ScrumMaster as Facilitators: More than Standing at the Front of the Room
One of the most common questions we at Collaborative Leadership Team (a Certified Agile Consultancy) receive when coaching clients on Scrum is, “How can I best facilitate a Team during one of the Scrum Ceremonies?” While this question is being raised in a Scrum context, the ideas outlined in this blog are really applicable to any successfully facilitating any meeting.
One of the most common questions we, Collaborative Leadership Team, receive when coaching clients on Scrum is, “How can I best facilitate a Team during one of the Scrum Events?” While this question is being raised in a Scrum context, the ideas outlined in this blog are really applicable to successfully facilitating any meeting.
Do Your Homework: The first step in facilitating any successful Scrum ceremony is to prepare the session that you are about to facilitate. For example, if you are preparing to facilitate a Sprint Planning session, check-in with the Product Owner and ensure that he or she has updated the Product Backlog. This includes ordering items as appropriate and defining what “Done” is for Product Backlog Items that will be brought into the Sprint. Important Note: this doesn’t mean that you, as a ScrumMaster, need to do the work. It means that you need to coach the Product Owner to complete the work that the Scrum Framework requires of him or her.
As part of preparing for the ceremony, you might want to create a “Facilitator’s Agenda”. This agenda shows how you will be facilitating the ceremony, which activities you will use to help the Team achieve the goal of the ceremony, as well as the timing of each one.
Gain Consent on the Goal: Once the session begins, it’s important to not only set a goal but to also ask for consent from the participants immediately. While this recommendation may seem trite, Teams, particularly early in their adoption, can forget the goal of each event. As the ScrumMaster you are not only the facilitator, but the internal coach. You can engage the Team by reminding them of the goal, offering them an overview of the activities that you have planned to help them achieve that goal, and ask them what ground rules they would like you to enforce as the facilitator of the event.
Notice that you are offering the Team possible activities and that you are asking them which ground rules they would like you to enforce. The Team retains the right to accept or reject the activities that you are proposing as well as the right to articulate the ground rules that they would like to operate under. This freedom means that as a facilitator, you need to prepare multiple tools and have them ready in case the Team that you serve rejects your first offering.
Guide the Product Owner, Team and any other Participants: Once agreement has been reached on ground rules for the particular event, work begins on the first activity. Your job as a facilitator shifts to guiding. Ensure the following:
Is everyone participating? – If more extroverted participants are dominating the session, don’t be afraid to interrupt and engage the more introverted members. Sometimes changing your physical position in the room – walking around and moving closer to or farther away from anyone can either decrease or increase someone’s contribution.
Is everyone working towards its goal? – Sometimes participants will be actively discussing a topic that is related to the goal of the session, but is not necessary to achieve it. As a facilitator, you need to gently guide the discussion back toward its goal. Asking open-ended questions, summarizing points made and using them to tie back to the goal of the session are techniques that you can use to help re-center participants on the goal of the session if things gets off track.
Closing the Session: As the event concludes, your role as a Facilitator shifts to ensuring that everyone understands the outcome that has been reached as well as any related follow-up/action items. Closing the session allows everyone to review what has been achieved, gain clarity on next steps as well as who owns the completion of those next steps.
Taking each of these actions described in this post will improve your facilitation skills and help your Team continue to evolve, delivering working product that people want to use.
Want to learn more?
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 Self-Organizing Team?
In the first two parts of this four-part series, we addressed the broad question of “Why Get Certified?” and how a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) can help an organization transition from a project-based to a product-based organization. In this post, we examine a unique aspect of the Scrum Framework – a self-organizing team and the role that a ScrumMaster can play in helping the Team become self-organizing.
In the first two parts of this four-part series, we addressed the broad question of “Why Get Certified?” and how a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) can help an organization transition from a project-based to a product-based organization. In this post, we examine a unique aspect of the Scrum Framework – a self-organizing team and the role that a ScrumMaster can play in helping the team become self-organizing.
Before outlining the ScrumMaster’s responsibilities in this regard, it’s important to establish what “self-organization” means or more importantly what it does not mean. Self-organization is providing the team with a goal to achieve, constraints to which they must adhere and then getting out of their way as they determine the best way to achieve this goal. Note that this definition does not state the team gets to decide the goal, change the goal or generally decide on a day-to-day basis what work it would like to do or not do. A team that follows this approach is practicing Scrum or any other Framework, it is engaging in a method known as “Chaos”.
This is the first responsibility that a ScrumMaster has in regards to self-organization – teach its definition and highlight to both the team and the organization’s broader leadership the implication of this definition.
Beyond teaching this definition, the ScrumMaster must also encourage the team to practice self-organization. This means not letting the team wait for direction from management before taking action. Whether it’s something as simple as gaining access to a server or something as complicated as identifying the source of an intermittent defect, the onus needs to be on the team to take action. In organizations with a high-degree of “command and control” leadership, a ScrumMaster’s needs to be both persistent and patient with the team. Part of this patience involves the ScrumMaster advocating for action, but not taking that action on the team’s behalf. If the ScrumMaster becomes impatient and acts on the team’s behalf, they have simply replaced management in their former role and the next time the team needs to take action they will wait for the ScrumMaster to act.
Of course, the ScrumMaster also has to protect the team while it learns what it means to be self-organizing. Often times, management will understand the definition of self-organization and will give the team the opportunity to self-organize only to quickly become impatient and fall back to a “command and control” mentality when the team struggles to put the principle into action. A ScrumMaster in this situation needs to coach management regarding the time it takes for a team to adopt a new way of working and preach patience as the team works through this timeline.
In our next post, we will address another crucial question related to the ScrumMaster role – “Isn’t a ScrumMaster just a project manager by another name?” If you are interested in learning more and becoming a Certified Scrum Master (CSM)., 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?
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.
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.
Accountability Layers
In the ocean (as marine biologist and Tom Clancy fans well know) there is a point where warm surface water and cold water from below meet. It’s called the Thermocline layer. It’s where the heat from the sun can’t sufficiently heat the water relative to the cooling currents from below.
Do you know where your accountability layer is?
In the ocean (as marine biologist and Tom Clancy fans well know) there is a point where warm surface water and cold water from below meet. It’s called the Thermocline layer. It’s where the heat from the sun can’t sufficiently heat the water relative to the cooling currents from below.
How does this relate to Agile or Scrum? In a couple of ways, but the one we will focus on in this post is, “Where is your Accountability Layer”?
I’m talking about the level in an organization actually tasked with TCB (Taking Care of Business). In a waterfall project this are usually Project Managers, Resource Managers, Team Leads, etc. These roles use words like “driving” and “managing” staff. Accountability for the success or failure rests here. Sure the QA team missed a bunch of bugs but those were just missed requirements, right? If only we’d have just planned more time to get the right answers first.
Agile approaches, such as Scrum, push this layer down to the team level. The TEAM is accountable for their work. The TEAM plans and executes. The TEAM decides the best way (within the boundaries set by the organization) to achieve the goal and deliver the value.
We still need the folks at the old layer level because the Team will need help, guidance, and organization changes that they can’t manage in addition to their new TCB focus. That assistance has to come from the folks that are best at providing it – the old layer.
I really feel this isn’t often addressed in current thinking about change. Moving this layer is a huge cultural shift in addition to the obvious, practical one. Most species in the ocean live above or below the Thermocline layer- and they don’t usually cross it willingly.
Want to learn more about cultural shifts with Agile and Scrum?
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.
Do Good Scrum – It's Time To Focus
I do not intend to inflict harm on any kittens. Quite the contrary! I love the furry little creatures so much that I want to protect them. And I love Scrum. I really love it when people do good scrum. It is a results oriented process that can deliver business results much more quickly than traditional methods. If used as directed.
A controversial statement I made in a Certified ScrumMaster class last year was, “every time you do bad Scrum a kitten will die.”
I do not intend to inflict harm on any kittens. Quite the contrary! I love the furry little creatures so much that I want to protect them. And I love Scrum. I really love it when people do good scrum. It is a results oriented process that can deliver business results faster than traditional methods. If used as directed.
But so many people attempting Scrum turn a blind eye to the culture change, dig their heels in and try to force their status quo onto Scrum. By definition Scrum is different. That is how it can deliver faster than other methods.
Jeff Sutherland is a smart guy. If he thought that there was a need for a “Sprint 0” that produced nothing but requirements, he would have included it in the framework. There is a reason that it does not exist – because by definition a Sprint should produce a working product increment. Not a document. Not a Product Backlog.
So why do people make things up that do not exist? If the organization is not ready to commit to the work, why waste the team’s time with activities that the Product Owner and ScrumMaster are capable of addressing? The team could be executing something that does deliver a potential shippable product increment or something of value to your customers.
Do people make up structures in Scrum that do not exist such as Sprint 0 because they do not understand that the Product Owner is empowered to frame up a Vision? A Roadmap? A Product Backlog? Why abdicate these activities to the team who is supposed to be developing the product?
So why bother with Scrum at all? If your current process is making your customers happy, don’t change a thing. But if you want to try something different, why not respect the process as it was intended to be adopted and not make things up.
Come and learn from the Collaborative Leadership Team as we get back to doing good Scrum at our upcoming Certified Scrum Training classes.
#dogoodscrum
Author: Collaborative Leadership Team. Learn more about our coaches and offerings here.