The One Single Thing You Must Do To Be Better At Scrum

Scrum does not provide a quick fix. It will not help your software get better overnight and it definitely won´t increase trust among your team members quickly.

But there´s a trick to make Scrum work for you, and it´s not getting a certification or hiring an experienced agile coach.

Let´s take an example from 2 famous people

You´ve definitely heard of Bruce Lee, American born martial artist and actor who was raised in Hong Kong. He is famous for his martial arts related movies, such as First of Fury, The Big Boss or Enter The Dragon.

He was not only an actor and martial artist, Lee was also a philosopher. Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” 

Another example, Jeff Hoffman, an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, film producer, and jazz artist, tells the story of startup founders who were pitching him on a new business idea (Inc.com).

These founders, according to Jeff, were bright, motivated, passionate, and with brilliant idea. However, instead of selling him one great idea, they tried to sell three ideas. Big mistake.

Jeff Hoffman says: “What do you think happens when you try to launch three ideas at once? Nothing.”

What do they have in common?

It´s not hard to guess… Bruce Lee and Jeff Hoffman might be in different fields, but they have something important in common. They both believe that to be good at anything, you have to focus on a single thing at a time!

Coming back to Scrum…

And this leads us to Scrum. Sorry to disappoint you, Scrum is not a project management framework that solves all your team´s problems. It´s actually not really a framework, it´s more of a state of mind.

Scrum is anyways a great starting place for your team. But after you´ve incorporated scrum principles and found its deficiencies, what do you do then?

Retrospective

You might be all familiar with retrospectives, a method for inspecting, adapting, and improving your team´s processes. Retrospectives helps your team to go over what´s going well, what´s not going well, and what it can improve.

Hopefully you´ve been running successful retrospectives. But you can still ask yourself: Is there a way we can apply the principle of “being good at one thing” to retrospectives?

Action Plans and Follow Through

Let´s focus on the action plan – the outcome of a retrospective. Action plan is a list of items the team agrees to fix or improve. Action plan consists of one or more action items written in an actionable format.

Some teams choose to follow SMART acronym (specific, measurable,assignable, realistic, time-related). Some follow the Who, What, When paradigm (who will be responsible, what will be done, when will it be done). Both work well.

In my experience, I´ve come across many teams that tend to create long action plans (5 or even 10). These teams finish their retrospectives excited, but at their next retrospective they find out that nothing has really changed. Why is that always the case?

Here´s the one single thing you must do to be better at Scrum

The advice that Bruce Lee and Jeff Hoffman tell to become really good at something we have to focus on it alone, applies to Scrum and retrospectives too.

This means that the action plans we create should have a single action item. Just a single thing that the team agrees upon, prioritizes, and is committed to fix.

Focusing on a single action item gives a high probability that the team will follow through on implementing it.

The truth is that change is hard. Most people have a natural preference to stay within a comfort zone. How likely is it that your team will be able to change 10 things at once? Almost zero chance. How likely is it that your team will be able to change a single thing within a specific time period? Much higher.

And that´s where the secret is to be better at Scrum. It´s not to run more effective retrospectives or producing action plans. You all do that, I´m sure. It´s about having a sharp focus on a single action item that will have a measurable impact on the team´s performance.

Scrum does provide all the answers, it provides the conceptual framework for continuous improvement, which enables your team to get better. If you follow this advice, you will soon discover the true power of Scrum and agility.

All you have to do is focus on the one thing.

The post The One Single Thing You Must Do To Be Better At Scrum appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.