To Scrum Or Not To Scrum

I get many questions in my trainings, and one of the most common is when to use Scrum – usually preceded by utterances of “Scrum will never work in my team…” The wording of the question below comes from the Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach (CTC) application. So this topic is relevant, and there is no one answer.

The Question

When might you advise a client to apply XP, Lean or a non-Agile approach to workflow instead of Scrum?

Let me answer this question by describing an actual situation. Read on for my thoughts.

The Context

I once coached a program of teams at a large corporate that had to automate a manual and laborious business process onto an off-the-shelf product. This program had been working in a waterfall manner for a year and had managed to automate a small subset of the business process.

A new CIO was employed and decided that this program needed to use Scrum because it would help with faster delivery. When I arrived this is what I found:

  • Teams had been set up, consisting mostly of contractors from different contract houses;
  • Most people had received an Agile Bootcamp training focusing on Scrum;
  • Project Managers were in-house and expected to be Scrum Masters as well;
  • Teams were supposedly dedicated, but the program manager repeatedly moved contractors in and out of the teams;
  • The deadline had already been decided by the CIO.

It became apparent that the teams were not set up for success and that the program would revert to using a waterfall process. I thought that by helping the teams focus on some of the principles of Lean without giving their way of working a label, that it would start them thinking about bottlenecks to their workflow and identify wasteful activities.

 

The Rationale Behind This Approach

Major organisational impediments which due to the nature of the organisation (size, structure, and politics) were outside of the teams’ control to resolve resulted in an interrupted value-stream, but for which they were being held accountable. Here are some of them:

  • Data sourcing – each business process was multi-layered with multiple data sources which the teams did not own nor have access to. Obtaining data required a long process with multiple approvals;
  • Environments – development, test and production environments were being built at the same time that the team needed them to do their work.

Program-level impediments:

  • Teams were not stable – people moved in and out without notice to them and the Project Managers;
  • No Scrum Masters – Project Managers were expected to also be Scrum Masters – this created a conflict of interest and anti-patterns began to emerge;
  • Teams did not own their full value stream and yet were held accountable for delivery;
  • Each business process to be automated was 1 large story because they were not easy to break down into user value items;
  • Teams consisted of more than 10 people and had 3 Product Owners.

I recommended that teams adopt Lean principles and visualise their work, in its imperfect form, and start improving where they could because:

  • The Product Owners were present and involved – there was a real effort on their part to help teams break their work down into manageable chunks taking into account the organisational impediments;
  • By visualising the workflow as it was they would start to see where all their bottlenecks were and having the teams and Product Owners focus on customer value they would begin to identify wasteful activities;
  • For me, it was also important to help teams see that their current process was not value-creating, and by regularly looking for improvements they would start to look for different ways of getting around that which was seemingly outside of their control.

There are other ways of addressing this type of problem, such as using a complexity frame and the Stacey Complexity Model. As with all things that relate to coaching, the context of the organisation and the maturity of the team are important. In order to help them become unstuck I guided them along this path and brought in the learnings of complexity later. I felt that this was, for these teams, a useful place to start.

What would you do? Please tell me below.

How you could accelerate your facilitator journey

Years back when I sought out to work with teams, it was because I was convinced there must be a better way. A better way for us to approach doing the work. A better way that enabled us to openly share our thinking and ideas with one another. And ultimately a better way for us to navigate our way through problems and opportunities together.

I finally had proof of this being a valid conviction when attending CSM (Certified Scrum Master) training. It wasn’t just the concept and the framework that landed for me, it was that I was being taught in an entirely different way to what I’d experienced before – in school, in college, and in the workplace. It was so unlike what I’d grown accustomed to over the years. It was experiential and practical, with a touch of self-exploration.

The environment was somehow designed not only for you to explore the topics that framed the training, you were also exploring your own experiences, thoughts, and beliefs in relation to those topics. I found myself in a constant sea of self-exploration all while engaging and collaborating with strangers whom I’d only just met. Speedily together working at solving for problems and scenarios posed to us. How is it this easy in a room full of strangers? When with my own colleagues, collaboration and taking decisive action remains as cumbersome as herding cats.

What made it so different? How was it enabling such an engaged and collaborative space? What led to a bunch of strangers being able to problem solve together in such a short amount of time? It was the trainers, yes, and more than that it was their facilitation skills! They made it feel so simple and natural, it just worked, and yet it was designed to feel and work that way.

Today I feel honoured to know that I’ve grown capable of designing spaces where learning can thrive. Being able to set the tone for natural engagement and collaboration, even amongst strangers meeting for the first time feels incredible. Knowing that I have the ability to design for how people feel and engage in a space I hold, is both powerful and at the same time scary. Just as I have the ability to influence a space positively, I too have the ability to influence it negatively.

It has taken years for me to cultivate this capability within myself and I wish when I started out on my own journey that there was a course I could have attended to accelerate the rate at which I learnt these skills. So when I was given the opportunity to become an ICAgile Authorised Instructor and teach their ICP-ATF (ICAgile-Certified Professional Agile Team Facilitator) course I went for it.

And yes, while there are some skills that you need as a facilitator which can’t be taught overnight. Skills such as self-awareness and self-management. We’ll teach you how to evolve those skills more explicitly and effectively in the future, all while equipping you with skills which you can directly start to apply on your own.

You will learn about:

  • The mindset and role of a facilitator
  • How to define the purpose and outcomes for facilitation
  • How to design the flow of the process and structure for facilitation
  • How to maintain neutrality and create a collaborative space
  • How to facilitate for full participation
  • How to facilitate collaborative conversations
  • How to facilitate better decision-making
  • How to facilitate Scrum Events
  • Understanding how physical space influences facilitation

My aim in writing this is two-part:

To ignite in you the same need and urge that I had in wanting to enable healthier, engaging, and more creative thinking spaces for people. Beyond that of our every day underwhelming group or team experiences, which I sincerely hope you will oppose and seek to improve from here on out.

And to inspire you to take a small yet powerful step in accelerating your own facilitator journey, by joining us on our upcoming ICP-ATF course, where we’ll help you to grow and develop your facilitation skills and empower you to bring about the same inspiration in others to want their engagements to go from run-of-the-mill to remarkable!

Participants are guaranteed to stay engaged throughout the course, learn by doing, and have fun along the way. Our next course is scheduled for 6 – 9 Jul 2020, from 09:00-13:00 CEST each day.

Click here for more information and to book online.

Growing great upcoming ScrumMasters

At the end of January, I ran a Certified ScrumMaster class for students at the IT University of Copenhagen.

My colleagues in Finland have been in touch for a couple of years with Maria Paasivara, working as an adjunct professor at Aalto University in Helsinki and researcher in multiple subjects including globally distributed software development, distributed agile development and software project management.

A couple of years ago she started as an associate professor at IT University in Copenhagen and, moved by the strong belief that a Certified ScrumMaster training would be a good complement to her course content and a great added value to the students’ professional development and employability, she asked if we were available to support the University and run a pro-bono class.

At agile42 we believe that obtaining a quality education is the foundation for creating sustainable agility. In addition to improving quality of life, access to inclusive education can help equip students with the tools required to develop innovative solutions to the world’s greatest problems. That is why we are used to offering pro-bono training classes to people in need and to university students, to build the next generation of leaders our organizations and society need. We often also work with local schools introducing agile concepts to teachers during their professional development days, because a better education system will shape a better future.

In particular, I have always found it essential to instill a culture of agility into the new generation of students, who, in many universities, after almost 20 years from signing the Agile Manifesto, are still taught traditional software development techniques and lack an accurate introduction into industry-leading methods and practices.

When in 2012 I designed and delivered the first-ever class on Agile SW development in the Computer Science program at the University of Salerno in Italy, almost no student I met knew even the name “Scrum” before the course, nearly 20 years after Scrum was first practiced in 1993. Nevertheless, that was one of the most rewarding experiences in my career: I had a great time interacting with clever guys eager to learn and experiment with new things, and what most of the students achieved in that class, despite the small amount of time available, was really incredible

So it was a no-brainer for me to accept the invite from Maria; it was definitely worth it to engage with her students and share a small portion of the professional development career of twenty brilliant individuals.

It was two days of great conversations, learning and fun on both sides. As it normally happens in my classes, I took the opportunity to challenge their thinking and some of them got exposed for the first time to ”real life” examples from industry, which are soon going to be part of their daily life after the university time.

The reward for me came from this valuable interaction, the comments from the students during the class and the feedback I got from Maria:

”The training that Giuseppe gave to my students was a great start for our course. After this class, I can be sure that the Scrum Master students are well prepared to start practicing their role as Scrum Masters with their teams that will be developing software for real industrial customers.

Giuseppe is a wonderful teacher! My students really liked him and his style of teaching and facilitating. He was full of energy and transmitted that good energy to the students and managed to keep them engaged during the whole training, which seldom happens. Thank you agile42, and especially Giuseppe, for giving our students this possibility to get this wonderful CSM training! The students had hoped for this opportunity and you made that wish come true.”

Thank you, professor, for the opportunity and thanks to the Scrum Alliance for supporting this initiative.

If you wish to know more about our classes have a look at the course offering on our website and, if you are a school or university teacher and are intrigued to get you and/or your students exposed to Scrum and agility, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Best of both worlds with ORGANIC agility training valid for Certified Agile Leadership

Agile Leadership is necessary for any organization that wants to learn and grow. ORGANIC agility® provides a new leadership approach, models for cultural change, insight into complexity thinking, and addresses topics that are important to every leader in any organization.

The ORGANIC Leadership Foundations Class is intended for:

  • executives, middle management, and other leaders with organizational influence
  • leaders or consultants who support, lead or interact with Agile initiatives
  • any leader sponsoring, requesting, or involved with Agile adoption within their organization

The ORGANIC Leadership® framework supports Leadership growth as a capability, rather than only seeing it as personal development of Leaders. And growing the capability of leadership within an organization requires building it into the organizational structure and culture.

To grow leadership capabilities we need to start building the ability, in ourselves and others, to see the connections between what we do and the effect that has on our organizational culture, our environment and us as a leader. Becoming a true Strategic Leader will allow you to focus on what matters and equip you to head a resilient organization.

CAL I is an introductory, educational course from the Scrum Alliance that consists of in-depth leadership development learning objectives across five categories. The goal of CAL I is to bring awareness of agile leadership thinking, focus, and behaviors; and to start (or meet where they are) the agile leader on their learning journey. CAL I is the first step of the Certified Agile Leadership program.

Starting this year, our Certified ORGANIC Leadership® Foundations Workshop in combination with a 3h virtual training session provides you the CAL I credential of the Scrum Alliance. It is literally the best of both worlds!

agile42 CAL-Educators and coaches will offer multiple classes of the ORGANIC agility Foundation valid for CAL I during 2020, available in Germany (Berlin), the Netherlands (Alphen a/d Rijn and Amsterdam), Australia (Melbourne), Sweden (Stockholm), Finland (Helsinki) and Turkey (Istanbul). See the full calendar to check your closest location. More classes will be added during the year.

You can contact us for further information and to organize in-house classes.

Learn more about the ORGANIC agility Leadership model from senior coach Andrea Tomasini in this video.

person holding brown pencil

Online visualization workshop with Benjamin Felis

In most of our classes, the training participants are impressed by the visualization approach used by our coaches. Instead of relying on a prepared PowerPoint deck, we start with a blank canvas that gets filled with words, symbols and pictures live during the class.

The ability to visualize is an essential skill for a coach but also crucial in many fields in our professional work life. Known as Visual Facilitation, Visual Recording, Graphic Facilitation, Graphic Recording, Scribing or Visual thinking, it refers to the way of documenting and presenting spoken language into pictures and metaphors.

Benjamin Felis, a friend of agile42 and teacher of these techniques to most of our coaches, brings now his visualization workshop to a new online, on-demand format that everyone can follow, at their own pace, from their computers. Just register on the platform and immediately access the course with video lessons, worksheets and practical tips. An extended “coaching” version also includes 3 half-hour individual coaching sessions via Skype or Zoom.

Benjamin Felis is based in Berlin, he is a former graffiti artist and works as a full-time graphic recorder & illustrator since 2013. He’s been teaching creative visualization for over 8 years, and he has worked in over 15 countries in Europe, South America and Africa.

Watch the short introduction video!

Learning by doing: CSPO class video

For my recent Certified Scrum Product Owner class, I asked participants to make a video that they can take back to their colleagues at their work places. This post captures the activities of one such team and their progression to making an awesome final video. Here is the final video after their fourth sprint. (each sprint was 20 mins duration)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKva5ttCqhA

How does this compare to their product vision statement?

Folks who made this video did not have any video editing experience and they had to learn technology (windows movie maker) and develop content during their sprint working time (20 mins each). To appreciate this teams creativity and ability at problem solving, compare the final Sprint 4 video with the one they had at the end of Sprint 1.

https://youtu.be/_JZMU4CDFE0

How did they do it?

Team work, team work and team work.

This group of people gelled in to a functioning team, that continued to retrospect throughout and implement small improvements in their inner-team processes. They acted on product feedback and most importantly cared about the quality of their work product. To put this in one word: Scrum.

During my Certified Scrum Product Owner class, I make sure that participants have space to practice concepts, tools and techniques that they are learning.

  1. Create a product vision statement and continually align actual development of the product to the vision.
  2. Participants learn and create a User Story Map, like the one for this video. (Cards in yellow were their must-have’s or minimum viable product – MVP).
  3. Learn, create and deliver a product to their definition of done.
  4. Learned about importance of Sprint goals. They created sprint goals for each sprint and realized how to value outcomes (kick-ass product) over valuing outputs (story points).
  5. Use Kano analysis to identify feature mix. That cool background music in final video was an “exciter” identified via Kano analysis.
  6. Product owners learn to temper “gimme more features” reflexes by playing team member roles and learn techniques that help them get to essence of a feature with minimal team effort.

In summary, learn about what makes a good product and practice by building a product. Learning by doing.

Many thanks to Alysia, Alistair, John and Nick from Houston for making such a great video.

Adventures in Europe

IMG_5392 Denmark trainees

Shortly after joining Scrum Sense in February this year I started my journey to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). The process includes co-training with other CSTs around the world, so that I can get feedback to improve and, once I am good enough, I can get their recommendations that are essential to acceptance. For the past week I have been lucky enough to travel around Europe and co-train with some of the top CSTs and CSCs (Certified Scrum Coaches) in Europe. It has been a wonderful experience for me.

 

My trip started in Copenhagen, where I spent a wonderful two days with Carsten Feilberg, a friend and an incredible tester. We spent time refining our workshop for Let’s Test Oz where we will be presenting on Communicating Complex Information in Sydney next Tuesday. We have been designing the workshop over mail and Skype for the past couple of months and being together once more re-enforced the Agile principle that face-to-face communication is the best kind. We have come up with a great design and I am really looking forward to our session.

IMG_5393 CSM Aarhus with Bent Myllerup

My next stop was Aarhus also in Denmark. There I met up with Bent Myllerup, a very experienced CST and CSC with agile42. I spent two days co-training a public Certified Scrum Master (CSM) class with Bent in Denmark. Lucky for me the course was delivered in English. We had eight participants and received wonderful feedback. I was able to train some of the modules and learned some new techniques from Bent. I love being in a fresh context, because I can always learn new things and see how different people understand and take in information. It’s also interesting to see the European adoption of Agilethe different industries that are beginning to understand the value of empirical process control and fast feedback loops, and  working with teams instead of individuals. Bent speaks about a truck factor which I thought was a novel way of illustrating the point of resilience. The track factor is the number of people in a team that, if they were hit by a truck or won the lotto and left, the project would have to stop. So if you have only one key team member that knows everything and that information is not shared in some way with the team then you have a truck factor of one. A higher truck factor is better than a lower one. What is the truck factor of your teams?

CSM in Berlin with Andrea Tomasini CSM in Berlin with Andrea Tomasini

From Denmark I went to Berlin. Berlin is an amazing and crazy city. I arrived early on Saturday morning. Half of the city hadn’t woken up yet and the other half hadn’t been to bed. I was lucky enough to get to explore and see some of the sights. Sunday evening I met up with Andrea Tomasini, another very experienced and talented trainer and coach from agile42. We ran through our course plan for another CSM class on Monday and Tuesday. I got the opportunity to see Andrea in action and to train some of the course modules. I really enjoyed the way that both trainers focused not only on Scrum, but also on how important it is to be Agile. Transformation is difficult and changing your mindset early on is important. It’s also interesting to see how many companies both in South Africa and internationally have similar problems. We had 20 participants from all different backgrounds from gaming to building of aeroplanes. Who said Agile is just for software?

CSM in Berlin with Andrea Tomasini CSM in Berlin with Andrea Tomasini

It’s amazing to see how many different contexts are interested in the principles and values of Agile and Scrum, and how many people are really keen and eager to learn. The Training from the Back of The Room approach also helps to encourage people to learn on their own and creates an atmosphere of excitement and energy.

 

All in all it was an amazing experience. I had the opportunity to work with some great coaches and trainers and to learn new things that I can bring home. I love how supportive and encouraging our community is, both in South Africa and internationally. This is a long and tough journey and I feel that this trip has really helped to get me to the next level.

 

I am looking forward to co-training the next CSPO course in Johannesburg with Peter starting 30 September. Maybe I will see you there. If not I’ll be speaking at the Scrum Gathering in Cape Town in October, or maybe I will catch you at Let’s Test in Australia next week!

Brno

Agilia and CSPO in Czech Republic

Next week I’m starting a trip to the beautiful Brno in Czech Republic that will include a talk at the Agilia conference on March 26th. I’ll speak about “Will agile work in my embedded development environment?”.

Agile approaches like Scrum is designed for software development, but will it also work when we add electronics development and mechanical construction to the practices? Come and get insights from the experiences of a Certified Scrum Trainer who actually did the work himself. You will learn about how to setup teams that have the combined skill-set of software, electronics and mechanical engineers, how to challenge or cope with long lead times for physical components and how you can have a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) even early in the project. This is a companion to the keynote we’ve given earlier this year at the Embedded meets Agile conference in Munich and you can download the slides from SlideShare.

In the following two days, March 27th and March 28th, I will facilitate a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) training organised through Aguarra Agile Competence Center in Brno. As it happens with all our Scrum public courses, it will lead to a Scrum Alliance certification. In this course we will explain how particular agile or Scrum roles typically manifest themselves in enterprise environments. The course is an interactive workshop filled with lots of exercises whose goal is to demonstrate the difference between traditional and agile approaches to product management and software development. We will also discuss real-world organizational changes such as managing large or multiple teams, release planning and tracking progress through the right metrics. Most importantly we will answer your specific questions regarding your individual situation and organization.

Photo: details of Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Brno by Millenium1987 from Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository.

Ableton Developers build a LEGO city

The Ableton application developers build a LEGO city using Scrum as part of the Scrum training.

In a second round of training the developers at Ableton have constructed another LEGO city using Scrum. Using 5 minute bursts of planning, building and retrospecting, the teams transform the high-level wishes of the Product Owner into structures.

Ableton City

Instead of writing detailed, low-level specifications, the Product Owner uses User Stories: descriptions of functionality from the end-users perspective. LEGO stories look like this:

As a citizen, I would like a two-story house so I can have a large house on a small plot of land.

The teams would estimate and commit to these kind of stories, then iteratively transform them into LEGO. Together with the Product Owner they would assess the outcome and prepare the next sprint, refining build structures or pulling in new work.

The outcome, as you see here, was a very pretty city! Extra brownie points were awarded for the wonderful setting and the LEGO Ableton logo :-)

Ableton City

Ableton builds a Lego Abletown

As always we put theory into practice by building a LEGO City at the end of a Scrum training. The attendees are challenged to build a LEGO City from a Product Backlog in a very limited building time, of course using Scrum. This lets the people really feel what it means to self-organize, to sprint and to have a retrospective. Also working against a Product Backlog and with a Product Owner is something that you need to experience.

Ableton Team

In a couple of 5 minute sprints, the teams build, refactor and integrate their LEGO creations. Many aspects of Scrum in software development are also evident in this exercise. Work is prioritized on an on-going basis in the Product Backlog and the teams pull in work from this list into their Sprint Backlogs. After each Sprint the team has some time to reflect on their previous Sprint to figure out ways to improve their process.

All the hard work leads to a fantastic LEGO City, complete with a LEGO Ableton logo. Extra kudos for the impressionist river and for the name: ABLETOWN :-)

Ableton ABLTOWN

Good going guys, cool city!