Undone Organization

Agile and Scrum transformation is not any easy and it takes time. For a big organization, such time can easily be counted in years. During those years you would be dealing with so-called undone organization. Scrum itself only knows three roles – ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Development Team. That’s all we need to deliver value to the customer. The other roles are ultimately not needed.

However, at the beginning of our journey, the undone organization might be bigger than the Scrum part of our organization. As our Definition of Done is extending, the teams are getting more and more cross-functional, we are able to embrace those people and make them part of the team. The more the team extends its cross-functionality, the closer we get to the production quality and real-time feedback.

For example Architect and UX people are often at the beginning of the Scrum journey outside of the team but as the team is getting better and learn, teams are able to take it over and make it part of the Definition of Done and separate Architect and UX roles disappear and people move into teams. At first, it sounds unrealistic but in some time this is exactly what needs to happen in order to optimize for fast value delivery and feedback.

Agile Leader Competence Map

The more Agile Leadership is popular, people are asking for more description. Who is the Agile Leader, what makes him different from a traditional manager, and which competencies and skills they have to have. So I created this Agile Leader Wheel so you can map the competencies and skills.

Great Agile Leaders have four core competencies in which they can create a vision, enhance motivation, get feedback, and implement change. Vision is the driving engine. It’s not necessarily related to the product and business but the organization itself. The second segment is motivation. Agile Leaders understand the nature of motivation, are familiar with the power of intrinsic motivation of autonomy and purpose. The third one from the top section of the Agile Leader Wheel is feedback. For Agile Organizations feedback is crucial, it makes the team and product feedback part of their DNA, it becomes an integral part of their culture. The same for Agile Leaders, the regular feedback from the system is the key to their success. The last piece is the ability to implement change. For Agile Leaders, the change is happening at three levels. Firstly there is a change in myself, my own beliefs, reactions, the way I work. Secondly, there is the ability to influence others. Make them part of my team, get supports who will help me to lead the change. Finally, the third element of change is a change at the system level, the whole organization level.

Agile Leader Wheel

In addition to the mentioned competencies, Agile leaders will need to balance the time when they need to make a decision and when it’s better to collaborate and empower others to take a responsibility for that. Finally, on the right side, Agile Leaders are facilitators and coaches. We are not speaking here about one-one coaching. Great Agile Leaders use coaching as a spice to address the complexity at the system level and coach the organization as a whole. Great Agile Leaders are not born this way but constantly develop those competencies and skills. This concept is part of my Agile Leadership program where I help leaders to understand the complexity of nowadays organizations and be successful in their roles. Looking forward to seeing you at some of my Agile Leadership workshops.

Traditional metrics are dead, let’s kill KPIs

Most of the people, when you ask them, admit that KPIs are not any useful at their organizations. They don’t motivate, they don’t change people’s behavior to any better way. In the best case KPIs are usually a formal metric, in the worst case a way how to punish people. In modern organizations, which are built on top of collaboration and teams, the need for individual metrics disappeared. So what can you do instead?

If you have a bit of courage, you may try this: ask all team members to distribute for example 100$. They can give it to any team member, but can’t keep it for themselves. In a very short time, you get a very honest feedback. If you ask people to give Kudos or appreciations together with that, it’s awesome. Problem of bonus distribution solved. There are companies which distribute the bonuses not only within one team, but across the whole organization. To the receptionist, CEO, sales, developer. Your choice. We make it very transparent, so the system will correct any weird behavior as exchanging bonus money within two people. In general this is more theoretical question. I haven’t seen it happen but it comes out anytime we talk about it with managers. I guess it indicates lack of trust.

Another way how to do it when your organization is more Agile is to give every month people some money to their bonus account, you can keep them of give some to the others. Each month the random person from your company rolls a dice and if there is a six, the money is yours and we start to build another jackpot. When it’s any other number, they just continue in moving money as appreciation. As no one knows when the money is going to be paid, they don’t game it.

Finally, I have to admit that I don’t believe in any money bonuses. They are not going to help with real motivation and the risk of side effect is higher than possible outcome. So I would kill not only individual KPIs but bonuses as well. You can achieve better motivation by giving people autonomy, responsibility and clear purpose. And you can help them grow with coaching. It takes more time and energy then do KPIs and bonuses, but it brings higher results.

Agile Culture

Culture is intangible. It’s hard to touch. Hard to define, hard to measure. However, it is the critical piece for the organizational success. We may debate if culture follows an organizational structure or vice versa, but I don’t think it is important. Culture reflects our values and philosophy. The way we are. Being Agile is about changing mindset. If enough people change their mindset, the culture changes and they become Agile Organization. Simple if you say it this way, but hard to do.

I’ve been looking for a good definition of culture for years. I surprisingly find it at CAL (Certified Agile Leadership) training which I attend from Michael Sahota in California. I very much like his way of describing culture, and I used it as an inspiration for my drawing.

Agile CultureThe culture consists of two parts. The mindset and structure. I’ve always seen the mindset as the most important part of culture, a driving force. Something which can change the structure part if done well. To my belief structure is always preventing us from change, from being successful. So shall we change the structure or mindset?  I would always go for the mindset. It’s harder, but it brings significantly better results. Create a clear goal. Purpose. Something which makes to you stand up every morning and put energy into it. Something you truly believe in and are willing to take ownership and responsibility for. Something which makes you collaborate with others, something which makes your day. When you succeed with the mindset, you are usually ready to change the structure. So I truly believe that structure follows mindset. Which is good, because as the first step you can start with changing yourself. 🙂

Entire System – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The third element is called Entire System. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. As organizations are complex systems, you can stay here forever. There is always some change which needs your attention, there is always a better way how we can do things, there is always a better way of work.

Level 3: Entire System

At this level, ScrumMasters shall look at the organization as a system, from ten thousand feet distance. Searching for organizational improvements. They shall become servant leaders, helping others to become leaders, grow communities, and heal relationships. Bring the Agile values to the organizational level. Address the system in its whole complexity and make it a self-organized network of great teams. At this stage, you can see your organization as a living organism. This living organism has one goal of which no one has doubts. This system takes experiments and learns from failures. The safety, transparency, and trust are deep in the system DNA. The culture value collaboration and trust which gives us an opportunity to come up with more innovative and creative ideas then hierarchical traditional structures.

#ScrumMasterWay - Entire System

You might feel you are done, you made it. Please celebrate, it’s a huge achievement. And then let me remind you, there is no end of your journey. The goal is to achieve the right mindset of inspect and adapt every day. Being Agile is the star on the horizon, you can never touch it, but in short iterations, you can get closer. That’s what Agile is all about.

If you are struggling about how to create such Agile organization and how to work at this Entire System level of #ScrumMasterWay concept, join my Certified Agile Leadership class (CAL) which we now offer as the only ones in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Relationships – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The second element is called Relationships. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. If you do it right, and your organization is not too dysfunctional with a lot of politics and difficult stakeholders and product structure, what you build at the Relationship level, could be sustainable in about three years and gradually you may gain more and more time to the next level of the Entire system.

Level 2: Relationships

The Relationship level brings higher perspective. You are not focusing on the elements of the Myself dimension to the development team only but to the broader system. You look after all relationships your team has with anyone outside and use the mix of aspects from Metaskills, Learning, State of Mind and Leadership elements to improve them.

ScrumMasters focus their teaching, mentoring, facilitation, and coaching skills to improve relationships between the development team and Manager, Product Owner, customers, stakeholders, and other teams. For example, you may coach the Product Owner to build a great vision, facilitate conversation with other teams, help the manager to understand how to change the performance reviews, and much more. Whatever helps the bigger eco-system to become self-organized, consistent and coherent.

#ScrumMasterWay - Relationships

At this level, the eco-system begins to use the high capacity of the previously created high-performing teams in a meaningful way. We maximize work not done, is in the Agile manifesto. Too many companies are using Scrum just as a tool to deliver any idea which goes around. This level helps organizations to prioritize and focus on true value delivery. There are thousands of practices from this space you can teach (Story mapping, splitting patterns, Impact mapping, Lean startup, beyond budgeting, management 3.0). The list never ends, so keep in mind that it’s not about practices despite the fact that they can be useful but it’s about building the right Agile mindset. Increase transparency and openness. Help them to become a great team together with one goal.

My Team – The World Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay Concept

The world dimension of #ScrumMasterWay concept represents three levels ScrumMasters shall operate. The first element is called My team. Though the time and energy ScrumMasters spend on each level differ based on the team or organizational culture and maturity level, they have to be present at every level to keep an eye on changes. If you do it right, and your organization is not too dysfunctional with people actively fighting against what you build at My team level, you shall be ready to move to the next level in about six months.

Level 1: My Team

The first level of #ScrumMasterWay concept is My team. Being ScrumMaster at My team level feels like being a team member. They look at things from the development team perspective: Explain different Agile practices, facilitate Scrum meetings, help to remove impediments, coach the team, and make the team great. If people are only aware of the existence of this level, we often hear that ScrumMaster can be a team member at the same time, or it can rotate, or it shall not be needed at all after some time. They are all huge misunderstandings of the ScrumMaster role.

#ScrumMasterWay - My Team

My team level is a great start. If you do it right, it will help you to demonstrate the success of Scrum, and show you a way to the next level of addressing product success, and building an Agile organization. If you do it right, the team becomes not only cross-functional, and self-organized, but high-performing as well. The team will be significantly better that anything you ever experienced before. More productive, always improving, proactive and taking over the ownership and responsibility for the overall goal.

You can’t skip this level, as this is something tangible, something which helps you to demonstrate success. Something which helps you to taste Agile for the first time. And get feeling how it shall be. The first Myself dimension will help you to address My team level and prevent you from falling into assistant or mother of a team. You are done when you build the great team from the group of individuals. You recognize it with a high level of energy, positivity, and activity in the team. Team members will be happy to go to work, they will enjoy it, and take other team members as friends.

Leadership – Myself Dimension – #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the last element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog posts, each element of this dimension is represented by a dice which you can roll every day of Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The fourth dice stands for leadership. If you want to transform the organization, your leadership style shall change first. In this element, we talk about being a servant leader, creating the culture, feedback, motivation, collaboration, and leader-leader style.

Servant Leader

ScrumMaster is a leadership role. One of the aims of ScrumMaster is to make others work better, they are servant leaders. They can heal relationships, create communities, listen to others, have empathy, and think beyond day-to-day tasks and short-term goals. Only when you become servant leader you can be the great ScrumMaster.

We Culture

Agile needs the right culture. It’s all about us, how we work as a team. Be collaborative, support each other, take over responsibility and ownership for the team. ScrumMasters shall be using their leadership skills to create such culture because without it Agile and Scrum can never be successful.

Feedback

Give and receive feedback is critical for every leader. It’s important prerequisite to inspect and adapt. ScrumMasters shall be actively searching for feedback and find creative ways to allow people to learn from it.

Motivation

Part of the motivation is coming from the environment and culture. ScrumMasters support intrinsic motivation factors as they are aligned with their goal to create a self-organized team. Motivate through an understanding of the purpose and clear goals, safe to fail learning environment, and open and transparent culture.

Collaboration

Collaboration is written in the Scrum DNA. Scrum is all about teams and collaboration. There is no individual work important in real Scrum, no individual goals. We do our best to achieve the goal – deliver value to the customer.

Leader-leader

The leader-leader model helps you to change the traditional leadership style of leader–follower where people are expected to follow orders into the leader-leader concept of servant leadership where leaders are here to help the other people to grow and become leaders themselves.

State of Mind – Myself Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the next element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog posts, each element of this dimension represented by a dice which you can roll every day or Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The third dice is for choosing the approach – State of mind. The approach you take is important and can completely change the result you get from addressing the different situations. For every situation, you can choose one of the following aspects: observe, facilitate, coach, remove impediments, teacher and mentor, and increase positivity.

Observe

Start every situation with observing. There is no rush. Then choose any of the following approaches, address the situation by facilitation, coaching, teaching and mentoring or increasing positivity and return back to observing to see how it landed. If it works, you can continue with the selected approach, if not it’s time to change. Keep in mind that you work at system level and systems are complex by nature so hard to predict their reaction. You have to inspect and adapt.

Facilitate

Almost every situation can be addressed by proper facilitation. You can prevent conflicts by keeping the discussion in the problem space and prevent the situations when people takes it personal. Facilitator you shall be neutral. It’s their agenda, you only take care of the discussion flow.

Coach

Coaching can help when the other approaches can’t. Coaching will raise awareness and grow the interest to learn or change. It will start thinking process and creativity. Through coaching you can help team to reach the next level and become great team.

Remove impediments

This approach is actually a trap for ScrumMasters. Way too many ScrumMasters takes this approach as a destination and become assistants or mothers. Instead, you can help team to identify impediments by proper root-cause analysis and help them to solve the impediments by themselves.

Teacher, Mentor

ScrumMasters shall be the subject matter experts with hands-on experience from Agile and Scrum environment. This approach is about sharing the knowledge and experience so people understand the purpose of individual practices, Scrum framework and Agile.

Increase positivity

Finally, increase positivity. Celebrate success. Search for short wins. The more positive the overall team and company environment is, the higher chance they have to become great high-performing team and bring overall organizational a success.

Learning – Myself Dimension – The #ScrumMasterWay concept

Let’s continue with the next element of ‘Myself’ dimension. As we already said in the previous blog post, each element of this dimension represented by a dice which you can roll every day or Sprint and choose the aspect you are going to take. The second dice is for learning. Scrum Masters shall learn new things every day. This element shows a direction where you can focus the learning activity to gain Agile, coaching, facilitation, business, change, and technical skills.

Agile

ScrumMasters you must be Agile enthusiasts, constantly looking for new practices, concepts, and ideas. Joining local communities, attending or speaking at conferences. Looking for trends where Agile is heading. The world is changing fast, so do Agile and Scrum.

Coaching

Without good coaching, you can’t create sustainable high-performing teams. So better start right away. There are many classes and books on coaching, plenty options to choose from. But after all, it’s all about practice. Start tomorrow and get better during the time.

Facilitation

Facilitation is critical especially when the team is not that mature. Be ready to facilitate not only during meetings but anytime. Every conversation can go wrong, and create a conflict or misunderstanding. Be on a watch for those situations.

Business

As part of the mentoring and teaching, you will need to understand the Agile Product Ownership. Have an idea on how to form a vision, how to prioritize, how to build the backlog. Help Product Owners with business Agility concepts.

Change

ScrumMasters are implementing change in organizations, they change their culture, and way of working. Such change is one of the hardest. You are change manager, change is your day to day job, so be better at implementing change.

Technical

Finally, the most controversial aspect of this element is technical. It’s controversial because as ScrumMaster you shall not be a team member at the same time as you will lose the overview. The technical aspect here points to the Extreme Programming practices as continuous integration, shared codebase, auto-tests and TDD, BDD, pair programming, regular refactoring, agile architecture and continuous delivery. They are critical for team success and every great ScrumMaster shall have a decent knowledge about them.