Scrum – Page 2 – Tandem Coaching

Scrum

Do You Think You Are Done?

As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I get to think about the Definition of “Done” and its meaning a lot. In one of the Sprint Planning event the other week, a Product Owner asked an innocent question, “I need this small thing changed, how long that might take?” An answer followed almost immediately, “it’s just a couple of lines of code.” I heard that conversation many a time before and almost always it ended with, “of course we are going to get it done, no problem.”

To those kinds of exchanges, I always have a couple of questions. What exactly do you mean you will get it done? Do you know what getting done means? Quite often the responses are either an indignant, “of course we know what done means, we have been doing it for years, do you think us fools”. Sometimes I just get a blank stare, “what do you mean.”

Scrum

Information Radiator – Sprint Health

Information Radiators are a great way to make things transparent for a team or organization. The radiator pictured above I a sprint health radiator. It can be used however you choose to implement and using whatever colors you select. I just happened to be using a white board and green, blue, and red dry erase markers when I created the one pictured above.

You could also make this smaller on a flip chart and create a new one daily to show progress over time which is really cool because the team can see how far they’ve come each day. It also shows them when new work is added to the sprint or when things are not moving along as expected. Take care to ensure that this information radiator is used to display and radiate information that is useful to the team to see the health of the sprint and make decisions about changes they might need to make in the way they are working. Don’t use this as a whipping stick to prod the team to work harder, faster, or more recklessly!

Let me give a description of the radiator parts, options, and how it’s used.

Scrum

Information Radiator – Gut Check

Information radiators are a great way for you to communicate information to a team that they just are not seeing for themselves. It also helps you to not have to nag the team with information they aren’t ready to hear about things they are doing that self-sabotaging.

I created this radiator when I was working with a team that had gone through several sprints where they kept voicing that they were going to finish all the work until the last day when they finally admitted that they were not going to finish. I’m not sure if they were deceiving themselves or if they were afraid to admit failure but either way there were several reasons why I could see early in the sprint that they were not going to complete the work, but they couldn’t accept fate until the last day of the sprint. By then, there wasn’t much that could be done to change directions or not frustrate stakeholders with surprise unfinished work.

Agile

Agile Jeopardy Retrospective

(This post is by guest blogger, Kenny Barnes.)

For our latest retrospective, I created a jeopardy board using JeopardyLabs – Online Jeopardy Template. I used a mix of Agile related categories (Scrum, Agile), items related to the team [Working Agreements, Sprint (more details below)] and something the team is really passionate about (Star Wars). It took about an hour and a half to come up with the questions/answers and setup the board.

Scrum

Using Information Radiators to Make Risk Transparent

I love to walk around team spaces and identify cool things that people are doing so I can share them with the organization. Last week while doing a Gemba Walk in one of my offices I found this!

On his metal scrum board he created “What’s at Risk” information radiator magnets in the design of a traffic light. Red indicates that the story is at risk with a high likelihood that it will not be completed this sprint. Yellow indicates that the story is somewhat at risk and there is a chance that it will not be completed this sprint. Green indicates that story is not at risk and is expected to be completed this sprint. He uses two magnet discs to cover up the extra colors and only displays the current risk state of the story.

Agile

Is More Really Better?

One of my favorite things about being and Agile coach is connecting with the Agile community through conferences, meet-ups, and other networks. Because of these connections I get to interact with Agilists all over the world. Over the past few months I’ve noticed a concerning trend coming from the Scrum Master community. They are telling me with excitement, “I’ve finally worked myself up to two teams!” Some have said they are now working with three or four teams. The thing that concerns me is that they seem to view spreading themselves across multiple teams as an accomplishment. I am hearing pride in “being busy” and “being able to handle more” and that tells me that we still have work to do. It tells me that there may still be an anti-pattern running rampant in our Agile organizations telling us lies.

Agile

My Agile Journey to CEC

“If you want to be a CST, do something about it. Get out there. Join the Agile community. Go to user groups. Go to conferences. Speak at conferences. I want to see you and know who you are. And you can never stop coaching. You can’t be a good CST if you aren’t coaching. That’s where everything you know comes from. That’s where you gain your credibility and true expertise that can help people.”

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

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.