Tag: Scrum

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Agile

Are Your Stories Ready?

This week I was particularly impressed with a method used by a Scrum Master to help his team understand which stories on the backlog were “ready” and which were not. It’s amazing how such a simple technique can bring the transparency needed to help a team prepare for a successful sprint. His technique is to use colored stickers as markers on the ordered product backlog hanging on the wall next to the team’s scrum board to indicate the state of the story. If the story is not ready it gets a red sticker.

Agile

An elephant and a monkey went for a walk last sprint …

This week I was walking past a conference room where a Scrum Master was preparing for the team’s retrospective. I had to stop and take a picture because I really loved what I saw. Here are a few of the things that really impressed me.

Agile

Agile 2015 Learning and Highlights

Sunday, as I got on a flight and headed to Washington, DC for Agile Alliance’s Agile 2015 conference, I was looking forward to spending a week with other like-minded people who believe in living the agile values and principles and who are investing in themselves and in others to grow in their craft. I anticipate this conference all year because I love the full saturation of agile. I love the networking and new ideas. I love the opportunity to see what others in the industry are up to and to learn from them. And I love meeting new people who teach me great things!

Allison Pollard and I were given the opportunity to present a coaching topic called “Change Your Questions ~ Change Your World” this year. It was exciting to see Allison again and partner with her on this great topic and it was an honor to invest in the agile community at large.

Agile

Scrum Mastering – It’s a hard job. But someone has to do it!

This is me. I’m an agile coach and I love being a scrum master whenever my path allows me to step into that role for a few months in order to start up new teams and develop scrum masters. I’ve been scrum mastering a few teams for the past couple of months and having the time of my life! But now comes the real test – mentoring a few brand new scrum masters.

Agile

Definition of Done – More Than a Checklist

This is Mark. He challenges me. He confronts me. He inspires me. I think he is amazing. Mark doesn’t do things because someone like me who claims to know a bit about agile says so. He looks at the world from every perspective. I love this about him because he forces me to think deeper than I’ve ever had to in many areas. He stretches me as a coach and forces me to keep growing.

Definition of Done was an area where Mark really inspired me to dig deep. This was his concern …

“I hear and see people teaching Definition of Done like it is a checklist of all the things a team has to do in order for a user story to be done. I think this undermines ownership of quality code by the team because the checklist becomes a crutch and an excuse to be mediocre. It causes people to say things like, ‘Well it meets the definition of done,’ when they know that the code still isn’t as good as it could be. It develops the attitude of, ‘Oh well, it wasn’t on the list so I don’t have to do it.’”

Agile

Bridging the Gap Between Remote Locations

In my years as a consultant I have seen it time and time again. Companies with multiple sites all working together. It is hard to bridge the gap across the miles and inevitably it shows up – The Red Headed Step Child Syndrome. Perhaps you’ve seen it before? This phenomenon happens when the people in offices separated by miles can’t quite see one another as human.

This is usually how I see it portrayed:

I meet people in one site in Arkansas and they talk to me about how “Michigan” has a mindset that is way off base. They explain how “Michigan” really doesn’t understand how to get the work done properly so they need a lot of help. “Arkansas” holds a bit of bitterness because “we” are always getting treated like second class citizens. “Michigan” forgets us, doesn’t give us information timely, has a superior attitude, and doesn’t really care about “Arkansas.”

Then, I go to the Michigan office and meet people there who tell me how “Arkansas” doesn’t really get it. They describe “Arkansas” having a bit of an attitude, an incorrect mindset and lacking understanding of how to get the work done properly. They say that “Arkansas” needs lots of help to get better.

Scrum

Why are we standing?

A few months ago as I stopped to check in on a team during their daily scrum and I saw something really interesting happen. This team was co-located in a team room and were all sitting around a large conference table working collaboratively. There were two large whiteboards on two walls of the team room and one wall held a large scrum board.

When it was time for the daily scrum one member of the team said, “It’s time for the scrum,” and started making open handed stand up motions to everyone encouraging them to rise from their seats for the “stand up” meeting.

The team all rose from their chairs and stood in position looking at one another and proceeded to answer “the three questions” diligently reporting the status of the work they were responsible for completing.

Agile

Why They Need Agile Coaches

Over the past several weeks I have encountered multiple people from completely different companies that are implementing scrum. Some have been trying this for a few weeks. Some have been doing it for a couple of years. Others are somewhere in between. Some received formal training. Some read books. Others supplemented with You Tube videos.

Everyone I spoke to had a different reason for meeting with me, an agile coach. Some were people I was interviewing for clients to hire onto their full time staff. Some were clients and potential clients. Others were people in the agile community that asked for mentoring.

They all had something in common – doing it alone. In each case, they got information about scrum and tried to implement change. In each case they are struggling. Half of the struggles they are facing are around simply understanding how to implement the scrum framework properly. This stems from brain overload and trying to cram too much understanding into their minds from a two day class or a book and attempting to remember it with no context to their real world. Then, trying to implement the things they learned in their own environment while not forgetting anything. Yeah, right.

Scrum

Servant Leadership in Action

Earlier this week I attended a retrospective with team I am coaching and watched as a growing scrum master stood up and started the retrospective saying, “Ok guys, I’m going to step completely out of my comfort zone again today. You didn’t like the activity that we started the retrospective with last time so I’m not going to make you do that again. Instead, I came up with something else that I hope you will like a little bit better…”

Agile

This Shouldn’t Be a Status Meeting … Improving the Daily Scrum

How can I keep the daily scrum from becoming a daily status meeting? But if we are all answering three questions then who is supposed to be asking the questions? If we are gathering to give our updates on these three questions every day on what we are doing then that sounds like a status meeting to me – what am I doing wrong?

These are all questions that I have heard new scrum masters ask. The daily scrum seems like it should be the simplest thing we do, right? The team self organizes daily for a time box of no more than 15 minutes and talks about three things: What I did yesterday, what I am going to do today, and what is standing in my way.

So, why is it so hard? In my experience … mindset. Often, scrum masters learn a process to implement but they don’t recognize the mindset that must change in order for the process to have any value. Being self organizing and collaborative, like being agile, is a mindset. It’s not just something you do – it’s something you are. It’s something you become. It’s about individuals and interactions over process and tools. What I’m finding is that when teams are struggling with the daily scrum it’s about them putting the process and tools over the individuals and interactions.