When working with a new agile team or when a role like the Product Owner or the Scrum Master changes, I’ve found that it is prudent to visualize the specific team responsibilities. If the majority of the team has a basic understanding of the role of Product Owner and Scrum Master this method could be especially useful. Much more so than the alternative of teaching the group about generic guidelines and hoping they figure it out. (However, as a facilitator you should coach the group on which responsibilities could be ideal for thier role-based “standard” agile practices.) Another factor for Scrum centric organizations is that the Scrum Guide doesn’t have details about managers, so this is a good opportunity to codify that for your team(s).
I’ve used this method to help out dozens of teams, and it typically aids in sorting out if everyone is doing the right things, and allows for grey areas to be accounted for.
Team Roles Visualization Exercise Timebox: (30min for established teams, 60min for new teams) Purpose: Bring clarity and alignment for the roles on an agile team.
On a whiteboard draw out columns for the core roles for the team (PO, SM, Devs, Mgr, etc)
Have each individual in that role write in the various responsibilities, processes, and even meetings they feel they’re responsible for.
You now have an inventory of likely most of the things that comprise the teams rhythm of operation. As a facilitator/coach, write down any gaps you are seeing.
Now go through each column and make sure the group is aligned, or if certain things should be moved to a different person. Also, help ensure the gaps you may have written down are addressed.
Document the results with a picture or transcribe to a document that can be posted on your team portal.
It’s suggested to distribute the results to the entire team.
For brand new teams or for teams that do not have an agile background, this similar exercise may be another option to help nudge along this activity. Scrum Roles and Responsibilities Game
Today we will examine one element of the LeSS framework, and that is the “Overall Retrospective” model. In general, it is widely accepted that the LeSS framework is much more lightweight than SAFe. And as with any framework, you don’t necessarily need to adopt every element therein, but that doesn’t mean it hurts to examine components with a critical eye.
According to LeSS’s guide “The Overall Retrospective is a new meeting in LeSS. Its purpose is to discuss cross-team, organizational and systemic problems within the organization.” This is similar to a “scrum of scrums” but with a retrospective spin. So, can you and your organization find value by leveraging “Overall Retrospectives”? Let’s look a bit deeper and find out.
The Positives
Cross-team collaboration – it is very common for teams to only be able to take their growth so far until they hit cross team or organization-wide challenges. Encouraging and providing a model for cross-team retrospectives is a big win and something many companies could majorly benefit from.
Tools provided – the model outlined in the LeSS model tees up very nicely a model that is to the point and gets to the heart of issues. The article says “An important tool for Overall Retrospectives is to use Cause-Effect Diagrams. Having the participants pick an issue and explore the different causes together in front of a whiteboard can lead to big insights and real, useful changes.” These type of methods are great to make retrospectives less subjective and move towards identifying real for experimentation and continuous improvement.
The Pitfalls
PO role – One thing you could not like about this model is that it distinguishes the PO as a separate entity from the team. This may not be the intention, but when the PO is designated as a separate piece apart from the team, it can create a dynamic on a team of “us and them”. I’ve found it helps to message and position the PO as a “peer leader” of sorts that is an equal on the team. This means that POs should be a part of their team’s retrospective. Product Ownership is such a critical component of a successful agile team, that having that role only active in cross-team retros would be missing many opportunities for growth.
Managers & Retros – Not including managers in a retrospective typically is a signal of some kind of safety issue. Aside from this model, I’ve seen many teams hold two variations of their retro: one with management and one without. I think creating MORE meetings rather than addressing the behavior of a leader that doesn’t foster safety is counter-intuitive to the principles of LeSS. That being said, I am a fan of taking realistic steps forward so the dual phase retro can serve a purpose if the long-term goal is to groom leaders that can be present at a retro and have teams feel comfortable. I’ve also found that when treating managers as agile leaders it is important for them to attend retrospectives so they can take away action items to help support the team. If a manager spans multiple teams it could make sense for them to not be present at a team’s retrospective. I realize this may be counter to the popular belief in many agile circles, but take some time to consider if keeping managers in a silo away from the team is solving the right issue.
Summary
If your organization is struggling with cross-team collaboration “Overall Retrospectives” could prove to be a tremendous resource. As with any tool or process, you will want to carefully evaluate how to customize it for maximum benefit and minimal waste. LeSS is seeking to solve all the right problems with this process, but you may want to reconfigure the attendees at each level of retrospectives. Do you have experiences using this format or something similar? If so please do share in the comments!
No Sprint Planning meeting will be the same, but I have observed some very practical steps to help you power through your sprint planning and ensure the essentials are covered.
Some assumptions:
Iterations are 2 weeks in length. (adjust time boxes listed below if you do 1 week or 3-4 week sprints)
Teams have some level of cross-functionality
Product Owner is embedded in the team and in attendance
Sprint Planning Agenda:
(15-30 min) Recap of current sprint
What is done?
What is left and why?
(5-10 min) Prioritize any leftover items – The PO decides if left over stories should move to top of sprint backlog or sent back to the backlog. (Do not assume that because something was a high priority before that it for sure is a top priority again!)
(5 min) Close previous sprint in ALM tool (Jira, VersionOne, Rally, etc)
(15-30 min) Revisit estimates for carryover stories. (Look for TOTAL effort, not just remaining effort. This is key for establishing velocity)
(5-10 min) Evaluate capacity of the team (check for PTO, training, etc)
(90-130 min) Create the Sprint Backlog – Pull stories from the backlog to create the sprint backlog one story/task at a time.
Break each story/task down to sub-tasks
Estimate hours for each sub-task (optional)
Quickly Re-visit the estimates for the stories after tasks are created. Still seem good? (Your estimate was first created in backlog grooming, now you’ve gotten more specific and need to make sure it still is accurate)
Note: if the team is not yet highly cross-functional you will need to take a look and who these tasks might be assigned to. If you only have 1-2 people, a team with a specific skill set you do not want to create a situation where the rest of the team is blocked because they have too much work. If the team is cross-functional you do not need to assign anything to anyone other than the first task an individual will work on after sprint planning.
(10 min) Fist of Five – Ask the team about their confidence level for the upcoming sprint items. Specifically, this is trying to gauge if they feel their commitments are realistic, and there is nothing blocking them out of the gates. If there are outliers take the time to discuss and adjust sprint forecast as appropriate. Remember, you can always pull additional items from the backlog should the team finish all items in the sprint backlog.
5 fingers: I am 100% sure we will complete everything this sprint.
4 fingers: I think it’s probable we will complete everything this sprint.
3 fingers: There’s a 50/50 chance we will complete everything this sprint.
2 fingers: I think it’s unlikely we will complete everything this sprint.
1 finger: I am 100% sure we won’t get everything done this sprint.
(10 min) Create sprint theme/goals – This could be action items from Retro, or focus on collaboration, or some vision from the PO about a feature.
“Start with Scrum.” Have you ever heard someone say this? I’ve heard this statement multiple times over the years when folks are talking about agile transformation, and it rubbed me the wrong way. The problem is, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. In many ways, it makes sense right? Scrum can help someone wrap their mind around work decomposition, shorter feedback loops, retrospection, and being connected to the customer more through user personas. But why are so many teams struggling to find agility with scrum? I think I finally can explain why I think this approach isn’t the right thing to do if your end goal is agility.
Last year when I was presenting at the Global Scrum Gathering, we borrowed from Michael Sahota who said something to the tune of “If you adopt agile practices you could see a 20% benefit. If you adopt an agile mindset you could see 300% benefit!” So many people I meet that are interested in agile for their organization just want the benefits but without the mindset shifts needed to get there. I don’t fault them for that because when you look at the Agile Manifesto it reads out very well and sounds like positive things for most rational people. What is sorely missing is the “counting the cost”. If becoming agile as an organization was as simple as doing some training and doing the Scrum Events, there wouldn’t be agile coaches.
2 – Scrum is so 1990’s. (just like these awesome “hackers” in 1995)
Look…I love scrum. I really do! It’s something that opened up a doorway for me to be exposed to agile manifesto which has changed my life and career aspirations. But, while I was working on a blog post entitled “The History of Agile” it dawned on me that Scrum was a response to waterfall. And it was a tremendous leap in the right direction away from fixed cost/scope/timeline type projects. Then came along the agile manifesto which was a response to scrum and the various flavors of agility frameworks sprouting up. But we need to look ahead and allow the agile mindset to lead us into the great unknown. Ron Jeffries, one of the great original thought leaders in agile even said “I may have invented points. If I did, I’m sorry now.” The point is, we need to inspect and adapt as technology changes, culture changes, and people change.
Here’s another awesome 90s picture just because I found so many great ones to use for this article.
3 – Training wheels can create improper habits.
I was listening to a presentation by Joshua Kerievsky last week and he told a story about teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. He said that many people talk to him about how Scrum is like training wheels for their organization to adopt agile. He pointed out though that training wheels don’t actually teach you balance, they just teach you how to steer and peddle. He took his daughter to the park one day and had her learn how to ride a bike by keeping her feet of the peddles and just pushing herself and lifting her feet to learn the balance. She quickly got comfortable with keeping balanced which is typically the hardest part of learning how to ride a bike. And in no time she was ripping around on the bike! What’s the lesson here? You don’t always need training wheels to begin your journey towards agility.
In conclusion, starting with Scrum may not be the right strategy for your team(s). My personal guidance as an agile coach is to only start with Scrum if you envision something close to Scrum being your destination. And even in that is your situation, always start with trying to adopt an agile mindset before trying to implement a framework. By doing this, you are allowing your organization to tap into their creative potential, untethered to just one framework.
Backlog grooming is an activity many agile teams perform each sprint. This is the process of adding detail, estimates, and order of priority to items in the Backlog. This is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner and the Team collaborate on the details of Product Backlog items. During Product Backlog refinement, items are reviewed and revised. The Product owner is responsible for having stories ready for grooming, and the Scrum Master is responsible for making sure the stories are groomed before sprint planning (via backlog grooming).
What is Backlog Grooming?
Removing user stories that are no longer relevant or needed
Re-assessing the relative priority of stories based on emerging information
Applying estimates to stories which have yet to be estimated
Correcting estimates based on newly discovered information
Creating new user stories in response to newly discovered needs by the team, product owner, or customers
Splitting user stories which are high priority but too large to fit in an upcoming sprint
Grooming will allow for:
A better understanding of user stories
Identification of dependencies and potential gaps for stories
User Story estimation for upcoming and future sprints
Product Owner’s Role
The Product Owner’s role in backlog grooming should start before the actual meeting. The PO will need to make sure that the stories are already prioritized. This is vital to making sure the team’s time is used to groom the most important items first. The PO should also add acceptance criteria or user acceptance test cases to stories as appropriate, depending on how soon each story will be pulled into a sprint. Backlog grooming should not be done without the PO.
Scrum Master’s Role
For this project The Scrum Master will schedule the meeting and take care of any other logistics. The Scrum Master should also be in contact with the PO before the grooming session to make sure the stories are ready to be groomed. Backlog grooming can be done without the SM.
The Team’s Role
Having the team involved with grooming is imperative. While the PO has a great deal of the content identified up front, the team can help round out the technical aspects, dependencies, and other considerations. With the team’s help, the acceptance criteria can be modified and expounded upon. If the team has the ability to even briefly review the top upcoming items, its ideal.
What’s the potential impact of not having backlog grooming?
Your stories will not be prepared for sprint planning.
The connection of work items to big-picture vision will grow stale.
A dev may be looking or hearing about a story for the first time as they are having it assigned during sprint planning. This typically can increase ramp up time.
Grooming: Same audience as above and including all Dev members and the QA teams.
Just Getting Started?
For the initial 1-2 sprints it’s suggested that both Pre-Grooming and Grooming sessions take place. Cadence and details below:
Pre-Backlog Grooming
(Optional but highly recommended during early stages): A more focused group review to prepare stories for the full team grooming sessions. Goals:
Review story scope
Identify blockers and agree on an plan of action to unblock items
Ensure the stories contain the minimum needed information to the team to be able to discuss and estimate.
Pre-Requisite: Product Owner has reviewed stories for Pre-Grooming and they are ready for review.
Timebox: Try to have 30-60 min planned each sprint for pre-grooming .
Backlog Grooming
A collaborative discussion and elaboration of user story details and estimates. All stories on the agenda won’t always be estimated as some will require additional discussion / decisions. Goals:
Stories should be understood by all members of the team
Blockers should be closed or workable
Stories should be ready for sprint placement
Pre-Requisite: Product owner has reviewed stories for Grooming and they are ready for review.
Timebox: Try to have 1-2 hours planned each sprint for grooming. For teams that are new to this you may want to plan for 2 hours and finish early if you get through everything.
Back To Basics
After your backlog begins to take on a level of refinement, you may find that it’s no longer necessary to have two separate backlog grooming meetings. A great indicator for determining this would be to ask the following question: “Are all of the stories for the next two sprints containing enough detail that the entire team attend grooming without wasting time?”
Questions?
If you made it this far, you’ve consumed a lot of information. Feel free to comment with questions or some suggestions you might have.
The timeline above contains some key moments in the history of agile, and some other interesting events taking place at that same time for reference.
1970 – Waterfall Model was created (by Winston W Royce.) Interestingly enough some of the risks he called out have been realized and are much of the reason we saw agile come into existence.
“I believe in this concept, but the implementation described is risky”.
“The required design changes are likely to be so disruptive that the software requirements upon which the design is based and which provides the rationale for everything…. are violated. Either the requirements must be modified, or a substantial change in the design is required. In effect the development process has returned to the origin and one can expect up to a 100-percent overrun in schedule and/or costs.”
1970 – Also, Gas is 36 cents per gallon. Wut?!
1990 – Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber conceived the Scrum process in the early 90’s.
1991 – Also, the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind signified the start of the Grunge era that would dominate the music scene up to the mid-90’s.
1995 – Scrum is codified in 1995 in order to present it at a conference in Austin, Texas (US) and published the paper “SCRUM Software Development Process”.
Scrum was first tried and refined at Individual, Inc., Fidelity Investments, and IDX (now GE Medical). These weren’t simply startups with greenfield development efforts.
1995 – Also, OJ Simpson was found NOT GUILTY!
2001 – In February 2001, Jeff and Ken were amongst 17 software development leaders creating the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. – Their goal was to take all the good things they’ve learned and create a “charter” for others to use. By this time there had been many variations of agility that evolved. The manifesto was taking the best of the best and boiling it down to principles rather than a framework or methodology.
2001 – Also, Lord of the Rings comes out in Theaters
Key Takeaway: Agile is not a flash in the pan, and is something that has been evolving for 20+ years. I believe we are even starting to see Agile become more of the “norm” in Software development. Agile as a mindset opens up the door for so much more than just SW Development. What do you think will be the key points in time for agile 20 years from now?
Fear not agile warrior, you are not alone and help is on the way. They are many situations where someone just knows that agile could help or even change the face of the entire company if utilized…yet someone or many people within an organization are opposed to the idea. So what should you do? First off what are some reasons someone would be against agile?
The’ve been on a team where agile was used, and failed.
They don’t know enough about agile or have misconceptions.
They don’t believe agile is right for their organization/product.
They’ve worked with an Agile Coach/Scrum Master/Consultant that was not very good at their role. Yes, not everyone does their job well…even in the wonderful agile community.
They are from the past (I kid…I kid! That was an IT Crowd reference)
Now for the part you really came to this blog post for: What are ways I can help my organization adopt and/or support agile?
Start emphasizing agile principles in whatever work you are doing. As a consultant that works on a wide array of projects with a variety of methodologies, I’m often tested with how to apply principles on a personal level. Getting out of the theoretical and nitty gritty practical application is a great exercise towards see if/how agile could work at your organization. If this is something you feel is “out of your league” or you just don’t have the time to do, it’s OK. There’s other ways to makes strides towards becoming more agile.
Propose solutions to problems from an agile perspective but without using agile lingo. Some people are just turned off to agile terms and immediately roll their eyes when you say “backlog grooming” or “daily scrum”. But if you are able to problem solve using agile principles you could begin to win over even the harshest of critics.
Create a mini scrum board for tracking your own work. I heard a story of a person who was trying to advocate for their company to adopt agile, and started doing a scrum wall in a shared space. Pretty soon scrum boards were up all over the company. Some were labeled “Inspiration wall” or “Wall of vision”. Everyone from IT to Sales was using them. Baby steps can be better than no steps, right?
Contact consulting companies. See if they would be willing to share about agile within your organization. Some consulting companies will do this for free because it’s a great way for them to help your cause, as well as demonstrate their expertise in this area should you need their services down the road. Or see if they are willing to just share free resources with you.
Join user groups and contribute to the agile community. There have been times where my primary daily function was far from an agile focus, but I was able to stay energized by attending local groups or writing blog posts in my personal time. Also, sometimes effective reflection comes when you are looking in from the outside.
Find a new opportunity. (Please take this with a grain of salt as it’s just my opinion.) This for many reasons isn’t the first option anyone would like, but it may be the right solution. As the industry seems to be moving more and more towards adopting agile, it’s less likely that a company is just flat out rejecting agile. It could be that they proclaim to use agile but it’s very broken or dysfunctional. These kinds of situations can cause stress if you are a firm believer in the agile principles. But is the disappointment or stress consistently outweighing the rewards or satisfaction experienced? If yes, it may be time to look for new opportunities. Robbie Bach wrote a relevant article you may find useful called “Knowing When To Walk Away“
What about you? What advice would you have for someone in this scenario? I’d love to hear what other people have done or are doing.
Someone developed this handy website for online Planning Poker sessions. Their website says it best “Online, virtual and co-located agile teams use this application during their planning/pointing sessions to effectively communicate points for stories.”
It’s FREE! It’s hard to be overly critical of a free tool right?
You can set custom point values. this is useful if you want to simplify your backlog grooming discussions.
It’s fast to setup a session and requires no authentication. In my opinion you want to spend as little time focused on getting into the tool as possible. No credentials or software = a breeze.
Enables remote team members or distributed teams to work together.
The timer is super useful for keeping on track. Until you press “Clear Votes” the timer keeps going.
Cons:
The interface is a bit outdated.
If you are concerned about security, this may not be the tool for you. While it’s not required to put sensitive or specific information on the site, all one needs is a session ID to see the contents of a session.
You can make your name whatever you want when you join the session. Follow me on this one. Depending on your team’s sarcasam-o-meter you could see some interesting names join your session. 🙂 If you are trying to run a smooth session with multiple people it could be a little clunky until you figure out who’s who.
Conclusion:
I love the tool, and have yet to find anything that works as well as this. Well done!
This week I was talking with some fellow colleagues about starting a Lean Coffee for our organization. We have a national (soon to be international) footprint and a ton of knowledge out there, but how to bring it together? So I thought the lean coffee meetings would be a great way to bring people together to inspire, encourage, equip, and empower each other. It could also create a consistent venue where we can work together to solve challenges for our clients.
I had a few different people suggest using a tool called IdeaBoardz. I want to share this tool not only because think it will be great for Lean Coffee but it has value for things like brainstorming, story boarding, and retrospectives. Especially if you have co-located teams.
It’s simple to use and has just enough functionality to make it useful. And best of all…it’s Free!
You can take it for a test drive without having to sign in or create an account.
Please Note I am in no way affiliated with IdeaBoardz and receive no compensation for writing this article.
This is mostly meant to give you a chuckle, but there is some validity to it as well. In my last blog post I talked about how we need to challenge the limits of what we understand agile to be. Can you be agile and waterfall at the same time? Probably not if you look through the lenses of what we typically view as a waterfall process. But it’s possible.
One thing I’ve noticed as an agile coach is that people like to gravitate towards what they know and are more comfortable with. One way this can play out is when helping a team adopt agile, you can get a strong pull to keeping things in the box of a waterfall process. This happens both at the individual contributor level and management level. Management can sometimes want waterfall type metrics but without the changes needed to realize the true benefits of agile. It’s ok though. Be patient, and see if you can find a way to meet somewhere in the middle. Waterfall isn’t bad. In fact it has tremendous value in the right context. So, as an agile enthusiast make sure you aren’t always negative about waterfall especially when it could be used to your advantage. However, what you don’t want to do is fall into the trap of using the buzz words from agile/scrum but keeping things pretty much the same.
I’ve found it is helpful to ask people questions about why they want to do something a certain way. “What do you think will be the benefits of trying it this way?” “What are you hoping to accomplish by doing it this way vs. that way?” If you say things like “You are just stuck in old thinking.” or “That’s not agile.” you can build walls instead of creating bridges. If they are pushing for trying something, maybe just go with it for 1-2 sprints. Then evaluate the impact it is having. After all, I’ve always found that I am continually learning from the teams I work with, and surprise-surprise I DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING! 😉
The AgileSphere 