The ScrumMaster Files: Can't Lives on Won't Street
You juggle your laptop bag, morning coffee and bagel as you walk into the office. You are a Certified ScrumMaster at Jackson Industries, a privately-held company based in southern Minnesota. You have been with the Company for over eight years and have served a number of teams as a ScrumMaster since your group transitioned to Scrum three years ago.
You juggle your laptop bag, morning coffee and bagel as you walk into the office. You are a Certified ScrumMaster at Jackson Industries, a privately-held company based in southern Minnesota. You have been with the Company for over eight years and have served a number of teams as a ScrumMaster since your group transitioned to Scrum three years ago. You are seen as a high-performer having helped a number of Teams improve their performance.
You enter the team’s space and find the mood tense and see sour looks on everyone’s faces.
“Good morning! Did something happen? You guys look like someone who lost their front teeth and someone told you there is no Tooth Fairy.”
“It’s this darned P.C.I. compliance stuff that’s slowing us down, “offers Tom. “We know the Payment Card Industry has these security requirements and we always follow them. It’s just taking so much time to jump through all of these paperwork hoops. We’re not getting the actual product done and we could be if we could focus on that.”
“Well, who is asking for this paperwork?” you ask.
“Bob from Corporate Compliance needs it all filled out, “says Sherri. “We have all of these items in our Definition of Done. We even have acceptance tests that have passed for these criteria. Typing these documents seems like pure waste.”
“Sounds like we need to invite Bob over for a conversation,” you say.
“We can’t do that,” says Tom. “Everyone knows that it’s not an option to skip P.C.I. compliance. And only managers get to talk to them.”
“Can’t lives on won’t street,” is your reply. “Is it that we can’t talk to Bob? Or that we won’t? I for one will. Bob probably has a process that worked with the way this company used to do work. He may not even know that we are using the Scrum framework to guide the way we do work now.”
You head over to your desk and pull up Bob’s calendar for the day and find an open spot. You invite Bob to come to the team area for a meeting later that day and follow up by calling him to explain what the team would like to discuss with him.
Bob arrives that afternoon for the discussion. As Bob steps through the P.C.I. checklist, the team is able to address every item on it by pulling up information in VersionOne, the tool they use to manage their work that reflects many of the sticky notes from their Information Radiator.
“Can I get access to some of the reports and queries these folks have shown me here today?” Bob asks.
“Of course you can,” you reply.
“You folks are certainly meeting everything we need, and giving me fewer forms to have to look through! And I always like it when someone makes my job easier, “says Bob. “And it seems like you have a lot more fun doing it too!”
“Thanks, Bob. I’m holding a Scrum workshop for some other people in the company this Friday over lunch,“ you mention. “If you can join us, please bring your lunch to the training room and learn how you could possibly even use this framework in Corporate Compliance for the work that you’re doing.”
“Thanks! I think I will,” says Bob.
How would you have responded in this situation?
What if the ScrumMaster had not embraced the Scrum value of Courage and talked to Bob?
Is there anything you are willing to do differently in your current work situation as a result of learning what this ScrumMaster did in this one?
Ready to start your Scrum journey? Click here for information and to register for the next Certified Scrum Master course.
Are You Resistant to Change?
Are you resistant to change? One of the reasons people attend Collaborative Leadership Team’s courses is to learn a different way of working. Many, however, spend the duration of the course trying to figure out how to make Agile and Scrum into exactly what they are doing currently. Angela Johnson, Certified Scrum Trainer and Agile Coach shares information she recently learned about why change is so hard.
Are you resistant to change? One of the reasons people attend Collaborative Leadership Team’s courses is to learn a different way of working. Many, however, spend the duration of the course trying to figure out how to make Agile and Scrum into exactly what they are doing currently. Angela Johnson, Certified Scrum Trainer and Agile Coach shares information she recently learned about why change is so hard.
As someone who has transformed the way that they do work with Agile and Scrum, I seek to help others learn how Agile approaches are different from other ways of doing work. The levels of resistance that I notice do not seem to be dwindling, but rather increasing! Even in coaching situations where clients have not only actively engaged our team to help them change, but have given us permission to identify when they are not changing, heels dig in and defenses increase when people are held accountable to working another way.
The song that inevitably plays in my head is the Gear Daddies “Gonna Change”. As the lyrics note, “I’m gonna change, just not today”. I’ve always been a big believer in the fact that you cannot change free will. If someone just is unwilling to try something different, there will be little success in asking them to.
I recently read an article by Kathy Caprino that suggests, maybe we’re just going about it all wrong – click here for article.
One thing that Kathy points out is that we tend to inundate people with information. As if they would simply change if they knew all of the data. Trouble is that this simple act does not translate into behavior.
Kathy goes on to share the Personal Motivation & Abilities, Social Motivation & Abilities plus Structural Motivation & Abilities that will enable change. When I think about the people attending our Certified ScrumMaster classeswho want to learn how to be great Scrum Masters, I do think they have the best intentions to take what they learned back to their organizations and apply it.
Where I think things fall short, however, is in the Social and Structural aspects. If the ScrumMaster does not have Social support for the new ideas partnered with any Structural Motivation or Ability in the organization, it’s unlikely that the new way of working will spread further than individual levels.
This is one of the reasons the Collaborative Leadership Team remains dedicated to coaching those clients who are willing to examine the way that they are currently doing work. Agile and Scrum are all about delivering business value faster and delighting customers. When we are not in the classroom, we are helping our clients out: assessing, mentoring and coaching.
Want to learn more about our Assessment or Coaching services? Click here to learn more how your organization can benefit.
Don't Scrum Undone with Rick Waters
I had a great conversation with Rick Waters on the subject of modifications to Scrum that make us cringe. Sprint 0 and Story Authors topped the list.
I had a great conversation with Rick Waters on the subject of modifications to Scrum that make us cringe. Sprint 0 and Story Authors topped the list.
To the man in the corner office: Are you providing business value?
I was walking to my clients’ office in downtown Minneapolis, when I spotted the man in the corner office. He looked smug in his three piece suit, staring down at us civilians on the street. The man in the corner office was literally on ‘top of the world’. Okay, maybe not the world, but the top of Minneapolis.
I was walking to my clients’ office in downtown Minneapolis, when I spotted the man in the corner office. He looked smug in his three piece suit, staring down at us civilians on the street. The man in the corner office was literally on ‘top of the world’. Okay, maybe not the world, but the top of Minneapolis.
Then I started thinking about him and the image he represented. Was he really that successful? Was he any better than the 20-something in jeans working next to me at Starbucks? Probably not, at least Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t think so.
When I graduated college I thought I would be an instant success. Then the company I worked for made me feel exactly the opposite. As the newbie, I was given a shorter lunch time, a further parking spot, the oldest, slowest computer, and the ultimate rite of passage—getting to wear a dirty, sweaty ice cream cone costume in front of my colleagues. They might as well have tattooed my head to read, ‘Lowest person on the totem pole’.
As society has evolved, so has the definition of success (thank God)! No longer can people hide behind status symbols—they actually need to provide value to their clients or their competition will.
When I first learned about Scrum, I realized that it’s more than a methodology—it’s a philosophy for how our society is evolving the world of work. The value of transparency and delivery of quality, working products naturally rewards teamwork, not individuals who use power, longevity, physical presence or a** kissing tactics to get ahead.
Here are a few ways that Scrum is transforming the world of work (for the better):
#1) Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer.
By focusing on customer satisfaction, we are able to remove obstacles (okay, people) that only care about self-promotion or stakeholder satisfaction. These selfish acts will soon be recognized if customer value cannot be met.
#2) Build projects around motivated individuals.
The power has shifted to the individuals that make up the team, and management now takes on a nurturing and supporting role, not a command and control one. Leaders must empower their team, not themselves.
#3) Face-to-Face Conversations
It’s time to break down the corner office walls and come out and talk to your team. Engage with them. Remove obstacles that stand in their way. Let them know you will do whatever it takes to deliver value to your customers. Hang up your designer suit and hang with the gang. They deserve a leader, not a status symbol.
Click here view all of CLTs upcoming courses to learn how you can provide business value to your customer.
Are you transforming the world of work or confusing it?
With 700+ attending, many great ideas and success stories were shared. Some same old Scrum and Agile dysfunctions were also shared. Angela Johnson, Certified Scrum Trainer was concerned by the number of people calling themselves trainers and coaches who continue to perpetuate “bad Scrum” using constructs that do not exist in the framework.
Are you transforming the world of work or confusing it? At a recent event, Scrum enthusiasts from around the world met to share ideas to achieve the Scrum Alliance vision of “Transforming the World of Work”.
With 700+ attending, many great ideas and success stories were shared. Some same old Scrum and Agile dysfunctions were also shared. Angela Johnson, Certified Scrum Trainer was concerned by the number of people calling themselves trainers and coaches who continue to perpetuate “bad Scrum” using constructs that do not exist in the framework.
Scrum is simple…but it is not easy. This is because it means changing the way we do work. And change is hard. Old habits die hard and it’s a Coaches job to remind people why they wanted to change in the first place.
Many cite “speed to market” as the reason they want to adopt Agile or Scrum. The sad reality for these organizations is they are not delivery anything of value faster than the old way of working because they truly have not transformed the way work is done. In many cases, they are practicing traditional System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or Waterfall approaches but have now placed Agile or Scrum vocabulary on top of this. Then they say things like “Agile does not work” or “Scrum does not work” when they are behaving pretty far from anything “Agile-like” or “Scrum-like”.
The top 2 “trainer” and “coach” abuses recently experienced include:
- Perpetuating the Myth of Sprint 0
- Enabling Process over People through User Story Abuse
Dysfunction #1: Sprint 0. The Scrum Guide (scrumguides.org) defines a Sprint as: the heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a “Done”, useable, and potentially releasable product increment is created.
When I ask trainers, coaches, clients, team members, etc. who have fallen into the Sprint 0 trap what their “so called Sprint 0” produces, answers range from design documents to architecture plans to requirements, etc. No value has been created. The reality is, that in these situations, work was performed in the same, old way. The Product Owner in these situations, has largely not done their job. Work is approached from “the system’s” point of view and not from the User’s perspective. As one of Collaborative Leadership Team’s customers who did transform the way they do work so eloquently puts it “They must call it Sprint 0 because it delivers ZERO value”!
Solution: Start thinking in vertical slices – not horizontal ones. Think from the customer or users point of view – as every single Agile approach requires. What can be simply delivered to realize the customer need? We can evolve the product based on feedback from there. Any technical needs are just tasks – work we have to do within the Sprint (timebox) to deliver this value.
Dysfunction #2: User Story Abuse. The Agile Manifesto (agilemanifesto.org) asks us to value “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools”. This means that we have traditional discouraged interaction by passing off documents to one another and assuming that all is understood, or agreed to. The people who created Scrum, and subsequently Agile, wanted us to try something different. That means NOT starting with a document. But rather, starting with a conversation. Scrum has us put a placeholder for the conversation, or the outcome of conversations held on an ordered list called a Product Backlog. Let’s have the real human user just tell us a story. Tell us who they are, what they want, why they want it. A “cheat sheet” was created in eXtreme Programming, one of the Agile approaches, to get that conversation started. Sadly, many are simply falling back into old habits of negating or replacing the conversation with a document. Only now they have started the document with the User Story template of who, what and why. The people who have to build the product are left with just as many questions as they had in the waterfall world because they have not been a part of the conversation. Some intermediary has been asked to create this “user story document” rather than the real user telling their own story – which is what was intended. In one case, there are people who are operating as traditional business analysts but the organization is referring to them as story authors. What?! They aren’t delivering value any faster than they were before they decided to “go Agile” and they are confusing people with a role not defined in any of the Agile approaches.
Solution: Step away from the keyboard. Engage with the real customer. The real user. Watch them do the job or perform the work. Ask questions. Have great conversations. Ask them what “done” looks like to them. Write down the results of the conversation as necessary but don’t start with the document. Start by talking to each other.
The solution: start thinking in vertical slices – not horizontal ones. Think from the customer or users point of view – as every single Agile approach requires. What can be simply be delivered to realize the customer need? We can evolve the product based on feedback from there. Any technical needs are just tasks – work we have to do within the Sprint (timebox) to deliver this value.
Want to learn how to Transform the World of World and stop Confusing It? Join us for our next Certified ScrumMaster course by checking out our upcoming courses.