self-organizing, where developers do not take responsibility for the whole project but just for their little pieces: They have their gardens—with fences around that protect them from others but also protect themselves from looking into other pieces of the project. Even worse, they tend to take these fences with them as soon as work items change.
Several ways to mitigate the problem were discussed:
- Teams should work in a collaborative environment, have clear tasks and priorities, and should get some pressure from the outside to get things done.
- Some teams need to learn what working in a team – together – really means. It may sound trivial, but what about solving problems together: Spending one-day climbing hills?
- Commitments should not happen on tasks (which by definition are well-defined and small) but rather on Features/ user stories. Task breakdown should happen after the commitment.
- There are patterns to break user stories that are too large into multiple user stories.
- Teams need to be coached – not only the scrum master should get an education, but the complete team. There are people interested in management who tend to read up on the topic after working hours – however, these are rather rare…
- Teams must be empowered – they must be responsible for the whole project and for the user stories they commit to. In return they must get what the need to get their tasks done.
- Newly formed teams inexperienced with Scrum have to get the chance to make mistakes – to fail – and to learn from that.
A great way to explain Scrum really is as a two-fold process: First half is about getting a product done, reviewing quality by the end of each sprint during the review. Second half is about improving the process to get the product done. Meeting to review the process quality is called retrospective.
Management buy-in
The second topic discussed was the role of management in scrum – and how to convince management of Scrum. To some extent, Scrum means losing power and control for management. Instead of micro-managing people, it’s suddenly about communicating your vision and scope. To get there, it helps to view lean management as the result of a long transformation:
- First, there is hierarchical management – with the manager at the top and employees underneath.
- Second, there is shared management – with the manager sitting between his employees, enabling communication.
- Third, there is collaborative management – here, the manager really is part of the team.
- Fourth comes empowering management – this time, the manager is only responsible for defining goals.
- Last but not least there is lean management – where managers are merely coordinating and communicating the vision of a project.
To establish a more agile management form, there are several tasks to keep in mind: First and foremost, do talk to each other. Explain your manager what you are doing and why you are working in pairs, for instance. Being a manager, do not be afraid to ask questions – understanding what your developers do helps you trust their work. Scrum is established, however there needs to be a clear communication of what managers loose – and what they win instead.
Scaling can only be done via delegation – however, people need to learn how to delegate tasks. With technology, we are used to learning new things every few years. In management, this improvement cycle is not yet very common. However, especially in IT, it should be.
Selling Scrum to a customer
Being able to sell Scrum to customers is yet another problem: You need good marketing to sell Scrum to your customers. “Money for nothing change for free” is a nice read on formulating agile contracts. Keep in mind that the only way to really win all benefits is by doing all of Scrum – cherry-picking may work to some extent. However, you won’t get the full benefit from it. In most cases, it works worse than traditionally managed projects.
Finally…
After two very interesting and lively discussions moderated by Andrea Tomasini, agile42, we finally had pizza, pasta and drinks – taking some of the topics offline.
Looking forward to seeing you in F-Hain for the next Scrum User Group Berlin Scrumtisch in April.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Isabell for providing this nice summary. If anybody would like to know more about Apache, Isabel’s Blog is the right place to go :-)