At a recent cookout, my 4 year old son, Dawson, ran for the back yard and easily joined a game of hide and seek. Watching this unfold, I realized that these kids are naturally agile. They got straight to playing (the value) and didn’t need a lot of ceremony to get there. They kids all did a quick hello, told Dawson what game they were playing, and invited him to join in (daily scrum). Then they played.
He and his friends self-organize, self-manage, and solve problems on the fly. They naturally exhibit the agile values and scrum practices that many adults struggle with daily.
For example, most parents have been bombarded with an unending stream of “Why’s?” from their child. Why does this work? Why did that happen? Why? Why? Why? While this line of questioning can be stressing, it is also invaluable to finding the root cause of an issue. Scrum teams use this approach – called The 5-Why’s – to get past technical issues and down to interpersonal issues that could be hindering the team.
This session is a fun discussion about the behaviors I’ve noticed in my son and how they translate to important lessons that all scrum master need to learn to better serve their teams.
6. “Regardless of what we discover, we understand
and truly believe that everyone did the best job
they could, given what they knew at the time, their
skills and abilities, the resources available, and
the situation at hand.”
--Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews
10. “The Scrum Master is responsible for
ensuring Scrum is understood and
enacted. Scrum Masters do this by
ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to
Scrum theory, practices, and rules.”
--The Scrum Guide
30. Happy Accidents
•Thomas Edison “failed” thousands of times
until he found the correct filament for the light
bulb.
•Post-It notes were invented to replace
bookmarks.
•Kleenex tissues were originally made to remove
make-up.
•WD40 is named after the number of attempts to
get the water displacement formula correct.
These ideas were at one point failures…
42. “I don’t think that design will work. You
should code the story like this…”
43. THINGS TO LOOK FOR:
•Is design/architecture emergent?
•Are the developers disengaged?
•How does the team decide the best way to
do their work?
•Is pair programming, #mobprogramming, or
swarming happening?
44. ADJUSTMENTS:
•Leave the developers alone
•Step down as scrum master and resume a
coding role
•Focus on guiding rather than directing
•Ask for permission to help
45. “What does it matter how many
times I reassign team members,
isn’t that what self-organization
is for?”
52. “Teams ship working software
at the end of each sprint. That’s
why we implemented scrum.
Work the weekends if you’re
behind. The team needs to
deliver on their commitments.”
57. “Agile processes promote sustainable
development. The sponsors, developers,
and users should be able to maintain a
constant pace indefinitely.”
--Agile Manifesto
58. Sustainable pace is a quality play
•Burned out developers deliver bad code
•They also find better jobs
59. Sustainable pace is a productivity play
•Continuous integration, automated
testing, skill building, and whole team
understanding become important when
long hours are not an option
60. Sustainable pace is predictable
•Over a period of time, the amount of
work that a scrum team - working at
a sustainable pace - can accomplish
will become consistent
81. ??????
AGILE IMPACTS EVERYONE
• Organizational Change
• Leadership Change
• Team Change
• Status Change
• Job Description Change
• Role Change
• Culture Change
82. WARNING SIGNS:
•Arguments – “What has to be true…?”
•Emotional outbursts
•Am I talking to the team or at the team?
•Your feelings – “Am I enjoying my role?”
83. ARE YOU BEING KIND?
•Take time to reflect on difficult exchanges
•What is motivating you?
•Anxiety, fear, or frustration
•Address the “friction” in the retrospective
•Ask the team for feedback and support
87. “500 YARDS OF FOUL-SMELLING MUCK”
--Red “The Shawshank Redemption”
The PMP® to CSM® pipeline…
88. We are telling people to
give up the tools, methods,
processes, and behaviors
that have made them
successful.
89. INSPECT:
•How the team manages their work
•Focus of Daily Scrum meeting
•Unsolicited advice
•Interrupting progress to pontificate
90. ADAPT:
•Questions over statements (2:1 ratio)
•Make failure an option – and then fail
•The team owns tasks and solutions
•Ask for permission to help
Prevents burnout which helps in turnover prevention.
Lowering stress has many benefits from increased health, improved state of mind and less absenteeism.
Working long hours for more than a week or two leads to less productivity than working fewer hours.
Working at a pace that is too high results in decreased quality and more mistakes.
If people feel they have no control over their situation they may begin to behave in a helpless manner. Inaction can lead to overlooking opportunities for change.