Scrum Transformation Journey

As one of the CSTs – Certified Scrum Trainers – I’ve got a unique opportunity to travel around the world during the last two years and teach Scrum at a variety of businesses, organizational environments, and very different cultures. I must admit that Scrum is awesome as it is universal. You can apply it to software, hardware, marketing, HR, executive teams and be rapidly successful, significantly better, change the way of work and become the best of the greatest. The flip side of the coin is, that despite the easy way how Scrum is defined, there are still companies, teams and individuals completely failing to understand what Scrum is and therefore failing to implement it.

I draw this picture to illustrate that becoming Scrum is a journey. You can’t just do Scrum, you have to embrace it. You have to become Scrum yourself first. It’s often not that straightforward as we’ve been got used to the traditional processes throughout the history, but at the same time, this is the very best strength of Scrum. Once you master it, it becomes the part of your life. It’s not just a process, it is a way of living.

Scrum Transformation

 

Technical Scrum

First, let me say explicitly that “Technical Scrum” is not Scrum. It only pretends to be Scrum. It’s a camouflage. However, it might be the necessary first step in certain organizations to move to the real Scrum. How do you recognize Technical Scrum? People “do” Scrum. They are looking for ways how to remain the same as they used to be. They are eager to get checklists of practices which need to be done, in order to do proper Scrum. Therefore Technical Scrum is all about estimations techniques, burn-downs, measuring velocity. The very important metric would be individual utilization, so they usually insist on time task estimates, capacity calculations, and time-sheets to be filled. They have identified new roles, but in reality, they just renamed the traditional roles and didn’t change the behavior. Scrum meetings are usually long and felt redundant. Managers use Scrum to micromanage.  The overall team focus is on “how”. The team is not any team but a group of individuals working on similar items. The individual accountability matters. They are looking how to split responsibilities instead of how to collaborate to achieve the goal. Product Backlog is usually a to-do list where most things have to be done.

Scrum Mindset

In the real Scrum, your team understands the mindset and they are “living” Scrum. They take it as the way how to focus on customers, how to innovate, how to collaborate. The estimates, efficiency, and utilization become quite unimportant, as they focus on delivering value to the customer and overall long term results. The first step here is usually “Team Scrum” where the development team becomes a real self-organized and cross-functional team which works together. The team creation process produces a huge trust internally among the team members but also externally to the organization. It’s the first tiny ‘snowball’ which afterward starts the whole transformation and creates forces to change how we run our business and how the organization itself is structured.

The “Organizational Scrum” builds on top of the values we experienced at team level – openness, transparency, and trust which leads the organization to be more business driven, flexible, and open to innovations. The business slowly starts to be picking up and the organization has to follow the rest. At this time, the snowball is big enough to attract the rest of the organization. At that time, you are truly Agile.

Such transformation can take years. It’s not uncommon that companies are falling back and restarting the whole initiative again. It’s hard. To succeed you need a good reason for change and courage. Eventually, every company has to change as the word is getting more complex and fast. The same way as industry revolution changed the way we were hundred years ago, the complexity of our current life is changing us now. To succeed in a long term, we have to be more flexible and dynamic – more Agile.

APPENDIX: Top Agile Experts

(as many people ask about who to hire for agile transformation and the quality of Agile Coaches, here is a short paragraph about this)

There are generally two groups of experts in the Agile world. Trainers and Coaches. Each group focus on the same field but from a different angle. The most recognized are Certified Scrum Trainers® (CST) and Certified Enterprise Coaches (CEC) both linked with Scrum Alliance. Both groups represented top world experts which are proved by highly prestige certifications issued by Scrum Alliance.

The CST – Certified Scrum Trainers deliver the certification training such as CSM – Certified ScrumMaster, CSPO – Certified Scrum Product Owners to name at least two most well-known certifications. They are experts on agile transformation, and very often they are experienced coaches.

If you are looking for a Certified Agile Coach (CAC), make sure you are looking at the Scrum Alliance CEC and CTC’s which are the second group of agile experts. Together with CSTs mentioned before, Certified Enterprise Coaches – CECs are a great help for your organization on your Agile transformation journey while the CTCs – Certified Team Coaches are a great help at the team level. They are all top-notch experts with deep Agile and coaching experience. The ScrumAllinace’s key mission is sustainable agility and keeping the quality bar high is one of the most important aspects they take care about. Any of the above certifications (CST, CEC, CTC) are the great choice for your agile transformation.

Agile Leadership

As the world is getting more complex, organizations has to change to keep competitive. They must become more flexible, team oriented, self-organized. And as a consequence, the leaders shall adopt another approach to motivate people and lead the organizations to keep up the speed. Agile Leadership concept was created to help the leaders to understand the nature of the change which is happening in the business right now, and be able to react to the challenges which modern organizations brought in its all complexity. Agile Leadership concept is not about how to implement Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, or Lean. You have people in your organization who can do that. The Leadership model is here for leaders, managers, directors, entrepreneurs, and owners to help them to sustain the change and be able to create Agile organization or become effective in it.

Modern world is complex

Organization is a complex system by itself as it deals with people and their behavior. There is no clear link between cause and effect.  It’s a network of interdependent elements. It’s not predictable so the traditional approaches which expect predictability and consistency fail. It all worked until about 1970 as the world had been only complicated at that time. Nonetheless, a lot changed from that time. Globalization and Internet allows businesses to grow fast so the density of nowadays businesses is so huge and communication so fast that they involve each other all the time and cause doesn’t link to any predictable effect anymore.

Cynefin framework - Complexity

The first step of the Agile Leadership model is “Get Awareness”. Awareness of the current reality, understanding of what’s happening around us, be mindful about the surrounding. Organization is a system which constantly sends signals. All we have to do is to be aware of them, notice them, and listen to them. The second step is “Embrace It”. It helps us to accept whatever is happening in the system without the urge to evaluate. Who knows what is good and what is bad. Our self-power is coming from our ability to gain enough clarity so it builds trust in the whole system. The third step is “Act Upon”. It uses the power gained in the previous step to influence things and change the system behavior.

To make it simple, in our Agile Leadership Program we guide you through those steps. Every change is difficult, and the change of ourselves is usually the toughest. However, the result will definitely pay off.

Agile Leadership Model

Global Scrum Gathering® Prague 2015

I’ve got a unique opportunity to be co-chair of the global Scrum Gathering Prague. It’s an event for all Agile and Scrum enthusiasts around the globe – the European Gathering usually got around 600 people.

The theme was structured around the five senses to challenge agile mindset and support the Scrum Alliance’s goal of “Transforming the World of Work”. The unofficial theme was how to address complexity and how companies need to change in order to address such change and sustain the market expectations.

Scrum Alliance - Scrum Gathering Prague

I especially enjoyed the opening keynote from Niels Pflaeging (if you are looking for a keynote, he is definitely part of my top#10 suggestions). He’s been talking about change in the management over past few decades. He explained that Taylorism is dead. That traditional management is not applicable for current extremely dynamic and global world. The world, which is not complicated, as it used to be, but it is complex and brings us surprises every day. You can’t respond by new process or standardization. It changes so fast so it’s not possible anymore. To answer complexity you have to use new tools like System Thinking or Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching.

Another surprise was lightning talks. They’ve been selected by audience using dot voting (very agile way, huh?) during the first day and they’ve been all great. Add finally I very much enjoyed Pecha Kucha format. If you never seen it it’s 20 slides auto forwarding after 20 seconds. Very nice format. Enjoyable. It forces speakers to speak to the subject and keep rhythm. And/but you have to be great speaker to make it.

Scrum Gathering Prague

The last day we’ve got an openspace. It’s always full of people, and engaging, but this time I was very much amazed by how many people attended Stuart’s illustration session. He’s been running a workshop on drawing and visual facilitation techniques and he’s got more than 150 people at this openspace session. If you missed it, don’t worry we are going to invite Stuart to Agile Prague Conference 12-13Sep 2016 so you have second chance :).