What makes a great Scrum Team?

In Agile the assumption is that software development is best done in teams. The formation, growth and guidance of teams is essential. In Scrum you no longer bring the people to the work as most project organizations do today. No instead you bring the work to the people! This means that the work is designed for the team.

Agile teams stay together for a longer time span than project teams do. The obvious reason is that groups of people need time to become a real team (If they ever become one). It takes an average of 18 months for a real team to form and become high performing.

As a Scrum Master you play an essential role in the team forming process. The Scrum Master has the job of doing tasks like facilitating conflicts, encouraging fail safe experiments, coaching on social skills and even motivating and inspiring the team members. And the Scrum Master has to do all of this without authority.

What is a team?
A team is a group of people that feel shared responsibility for achieving a goal. A group of people that put the winning of the team above the winning of the individual. A group of people who feel collectively accountable and are responsible for the team’s success with whatever they are trying to achieve. It is a group of people where there is trust and people are comfortable showing their shortcomings and vulnerabilities within the group.

In a good Scrum team there are various opinions on how to attack problems. There is a constant constructive conflict going on where people are challenging the status quo. The goal of the conflict is to learn and come up with a good enough solution at the moment of discussion. The team engages in discussions to seek and use everybody’s intellect and opinion. In a good team everyone is heard and decisions are made based on the team’s collective input.

Team Task
For teams to succeed the work needs to fit the group of people. One of the things this means is that no single individual is able to succeed on his own!
Linear software development is definitely not a team activity. The goal of producing valuable software is the project manager’s problem. The designer, developer, tester, architect, user experience engineer and analyst are able to succeed individually! All kinds of gates like Test Gates and misused Definition Of Ready make it possible for individuals to succeed while the ‘team’ fails!

In Agile a team task taps into the intrinsic motivation of people. That is because team tasks give frequent feedback of real progress (valuable software) and therefore gives meaning to the work people are doing. It is the fact that the team is working on a complete piece of functionality, experiences frequent feedback on progress and value with the possibility of deciding how to do the work that increases accountability.

The best Scrum Teams are self designing. The Product Owner, ScrumMaster and The Development Team decide on the direction of the product, decide how to do the work, who does the tasks, measure & monitor their own progress, decide which people and resources are needed and use everyones intellectual capabilities!

ScrumPloP 2012

Lachlan Heasman made this funny video of the ScrumPloP 2012.

Check it out 

ScrumPloP 2012

The next ScrumPloP is in the Netherlands. See ScrumTulipPloP for attendee list and registration details.

There is also time for drinks

Games for Product Management

I followed a Innovation Games© class by Luke Hohmann. I read the book some time ago and did not think much of it. I thought they where just more agile games, how wrong I was.

In the Agile games the focus is more on learning about agile practices, understanding it’s principles and just having fun. The Penny Game e.g. illustrates effects of batches on cycle time and ballpoint game makes you feel what it is like to work in a Scrum team.

The Innovation Games© are more about collaboration and together learning about things you don’t know that you don’t know. It is about as the name suggests innovation.

At the training we played numerous games like Give Them a Hot Tub. Below an action photo of the Give Them a Hot Tub game being played.

Team 1 is presenting to team 2 all the crazy ideas they came up with for a airline. A onboard hot tub, on board comedian and in flight dating are just some ideas. The best idea was to have beds in the plane so people could sleep during flights.

Another game I really liked was SpeedBoat. It is kind of a ‘bitching’ game but potentially give great insights because of the way the game is setup.

In the training I learned some valuable lessons in the way you can help people playing the Product Owner role with roadmapping, prioritization and discovering what customers actually value.
What I learned is that there is an interesting difference between the games we play in consulting and training aka Agile games and the Innovation Games©.

Supported Change

Below a pattern I am working on. Feedback on how to improve it is more then welcome.

NAME
Supported Change

CONTEXT
You are helping an matrix organization transition to agile. You are working with different teams coaching them on using agile practices in their organization.

PROBLEM
You want agile practices that are introduced in the organization to persist. How can you help the organization to adopt agile practices in such a way that they persist over time?

FORCES

• Illusion of control: People that define how to do agile practices in their specific organization themselves tend to support them better.
• Anchor change: Telling people how to do agile does not work as the people doing the work know their organization best. Therefore you want to facilitate learning and let the people discover themselves how to do agile within their specific organization.
• Create knowledge: Every time you provide a specific solution to a team you loose an opportunity for self organization. You want the team to be able to fail and learn but also to protect the team from not having a major accident.

SOLUTION
Create optimization teams for particular areas such as Agile Product Management, Scrum Masters, Agile Testing and Agile Development. People acting in different projects across the organization get together regularly in an optimization team to share their project experiences and discuss challenges they face and how to tackle them. The optimization team facilitates experiments in projects to create knowledge about how agile works in the organization. The optimization team makes the created knowledge explicit and available in the form of Standards for Improvement.

CONSEQUENCES
Benefits

• People are encouraged to experiment and question the way things are currently done. People from different projects across the organization learn from each other and spread the knowledge across the organization. A supported standard is established that forms the basis for improvement.
• People are committed, feel accountable and fully support the change because their opinions have been taken into consideration and they feel the changes are made by themselves.

Liabilities

• The Optimization team meet-ups can result in endless discussions with no real results.

ScrumTulipPloP venue is known

We have decided to organize the ScrumTulipPloP at the Kasteel de Hooge Vuursche. The ScrumPloP.org website is also updated with the latest information about writing and submitting a paper for shepherding.

See ScrumTulipPloP for details and the call for papers.

Professional Scrum Master training in Utrecht on 4 & 5 juni

I’ll be giving the Scrum.org certified Professional Scrum Master training in Utrecht on June 4 and 5. The training will be in Dutch.

You can register at here at Scrum.org

Check AgiliX for more information.

ScrumTulipPloP

On october 29,30 and 31 there will be the first ScrumPloP conference in the Netherlands. I am organizing this conference together with pattern experts Neil Harrison and James Coplien. The ScrumPloP is supported by the Hillside pattern community

If you don’t know what a PloP is I recommend to read What is a PloP?

At the ScrumTulipPlop you have the opportunity to

• Learn from peers & industry experts about Agile & Scrum
• Share your knowledge in the form of patterns to contribute to the Agile & Scrum community.
• Improve your pattern writing skills at the various writers workshops during the conference.

We will be announcing the venue and more details in the coming weeks.