Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

good ScrumMaster helps the team develop and grow. A great ScrumMaster helps the team develop their own growth pathway.

Some teams found measuring themselves against the agile manifesto values to be really effective, some teams found the twelve agile principles to be better for them, while other teams created their own values, principles and behaviours to measure themselves. One team simply used the “awesomeness factor” and asked themselves, “What do we need to do to be the most awesome team in the company—the one that everyone wants to work for and every product owner wants working for them?”

The characteristics that they decided made a team agile and, by proxy, successful were as follows: CLEAR GOALS Having a view of the goal of the product, not necessarily the specific detailed requirements STABILITY Teams that stay together longer, generally are more productive SUPPORT The level of servant-leadership provided to the team CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT The team’s ability and appetite for finding ways to improve their process SELF-MANAGEMENT The team’s ability to manage themselves and self-organise ATTENTION TO RESULTS The team’s quality and integrity levels PREDICTABILITY How confident can the organisation be in the team’s commitments and capacity to deliver? FUN The degree to which the team enjoys themselves while working

Each of these metrics had levels as well, although no scoring system. For example “Clear Goal” could be broken down to LEVEL 1: Delivering work with ad-hoc priorities LEVEL 2: a clear, prioritised backlog but no theme for the iteration LEVEL 3: a prioritised backlog and iteration theme/sprint goal LEVEL 4: Sprint goal is part of a release goal with clear customer representation LEVEL 5: Sprint and release goals are mapped to strategic direction with clear ROI justification

And “Self management” might be broken down to: LEVEL 1: The team update the burndown throughout the iteration LEVEL 2: The team actively utilise the iteration artefacts* to manage themselves * Note the term burndown has been removed because the team may be using something else (perhaps entering “Ha”) LEVEL 3: The whole team are involved in the decision-making process and own the decisions LEVEL 4: The team readily critique and explore multiple options before deciding the way forward LEVEL 5: The team cha...

Work with the team (and possibly leaders in the organisation as well) to collaboratively determine what a successful team looks like and then how we will know if we are moving in the right direction. And be open to changing the model if it’s not working or circumstances change. Perhaps once the team has reached a certain point, what good (or great) looks like will be different.

Transforming a team, let alone an entire organisation, from the principles of command and control to those based on servant-leadership, from plans based on prediction to plans based on empirical, evolutionary data requires both patience and tenacity.

It can be very easy to give up, thinking, “This organisation will never change” or “This team just isn’t stepping up to the plate in terms of self-organisation,” so it is very important to regularly reflect and keep a tally of progress and achievements both at the team and the organisation level.

they will do so with care and respect for the fact that current processes and behaviours were always rational at some point and that they have an element of emotional attachment for people.

TIP Practice staying calm (the old adage of counting to ten never gets old) when confronting a challenge. Take your time before sending emails or making phone calls. If you can, run through your views and arguments with a colleague before presenting them to your actual audience. Use the feedback to gauge just how provocative your message and tone is.

A good ScrumMaster removes disruptive influences from the daily scrum so it is used for the team’s benefit. A great ScrumMaster will create an environment where others (particularly the product owner) can attend and not affect the behaviour of the team.

This goes to show that while product owner involvement in daily scrums (and retrospectives for that matter) can be a destructive thing if handled badly, it can be highly productive if handled well.

Try starting the daily scrum (or retrospective) with a short confessions session, where everyone (even neutral observers) shares a short example of something they screwed up. This can increase the shared level of vulnerability and the sense that not everything always goes to plan.

Creating a process of gradual exposure is also a common pattern that great ScrumMasters tend to follow. Daily scrums and retrospectives start off as behind-closed-doors or off-site meetings. As the team grows comfortable with each other, they can extend an invitation to the product owner

Remember that while protecting the team by excluding disruptive influences may be a good short-term strategy, great ScrumMasters work towards a more inclusive and transparent process.

A good ScrumMaster will help a team change their sprint length to find their optimum. A great ScrumMaster has faith in self-organisation and knows the value of rhythm

Cyril Northcote Parkinson once said that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”

Shorter sprints do allow for greater risk reduction, earlier feedback and more opportunities to adapt to change.

What teams should never do, however, is extend the sprint, not even by just a couple of days. The rhythm of delivery is far too important to compromise and it is a terrible precedent to set.

In general I typically recommend teams start off with shorter sprints. Once they have optimised their processes and established a predictable velocity, they can then consider extending it to take advantage of the greater focus that a longer sprint offers.

A good ScrumMaster will say what needs to be said. A great ScrumMaster knows the power of silence.

Great ScrumMasters are proactive, pioneering and they hate monotony. They typically adopt the attitude that things are possible no matter how difficult they may appear and are constantly looking for new ways to engage their team and to inspire curiosity and energy in their team.

Many resourceful ScrumMasters broaden their perspectives and find new solutions by imagining what would make a problem worse, as opposed to better.

TIP: To stimulate resourcefulness, play a creativity game such as “100 uses” where you challenge yourself to think of 100 ways to use an everyday object such as a paperclip.

TIP: Search out ScrumMasters from other organisations – ideally those that are the most different from yours and share experiences. User groups are a good start but great ScrumMasters usually establish more focused relationships such as ScrumMaster circles. These circles are usually no larger than six people who meet up either face-to-face or virtually on a regular basis to discuss their latest challenges or thoughts. Perhaps you could even try a ScrumMaster exchange program—swap a ScrumMaster with another company for a retrospective, or even a whole sprint?

A good ScrumMaster creates an environment where raising impediments can occur. A great ScrumMaster creates an environment where creativity can occur.

the ScrumMasters that set themselves apart are those that can take the team to a point where they actually begin solving their own problems, offering creative suggestions to others’ impediments or, perhaps better still, being proactive and finding ways to solve things before they become impediments.

great ScrumMasters can usually help teams find interesting, fun and innovative ways of getting the mundane things done.

Remember that teams need space to be creative and proactive— they can’t and won’t do so if they are overloaded—so ensure your team is working at a sustainable pace.

Another great technique for practicing creativity is the improv game of “Delight”

A good ScrumMaster ensures team members share their status efficiently with one another in the daily scrum. A great ScrumMaster ensures the daily scrum is an energising event that teams look forward to.

A good ScrumMaster helps the team identify improvements. A great ScrumMaster inspires the team to be adaptive.

Great ScrumMasters encourage their teams to be ADAPTIVE: Act, Diverge, Account, Probe, Try, Involve, Visualise, and Expose.

While it’s great to have an action plan, the team should take on a manageable number (one to three) of improvement actions each retrospective. It is much more important that the team get into the habit of small and regular improvements than to try and fix everything straight away.

As soon as any semblance of agreement arises, the team jump on it as an opportunity to end the ambiguity and relax. This isn’t always a bad thing but it is usually sub-optimal.

Great ScrumMasters get the team comfortable with uncertainty and guide them through the process of divergent thinking: coming up with multiple alternatives before converging on the best solution.

The Rule of Seven, as first explained to me by actor and author Lee Devin, who had witnessed it from a team at Boeing. With this technique, the team agrees that they won’t make any decision until they have thought of at least seven different alternative solutions. I’ve found that the first few solutions or ideas are fairly easy to come up with and, usually, fairly sensible as well. Ideas four and five are a typically a little more off-the-wall and take a little longer to emerge. Ideas six and, especially, seven are sometimes a bit crazy. In ideas six & seven, though, are often the seeds of ground-breaking ideas that can really energise a team and lead to quite astounding solutions.

those who answer their own questions and come up with their own solutions are more empowered and more likely to succeed.

The first stage is asking observational or objective questions, such as What happened? Who said what? When did it happen? The aim here is to gather some facts about the situation without interpreting or analysing them.

The second stage is asking reflective questions such as How did that affect you? How do you feel about that? How do you think others were affected by that? The aim here is to learn about how the team feels about the situation.

The third stage is to ask interpretive questions, such as Why do you think that happened? What do you think that means? How do you think that will affect you/them/the organisation? The aim here is to u...

The fourth stage is to ask decisional questions, such as What are you going to do? How could you move this forward? What would you consider a positive outcome? The aim here is to help the team make so...

After all of these types of questions, we come to the powerful questions. A powerful question is one that causes curiosity, intri...

experimentation usually begins in retrospectives if it is going to begin at all.

One example of redefining failure I have seen in teams is to introduce the concept of the failure bow [27], a ceremony where a team member whose experiment led to an unsuccessful outcome literally takes a bow and accepts a round of applause for the effort. It is important to note that we are not glorifying failure here but rather changing the way we perceive and deal with it. We reward the effort, transparency and unexpected learning instead.

There is a saying that in scientific (and, in particular, iterative) experimentation, you learn the most when you have a 50 percent chance of failure because half of the possible scenarios will be eliminated. However, it can be a daunting prospect for a team to enter into something knowing that they have a 50 percent chance of an undesirable outcome.

When they identify opportunities to improve, they will act first and justify later

One great tactic I have seen the great ScrumMasters employ is to ask the team what they want to be held to account on, or what is important to them. This way the ScrumMaster has been granted permission to make note of progress in this area, making it much easier for them to do so.

Another great tactic here is to work with the team to discover their values and create a chart, such as a radar/spider diagram, to monitor team progress on this over time. (See the “Assess Your Way To Maturity” chapter for more detail.)

if the elephant is avoided for long enough, the team will develop coping mechanisms. The problem is, these coping mechanisms don’t deal with the issue and actually make the problem even less likely to be removed because it doesn’t seem quite as necessary any more.