More with LeSS: Identifying the Product Owner

The first post in this series about descaling Scrum, focused on how to identify the product. If you have successfully identified the product, or used narrowing questions to get to the practical product to start with, the next step is to identify the Product Owner. If you assign an available person as the Product Owner with little to no regard for identifying the Product, there’s a high probability that your Scrum adoption will be less than successful at delivering value.  Need the tips on identifying the product again? Visit: https://www.collaborativeleadershipteam.com/blog/less-series-descaling-scrum

Ok let’s say you have effectively identified the product and it’s large or even enormous! The framework included in this series that “descales” the organization when you have up to 50 people working on a large product is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). When even more people are involved, the product may be a candidate for LeSS Huge which will be explored in the next post in our series. For more information and case studies, visit:  https://less.works/

What Changes for Product Ownership in LeSS:

The good news?  Nothing does. LeSS is Scrum.  Product Owners still:

• Are customer focused responsible for maximizing whole product value

• Order the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions

• Are one person, not a committee

• Make decisions that are respected by the entire organization

The bad news? If these simple rules laid out in the Scrum Guide (https://scrumguides.org/) are not followed, not only will the Scrum adoption fail to produce valuable, working product,  if it’s a large or enormous products mentioned there’s still little chance for success. Indications that these mistakes are being made include Product Owners “in name only” who:

• Spend the majority of their time writing things like user stories

• Have no authority to make product decisions such as scope, scheduled and budget that are respected

• Are order takers saying yes to every request

Know your Development Type

In order to more effectively identify this Product Owner, it’s helpful to know the type of product development we’ll be engaging in:

• Product Development: product will be used by a paying customer in the marketplace. If this is your situation where can you look for the Product Owner? In the Product Management group initiating the work. If there is no Product Management group, then the business unit driving the initiative.

• Internal Product Development: for one or more users within the company. If this is your situation you can look for the Product Owner in the group that will use this product and/or who is closely involved in the work that the product or system will be used to support.

• Project Development: for one external customer where work is “contracted”; this customer includes both the purchasing entity and the users. Does this sound like your situation?  The Product Owner is from the company receiving the work/deliverable/system and much like the previous scenario, is hands-on using the system.

Closing Thoughts on Authority

Giving authority to the Product Owner and respecting their decisions are choices any organization is capable of making. If recommended steps have been followed for identifying the product and type of development, the chances of identifying a Product Owner who cannot be trusted with these choices is unlikely. Product Owners are not administrators reporting the results of someone else’s decisions.  In order for your organization to deliver more value with less wasted time and wasted money resulting from overturned decisions and go-betweens, it is critical for the Product Owner to have authority over the Product.

To learn more from Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) co-creator, Craig Larman, and to earn a Certified LeSS Practitioner credential register here.

What is a ScrumMaster?

In a recent Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course, a student new to Scrum was a bit confused by the repeated reference to the ScrumMaster as a “coach”.  “What do you mean coaching or when does this coaching happen?” was the question raised. Caught a bit off guard, or more importantly caught up in my own internal dialog of, “Well, doesn’t everyone who comes to a CSM already know this?” For a moment I was a bit dumbfounded. Then I realized that this is the very question that we need to spend more time answering.

Let’s just start with coaching. What do you think of when you think of coaching? Do you think of a sports team that has a coach? Do you think of losing weight and maybe hiring a personal trainer as a fitness coach? Do you think of accomplishing personal goals through engaging a life coach to help you stay focused? In any of these instances, the person that is in the coaching position does not do the work for the person being coached. The coach’s role is to:

·       Ask all kinds of questions – the obvious question, the dumb question, the hard question, etc

·       Make observations and play back what they are seeing, what they are hearing, what they are observing

·       Make recommendations, suggestions, provide alternative view points

·       Listen

·       Remind the coachee of the very goals that were set out to be accomplished and take stock of reality – is the goal being met or not with the actions the coachee is taking

Scrum is a different way to do work. It may sound simple to change to a new way of doing work, but many find the practice of Scrum difficult to accomplish. The official Scrum Guide is free to all and is available here.

The Scrum Guide is clear that a ScrumMaster does not only coach the team of people doing work or developing the product that will be used by customers, but they also have the responsibility of coaching the Product Owner and the Organization. The Product Owner gives direction about the product, and the greater Organization is comprised of other experts, users, customers and stakeholders about interacting with the Scrum Team.

That may sound like a big job, and it is!  This is why a ScrumMaster is a full-time job and not one that can be done effectively as part time. It’s not administrative at all. It’s about people. It’s about individuals and interactions. It’s about setting goals, accomplishing goals and more importantly, what needs to change if goals are not accomplished.

Think back to sports teams you may be a part of that had a coach. Or any sports teams that you watch. How many are successful without an effective coach? How many Olympic athletes achieve a medal without a coach? This idea is critical to a successful Scrum adoption. The ScrumMaster is the coach to the Development Team, the Product Owner and the Organization regarding making this change and when things get tough, not back-sliding into old habits or unsuccessful approaches that detract from the goal.

If you would like to learn more about Scrum or the ScrumMaster, refer to the free Scrum Guide. You can also join me for a Certified ScrumMaster course hosted by Hollstadt Consulting on Oct 2.

Author: Christian Antonie

Who is the Agile Manager?

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Collaborative Leadership Team’s Dee Rhoda, Certified Scrum Professional & Agile Coach, shares her perspectives on the role of an Agile Manager.

We all know that there is a very important and prescribed position for managers in the traditional project management world.  These folks are masters of estimation.  They can estimate schedules, costs, resources and all manner of traditional project planning tasks and administration.  I once worked with a Project Manager who could whip up and submit a Change Request faster than my dog could nab a fallen piece of bacon off the floor!  That’s saying a lot because my dog is freaky fast!

In the traditional project world (focus here on the word project) the aforementioned activities are excellent qualities for management.  But, what about a world where the focus is on the product?  You know, that adaptive place where Agile frameworks thrive?  Where dedicated teams focus on delivering quality products quickly with features that customers actually want and can use?  Where does the manger fit in this world?  What qualities will make this brave new manager thrive? Or, even be necessary?

When I conduct training on Agile and Scrum Fundamentals, I spend time discussing roles from different frameworks:  Product Owner, Customer, Scrum Master, Coach, Development Team Member, Programmer, etc.  When I introduce these roles, responses from students vary greatly and tell me a lot about where the individual will likely end up in their organization’s adoption of Agile or Scrum. Project Managers, Product Managers and Department Managers respond differently to what we at CLT refer to as “job security not role security” when adopting Agile or Scrum.  Some see this as refreshing and burden-lifting.  They no longer have sole responsibility for success.  They now are part of a team that, together, carry the responsibilities of delivering quality business value in a timely manner.  I once had a previously known as Product Manger smile at me after class and thank me for making her job easier with greater purpose and clarity. I would be happy to take the credit, but I can’t.  It’s the philosophy of Agile, the framework of Scrum.  On the other hand, I once had a Project Manager exclaim in class that, ‘It’s my job to protect my team.  I need to take care of my team and make sure the project is completed!”.  Most of us would agree that we have heard ‘my team’ mind-set way too often from folks in a leadership role. This team ownership mentality not tolerated well in an Agile world.   

I do believe there is a place for the Agile Manager.  I envision this person as one who knows, understands and lives by the 4 values and 12 principles of Agile.  A person who really gets that it is no longer about command and control.  It’s about dedicated teams doing the work and the Agile manager trusting those teams to do the work. The role of the manager shifts.  The Agile Manager moves from evaluating teams to coaching teams; from controlling teams to trusting teams; from blaming teams to advocating for teams.  The Agile Manager now has more time to focus on areas outside of the team such as organizational culture and environment.  As one of CLT’s clients put it “Agile freed me to be the strategic leader I thought this organization has always wanted me to be – I’m not burdened by the details anymore.”

If you have a true and authentic desire to help individuals and teams grow and be successful, you have a great start to being a manager in the brave new Agile world.

If you would like to learn more about Agile and Scrum, join us for one of our upcoming courses: 

https://www.collaborativeleadershipteam.com/upcoming-courses/

ScrumMaster Certification: Answering Crucial Questions – Isn't a ScrumMaster just a Project Manager by Another Name?

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In prior posts in this series, we have examined a number of crucial questions regarding the Scrum Framework and the role that a ScrumMaster plays in addressing them.  We conclude this series with an overview of how the role of ScrumMaster differs from that of a traditional Project Manager.

Before highlighting these differences and answering the question,”Isn’t a ScrumMaster just a Project Manager by Another Name?”, it is important to note that Project Managers have value.  Most are good and decent people who are trying to add value wherever they can in the pursuit of a project objective.  With that said, the goals of a project manager differ remarkably from those of a ScrumMaster.

A project manager is charged with ensuring the project goal is achieved within the scope, schedule, cost and quality parameters set by the project sponsor or project steering committee.  While they may discuss customer value or the team in pursuit of this goal, both of these topics are secondary to it.  The team is often seen as a means to end, a method of accomplishing the project.

In contrast, a ScrumMaster views the team as a source of creative, innovative energy that, when set loose in a self-organizing environment and served by an educated Product Owner and ScrumMaster, can achieve amazing results.  While this may sound a little new age, it is a crucial distinction between the two roles.  While a Project Manager is concerned with plans, controlling change and reporting the status of the effort to the various project stakeholders, the ScrumMaster trusts the Team and the Product Owner to work through the framework to address planning, changes and the reporting of status to stakeholders.  While these items look different in Scrum, they achieve the same objective: freeing the ScrumMaster to focus on things like Team dynamics, event facilitation, and impediment removal.

A ScrumMaster is also concerned with the technical practices of the Team.  While items such as the Team’s automation approach to continuous product integration are of minimal interest to most Project Managers, they fall clearly within the purview of the ScrumMaster.  A ScrumMaster is a strong advocate for the Team adopting these practices and is continually educating the Team on their benefits and pushing them to continually search for, and stretch, the technical excellence of their product.  Project managers might inquire as to whether the project team is controlling their source code or is regularly testing the application, but rarely will a traditional project manager push beyond this cursory inquiry.

In short, a Project Manager exists to serve the project stakeholders by providing them with an idea of the project’s progress through indirect means – how much money has been spent, how time has expired in a flawed plan, etc.  A ScrumMaster instead does anything that will help the Team be a better version of itself, to, in the words of Jeff McKenna, the coach of the first Scrum Team ever, “help the Team be awesome”.

Click here to view our upcoming classes and register for our next CSM or CSPO course.

Author: Collaborative Leadership Team. Learn more about our coaches and offerings here. 

ScrumMaster Certification: Answering Crucial Questions – What's a Product?

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In the first part of this four-part series, we addressed the broad question of, “Why Get Scrum Certified?”  However, there are benefits to obtaining your CertifiedScrum Master (CSM) certification beyond just learning the rules of the game.  It also allows you to answer crucial questions using the Scrum Framework.

One of these questions is “What is a product and how does it differ from a project?”  Projects, as defined within the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) by the Project Management Institute (PMI) are temporary in nature.  People are given an objective, a start and end date and, once the objective is achieved, the team is disbanded and the project is considered “complete”.  While this general definition works at some level, it leaves open the issue of who is responsible for the product created by the project once that project is complete.  Anyone who works in developing software understands the inevitable struggle that occurs in attempting to hand-off the product from the development team to a support organization.  Even if the development team is earnest in planning and executing this transition, this approach of handing off work from one team to another is risky and creates the opportunity for lower quality and decreased customer service.

The Scrum Framework addresses this risk by advocating product-focused thinking and product-focused teams.  These teams focus on the entire product.  This singular focus eliminates the hand-off described above.  Moreover, it connects the development team to the end product and to the customer.  If the team produces a poor quality product, they will be the ones that need to deal with the consequences of that poor quality, not another team who had a limited role at best in the development of the product.

A ScrumMaster has a unique role in helping organizations adopting the Framework.  While the ScrumMaster serves the Team itself, he or she has a broader responsibility to advocate for change in organization as a whole.   With this goal in mind, a ScrumMaster can take the following actions to help the organization transition from a project-focused to a product-focused organization:

• Ask Organizations to be honest about their current state – A ScrumMaster will help reveal the organization to itself. While this statement sounds deeply philosophical, what it is really driving at is the ScrumMaster patiently, respectfully, and courageously asking open-ended questions at all organizational levels in an effort to get the organization to be honest about how a project-based model is working for them.  What do our customers say about our releases?  What do our support call patterns look like?  What is our turnover rate in our Support Center?  Each of these questions will help drive the honesty that a ScrumMaster seeks from an organization looking to transition to a product-based model.
   
• Educate Teams and Executives on the Stages of Team Growth – A ScrumMaster can teach the organization how all teams progress from forming to storming, norming, and finally performing (see Tuckman model). By teaching this progression, ScrumMasters can help the organizations they serve understand that by breaking up a team at the end of each project they are setting any new teams that re-form back to the “forming” stage of team development.
   
• Facilitate Prioritization of the Product Portfolio – As a neutral coach to the organization, a ScrumMaster can help the organization prioritize the product portfolios that often grow rather large in project-based organizations. While it is up to leadership and the owners of the individual products to determine how the organization will prioritize its product investments, the ScrumMaster, based on his or her neutrality, can facilitate these important discussions.

In our next post, we will address another crucial question related to the ScrumMaster role – “what is a self-organizing team and how does a ScrumMaster help one?” If you are interested in learning more and becoming a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), check out our team offerings here.

Author: Collaborative Leadership Team. Learn more about our coaches and offerings here.