Archive for the ‘Scrum’ Category

• Upcoming Conferences

  Date: 2011.05.04 | Category: Agile, Conferences, Innovation Games, Presentations, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  Been really quiet these past months, but I wanted to share some upcoming places where you can see me in action.

  1. PMI San Diego Annual Conference – On May 13th, I will be giving a class on Estimating and Planning.  On May 14th, I will be giving a short tutorial on how to use Innovation Games to prioritize.
  2. San Francisco Agile Conference – my colleague and friend, Angeline Tan (@agilemeister), invited me to be a speaker at this conference she has been working very hard to organize.  On June 16th, I will be presenting Improve Flow Through Prioritization.

  You can still register for both the PMI San Diego Conference and San Francisco Agile Conference.

• SoCal Code Camp Fullerton

  Date: 2011.01.29 | Category: Conferences, Presentations, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Team | Response: 0

  It is time for Code Camp in Fullerton this weekend.  I will be speaking on Saturday on this two topics.

  • Scrum Roles in Action: in Scrum, there are three basic roles – Team member, Product Owner and ScrumMaster.  Each role is defined with some basic specific rights and responsibilities and filling in the rest of what one is supposed to do is left as an exercise for the participants.  In this workshop, we will review the rights and responsibilities for the Scrum three roles (plus stakeholders) and discuss what those roles look like when preformed well.
  • ScrumMaster Toolkit: are you just getting OK results with Scrum?  Has Scrum not delivered on the much anticipated quantum leads in productivity everyone had been promised?  One common source of lackluster performance comes from following routine behaviors and ordinary patterns of teamwork associated with the “old way of doing things”.  In this hands-on workshop, Carlton Nettleton will share powerful techniques from his coaching toolbox that breaks these old patterns, unlocks the potential of Teams and gets them moving toward high-performance.

• Scrum Bill of Rights

  Date: 2011.01.24 | Category: Extreme Programming, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Team | Response: 1

  One of the things I admired about Extreme Programming (XP) was the simplicity of the roles defined in the Green Book.  In XP, there are only two roles: Customer and Programmer.  When you are using XP, the Customer makes business decisions, Programmers make technical decisions and one role may not substitute their judgement for the other.  In short, Programmers do not make business decisions and Customers do not make technical decisions.  Kent Beck and Martin Fowler even went so far to add a Bill of Rights, which clarifies what people can expect for one another.

  Scrum does not have anything similar, so I decided to create my own (modeled on the XP rights).  Feel free to distribute and share.

  Every Team member has the following rights:

  • To produce quality work at all times.
  • To know what is needed from the business with clear declarations of priority.
  • To ask for, and receive, help from peers, management, and customers.
  • To experiment with new ideas, technologies and roles to grow both as a professional and an individual.

  Every Product Owner has the following rights:

  • To receive the greatest possible value out of every week.
  • To know what can be accomplished by the Team, when and at what cost.
  • To see incremental progress in a viable product proven to work by passing acceptance criteria they specify.
  • To be informed of schedule changes promptly in order to take effective countermeasures and reset expectations with the stakeholders.
  • To collaborate with the business on setting the future direction of the product.

  Every ScrumMaster has the following rights:

  • To try out different ideas, approaches and techniques to remove impediments which impede the flow of value.
  • To be given time for initiatives to take hold and produce change.
  • To take measured risks and learn from setbacks.
  • To be supported by senior leaders in the organization.
  • To be provided access to different parts of the business while identifying and removing impediments.

  Every Stakeholder has the following rights:

  • To receive regular status updates through interacting with a working product.
  • To change their mind, substitute functionality, and adjust priorities without paying exorbitant costs.
  • To cancel the product at any time and be left with a working product providing real business value reflecting the investment to date.

• Combining Scrum Roles

  Date: 2011.01.22 | Category: Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster | Response: 5

  This question started an interesting exchange on the Scrum Development list at yahoo!

  The Scrum Guide states that a person can be “Team Member” and “Scrum  Master”, a ”Team Member” and “Product Owner” but emphatically rules out  ”Scrum Master” and ”Product Owner” roles by one person.  I understand that all these “role combination” lead to one person being  split between two set of duties that are required to be performed. But  why does only the “SM & PO” combination find particular mention as  not acceptable.

  The way I teach the Scrum roles is that the Product Owner is responsible for the business outcomes and the ScrumMaster is responsible to ensure the process is implemented correctly and improves the flow of value.  These responsibilities require very different skill sets and it is rare that all are in one person or that one person wants to learn them all.  When the two are combined, one is responsible for doing the work of two people in an 8 hour day – which is then a violation of the Agile principle of sustainable pace.

  IMO, I often see people wanting to combine ScrumMaster with Product Owner or as a Team member, i.e. continue as a contributor.  As a friend of mine pointed out to me, this desire to combine the roles often speaks to hidden assumption\perception that there really is not enough stuff for a fulltime ScrumMaster.  Some people look at the framework and think: “ScrumMaster facilitates some meetings (check), updates Burndown chart (check) and does self-organization (check), not enough here to justify 100% allocation.”

  Oh how wrong!  Being a ScrumMaster is a full time job.  First, one has to help the Team become self-organizing.  That is a lot of work, requires close proximity to the Team and many hours of observation.  It is not something you can “phone in“.  Second, as ScrumMaster you are accountable to the stakeholders to improve the flow of value and help remove the organizational waste, i.e. impediments.  A lot of that effort is building relationships with different stakeholders and participating in efforts to remove organizational roadblocks (sometimes called kaizen).  You cannot be writing code, doing design or however you contributed in the past, if your responsible for identifying and removing impediments.

• Scrum Roles Defined

  Date: 2011.01.21 | Category: Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Team | Response: 3

  I do a lot of work with Scrum and the ones that struggle the most are the ones where the Scrum roles are poorly defined and\or not filled properly.  Scrum is a balanced framework and when the roles get muddled, the framework begins to adopt the dysfunctions of the organization and is not as powerful as it could be.

  In Scrum there are three roles – Team member, Product Owner and ScrumMaster.  Those three working together are called the Scrum Team (or just the Team).  I add a fourth role – Stakeholder – to recognize all the people who orbit a Scrum Team and influence them.  I define all these roles like this:

  1. Team: dedicated collection of self-organizing, interdependent, co-located individuals representing different functional roles with all the necessary skills to turn Product Backlog items into a potentially shippable increment within the Sprint.
  2. Product Owner: an empowered individual applying their personal and professional judgment to make decisions in the best interest of different,often times competing, business stakeholders to maximize the business value the Team produces each Sprint
  3. ScrumMaster: a dedicated individual responsible for improving the performance of the Team and the business by any means necessary.
  4. Stakeholder: any person who has a direct, or indirect, interest in the work of the Team.

  Keep in mind, these are role definition, not job descriptions and they are very loosely defined.  It is important that each role is filled.  In general, the Product Owner is concentrated on the providing valuable business outcomes to the business, while ScrumMaster is aiming his\her efforts at the execution of good Scrum and improving the flow of value to the customer.  Meanwhile, the Team remains centered on learning how to self-organize and deliver potentially shippable increments regularly.  Stakeholders provide feedback on the value of everyone’s efforts.

  When Scrum falters, it is often because people are not committing to their roles.  Other times, organizations chose to overload one, or more, roles in a single person, disrupting the balance of the roles.  Recall, the Scrum framework was designed to provide the maximum amount of flexibility with the minimum amount of control.  If these roles cannot be filled  with individuals who will fully inhabit them, or they are overload, the control mechanisms of Scrum become unhinged, visibility is diminished, accountability is lost and the framework loses its meaning.

  When Scrum is done well, there exists a natural tension between each role.  This tension exerts a force that tends to prevent the other roles from meddling in responsibilities that are not their own.  Since there are considerable gray areas on the role boundaries in Scrum, each role will eventually bump into one another as they discover what are the boundaries of their responsibilities.  This friction is an essential part of learning how to do Scrum and making it meaningful to your business.  Through the of process of inspect-and-adapt, the precise definition of each role – Team member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster and stakeholder – emerges as your organization gains experience using Scrum.

  One of the main reasons why I add a Stakeholder role to Scrum is because many Scrum implementations improperly keep these people out of the process.  Scrum was not designed to keep the Stakeholders from interacting with the Team.  In fact, Scrum was designed to bring these folks closer together.  What Scrum tries to do is give the Stakeholders a more meaningful, structured way to interact and provide the Team with feedback via the Sprint Review.  This is the opportunity for the Team to hear direct, unvarnished feedback on what they really think.  This is why Stakeholders have a dashed line connecting themselves with the Team, rather than a solid line.

• Review of Scrum Training on Nov 10th

  Date: 2010.11.16 | Category: Scrum, Training | Response: 1

  Last week, I conducted a one-day Scrum training in Irvine with Conscires.  The class was completely sold out and a great deal of fun.  Catherine Augustin wrote up an awesome review of the class.  Don’t worry if you missed out on all the fun – we are holding another class in January.

• Reading a Release Burndown Chart

  Date: 2010.11.08 | Category: Agile, Communication, Planning, Product Owner, Scrum, ScrumMaster, Tools | Response: 1

  In Scrum, we use a lot of easy-to-understand tools to communicate status.  A very common tool is a burndown chart.  In this diagram, I am showing a sample Release Burndown chart for a Team with eight Sprints in their release and will talk about how this is commonly used on a Scrum Team.  At the start of the release, the Team estimated 130 units of work would be delivered in eight Sprints.  At the end of Sprint #1, they delivered twelve units of work (the green bar) and 118 units remained (the red bar).  As the release progressed, a little more of the Product Backlog was delivered by the Team in the next two Sprints.

  In Sprint #4, the scope of the release increased by thirteen units (the yellow bar) and the Team only completed three units of added functionality.  In the figure, one can see the velocity of the Team increased during Sprints #5 and #6, completing twenty and twenty-one units of work, respectively.

  At the end of Sprint #6, it was clear the scope of the release was too large for the Team to complete before the deadline.  The Team’s velocity of twenty-one units per Sprint and the concept of yesterday’s weather, indicated the Team would not burndown all the remaining work before the end of Sprint #8.  As a result of this data, twenty-five units of low business value Product Backlog items were dropped, or descoped, from the release by the Product Owner.  When Sprint #8 was completed, nine units of work remained, but it had marginal business value.

• Scrum Gathering Amsterdam – Nov 15th to Nov 17th

  Date: 2010.11.01 | Category: Conferences, Presentations, Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  If you are looking for me in November, you can find me in Amsterdam!  I will be attending the Scrum Gathering and will be leading two really interesting sessions.

  1. Powerful Questions: picking the right question or reframing an issue can introduce a profound shift in the conversation. In this hands-on workshop, we will discuss how to create your own powerful questions and practice this skill. Leave with a practical tool you can use with your Teams today.
  2. Removing Impediments with Drawings: pictures convey ideas more clearly and have a greater impact than a simple conversation. In this hands-on workshop based on Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin, we will learn the six types of diagrams used in business and how select the right picture for your problem. Come ready to draw diagrams that will create a shift in how you visualize your impediments and help remove them from your organization.

• Using a Sprint Burndown Chart

  Date: 2010.10.30 | Category: Scrum, Tools | Response: 0

  

  A Sprint Burndown chart is a simple tool used by the Team to provide a measurement on how close they are to meeting the Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint.  Burndown charts are common in Scrum and are simply the trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a release, or a product.  The source of raw data for a burndown is the Sprint Backlog, with work remaining tracked on the vertical axis and the time period (days of a Sprint) tracked on the horizontal axis.  The Sprint Backlog is just the collection of tasks which represent the Team’s current understanding of how they plan to achieve the Sprint Goal.

  Sprint Burndown charts are evolving and active artifacts on a Scrum Team.  When a Sprint Backlog item - a single task or deliverable defined and estimated by a Team member - moves from in progress to complete, it’s estimate is removed from the total estimated work remaining in the Sprint.  There is not a lot of value estimating how many hours are remaining – the work is either done or not.  However, as a Team further refines their understanding of what needs to be done, creating new Sprint Backlog and estimates are added to the total estimated work remaining.  It is important that the Sprint Backlog and Sprint Burndown chart stay in sync since the graph gives visibility on the Team’s understanding of the work.

  There are four common patterns in most Sprint Burndown charts.  The sample chart above, based on real Sprint data from a 2010 Scrum Team, displays all of these patterns.

  1. The Sprint Burndown goes flat, as seen on Days #4 and #5.
  2. The projected trend (or slope) has the Team completing the Sprint after the timebox expires, as shown between Days #6 and #7.
  3. New work is added late in the Sprint, as indicated on Day #6.
  4. A large delta between the actual progress of the Team and the predicted progress of the Team (as if they had burned down an equal amount of work each day), as seen between Days #5 to #9.

  In all these cases, these patterns provide an opportunity for the Team to discuss what is really going on and provide an explanation.  If the Team is confident they can still fulfill the Sprint Goal regardless of how the data is displayed in the Sprint Burndown chart, the Product Owner and the ScrumMaster should always respect the judgement of the Team.  Recall, the Team commits to delivering the Sprint Goal at the Sprint Review, not to deliver the Sprint Backlog items.

• Scrum Training – Nov 10th in Irvine, Orange County

  Date: 2010.10.28 | Category: Scrum, Training | Response: 0

  Bachan Anand and I will be partnering on Nov 10th to teach a one-day course on Scrum.  In this class we will teach the principles and practices that make Scrum effective at managing projects.  The following elements will be covered during the one day course:

  • Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
  • Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
  • Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
  • Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
  • Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
  • Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow

  Together we will use the principles of Scrum to organize and deliver the course material.  Learning outcomes will be driven by the needs of the participants through a combination of expert instruction and self-directed learning.  Opportunities to reflect-and-adapt on the direction of the class will be offered at regular intervals and adjustments will be made.  At the end of the training, the participants will have the confidence and understanding to begin to socialize Scrum at their own organization and support teams in improving their processes.

  The cost is only $275.  Please sign-up today!