January 13th, 2012
As a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) I do a lot of work with ScrumMasters in organisations who are looking to find new ways to engage their teams and move their Scrum implementations forward past the basic Scrum framework. When Coaching ScrumMasters I recommend they try to become more ADAPTIVE. As you might have guessed from the fact that the word is capitalised, it is an acronym for a number of behaviours. Following on from my blog post about ScrumMasters getting RE-TRAINED, an ADAPTIVE ScrumMaster:
- Helps the team to hold themselves ACCOUNTABLE
- Leads the team to DIVERGE before they converge
- Helps the team take ACTION to improve
- Asks POWERFUL questions to make them think about the root cause of their challenge
- Encourages the team to TRY something new
- Ensures everyone is INVOLVED as much as possible
- Makes data VISIBLE to help the team investigate and the organisation improve
- Names the ELEPHANT in the room
A good Scrum team is mature enough to explore many options before making commitments to each other and then hold themselves accountable as to whether they achieve them or not. If they don't manage to achieve their commitments (or even if they do!) they will treat that as a learning opportunity and find ways to improve, feeling comfortable enough to experiment with new ideas or theories.
Self-organisation is a very new concept to many teams and so the help of an attentive ScrumMaster is incredibly important to facilitate this new way of working and, of course, an investment of time for them to grow. ScrumMasters often need to develop their enabling and people-facilitation skills and this is something that comes with time and practice but can be helped along tremendously by learning from existing techniques. I am lucky enough to have been exposed to multiple teams in varied industries across multiple countries over the last 10 years. Along the way I have picked up, and created, many techniques that have been helpful to teams working with Scrum.
If you would like to learn more about these areas and, in particular, learn some specific tools, techniques and games related to them, then perhaps you might consider attending my Advanced ScrumMaster class.
One of the things I focus on in my Advanced ScrumMaster class is providing tools, techniques and games to help ScrumMasters be more ADAPTIVE. It's good fun, practical and hands-on with techniques you can take away and use with your teams straight away. You don't need to BE "advanced" to attend and you don't even have to be a ScrumMaster (Product Owners have found this class equally valuable) so don't worry about that! If you are part of a Scrum team, or even just work with a Scrum team and are keen to find new, fun and interesting ways to help them improve then pop along.
Category:
Games
/ Scrum
/ scrum master
Tags:
Accountability / Adaptive / Advanced / Agile Adoption / Asm / Divergence / Elephant / Experimentation / Involvement / Scrum / Scrummaster / Training / Visibility
December 5th, 2011
I think one of the most glossed-over parts of Scrum in teams is the concept of a Sprint goal. My main concern with this is not that people aren't doing Scrum properly but that they are missing out on something that could give their teams, projects and products a massive boost.
"After the Development Team forecasts the Product Backlog items it will deliver in the Sprint, the Scrum Team crafts a Sprint Goal. The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the Sprint through the implementation of the Product Backlog, and it provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment"
- The Scrum Guide, Schwaber & Sutherland
Most Scrum teams, in my experience, take as much of the highest priority Product Backlog ... read more
Category:
Scrum
Tags:
Cancelled Sprints / Focus / Motivation / Roi / Sprint Goals / Synergy / Themes
November 20th, 2011
I'm pretty bad at twitter. I am terrible at getting my thoughts across as intended in 144 characters and the more I try sometimes the worse it gets. So I am writing this as a response to the twitter debate that ensued after Jim Coplien's latest post. My first view upon reading this was that, considering Jim's normally controversy-inviting style, it was well-written and aligned with a number of things I have been thinking about recently. However, it left me incredibly conflicted primarily because I want to be someone who is being positive and constructive to everything that is trying to help make organisations more successful through agility. This is why Jean Tabakas "Community of Thinkers" post resonated with me. I do feel an urgent need to... read more
Category:
Agile
/ Scrum
Tags:
Agile / Community / Conflict / Kanban / Scrum / Timeboxing
November 8th, 2011
So here's the situation; the leaves are turning beautiful shades of red, purple, brown and orange, you can hear them crunching under your feet as you take a walk. Yeah...Autumn is my LEAST favourite time of year! I HATE clearing up leaves! When I bought this house, the fact that it had a fair-sized garden was not a plus point for me, and the fact that it was surrounded by huge trees was a very definite negative for this very reason.
Anyway, the gutters were full and causing leaks outside the front door so the alert had been triggered. I needed to get my butt in gear and clear them up. I was also looking after my 5 year old son as my wife was taking my daughter to her dancing practice. Could I actually get anything done w... read more
Tags:
Autumn / Backlog / Experimentation / Motivation / Multi-task / Non-software / Planning / Prioritisation / Quality / Slack / Technical Debt / Tools / Vertical Slices
September 12th, 2011
Overview
The Sonics were a team about half way through their first sprint and having their first experiences with Scrum. At the same time this was their first project together as a team and, as such, were just getting used to each other and establishing a working rhythm. The ScrumMaster, Darryl, was also new to Scrum but was chosen to be the ScrumMaster because of his “people skills”. His history showed he had the ability to bring people together to work effectively as a team. Sprint planning went relatively well and everyone was relatively comfortable that what the team had committed to was achievable and the team seemed motivated by the project.
During the sprint Darryl noted that people were focussing on the tasks that they s... read more
Tags:
Daily Scrum / Retrospective / Scrummaster / Story / Team / Teamwork / The One With
August 18th, 2011
Gaining faith in emergence is a major part of agile: our designs, architectures, requirements and solutions emerge over the course of an agile project. Teams and teamwork also emerge over the course of time and this is often one of the most scary parts of agile for the teams I work with.
Tamm & luyet also state in "Radical Collaboration" that 'faith in emergence' is one of the behaviours in collaborative teams. Collaboration in a team, as you are undoubtedly aware if you have seen it, is so much more powerful than just co-operation.
At the Scrum Gathering in Amsterdam last year, Simon Bennett introduced me to a game he plays that helps teams get used to the idea of emergence. This is how it goes:
1. Set up a row of 6 chairs (the actual ... read more
Tags:
Emergence / Game / Story
June 29th, 2011
Overview
Xander, the ScrumMaster for the Blockheads team, had just finished leading them through release planning of the highest priority section of Product Backlog for the OPAL project. The team was fairly new and had little concept of their velocity plus the project was fairly complex and, after 4 hours, the Blockheads came up with a plan of 6 sprints to complete this release.
Heleena, Xander’s manager, who had been observing this new practice of agile planning pulled Xander to one side.
“Six months? That’s ridiculous. We can’t afford to take six months to get this release out.” She said
“Well we do have the option of deploying any time after sprint three so we could call this two releases really”... read more
Category:
Scrum
/ scrum master
/ ScrumMaster Stories
Tags:
Planning / Product Owner / Release Planning / Scrummaster / The One With
May 24th, 2011
Overview
Karina, a RE-TRAINED project manager, had recently come back from her Certified ScrumMaster training which had been organised just before the STING project was due to commence. She was aware that Serena, her boss, was keen for this project to be agile but was very nervous about it as this was a big project for one of their major customers. Before she went on the training she had looked at the original budget for 3,500 man days of effort over the next 12 months and thought this would be a big risk for her first Scrum implementation.
Karina had a de-brief with Serena on her return to the office with the idea of setting up the necessary structure for Scrum on the STING project. She mentioned that Scrum teams are generally optimal when... read more
Category:
Scrum
/ ScrumMaster Stories
Tags:
Multiple Teams / Planning / Project Manager / Re-trained / Scaling / Scrummaster / The One With
April 27th, 2011
Overview
Half way through the Sprint the team are having their Daily Scrum. The team take it in turns to share with their colleagues what progress they have made and what they plan to work on today. There are a couple of impediments that get added to the Sprint Backlog and Ashley, the ScrumMaster promises to pick up – one with an external vendor who is not supplying the input file in the correct format, and another with Operations who still haven’t provided a correctly configured staging environment.
The team glance at the Sprint Burndown which shows they are roughly on track and the team are about to leave the Scrum room when Ashley asks a vital question:
“Are we actually OK here? I feel worried but you guys seem fine wit... read more
Category:
Scrum
/ scrum master
/ ScrumMaster Stories
Tags:
Backlog / Burndown / Impediments / Scrummaster / Team / The One With
April 19th, 2011
At Agile Games 2011 in Boston, Ramiro Millan and I, with others, collaborated on a new game to explore the fragility and necessity of trust in a team. This is a run-down of the game.
Overview
The "goal" is for teams to compete to blow up the largest balloon. The team with the largest (unburst) balloon wins
The person blowing up the balloon will be blindfolded and will have to be guided by their team-mates when to blow and when to stop
Set Up
(Self) Organise in to at least 2 teams of at 3-5 people
One person should wear the blindfold and everyone else in their team should stand very close around the blindfolded member
State the objective of the game - to blow a balloon bigger than your competition
Rules
The blower cannot open their eyes... read more
Category:
Agile
/ Games
Tags:
Game / Teamwork / Trust
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