Tag: improvement

The only reason I’m still stuck with Scrum is because I’ve experienced it. Over the years I’ve seen it working so great, that I sort of felt in love with the energy well-functioning teams are creating. I love the self-management, I love the value-creation, and the impact the environment has on customers and the overall business results.

But it was not always like that. I didn’t like it at first. I took it as another process. I was angry that I must change. Deeply insight, I was afraid of the change that seems artificial, stupid, and crazy. At first, with my team we didn’t really like what we were requested to do, trying to fake it. Making all the possible mistakes you can imagine. The break point happened when we realized that it’s not about having a backlog, it’s not about standups, it’s not even about having a retrospective. It’s about the ability to take over the responsibility and ownership and do things our way. That Scrum is only a framework that allows you to creatively create outcome. Not just some work but achieve real value customers care about. And more over I realized that there is no need for perfection. By inspecting and adapting we make it work. If it doesn’t work, we improve it and find a way how to be successful. Change is our next day.

So why are organizations so stuck with faking it? Firstly, after that many years, organizations still don’t have people who experienced the real Scrum spirit and energy. They are so stuck in the project management individual way of working that it’s close to impossible to even imagine how things could be different. I used to believe that when we make agile well-known word, people use the common sense, and by inspecting and adapting create their own way of being successful. Instead, I see too much of the “Fake Scrum”, “Grey-processed Scrum”, or even “Dark Scrum”. So, stop saying it will never work here and start finding a way. I eventually had to redefine the goal. I now believe that we, the agile community, need to actively fight the flavors of Dark Scrum. That’s why I wrote the Great ScrumMaster: #ScrumMasterWay and Agile Leader: Leveraging the Power of Influence books. That’s why I teach and coach hundreds of practitioners. To help them to return to the mindset, help organizations to realize what are the principles, and what is this change really about:

• There is no one way. Stop copy pasting practices, follow the principles.

Create your own way by inspecting and adapting.

• It’s not about delivery but about achieving value.

Deliver end-to-end value.

• Don’t hide behind contracts, invite the customer in your team and collaborate.

Create partnerships.  

• We don’t know what needs to be done, only what needs to be achieved.

Be adaptive.

• Don’t focus on growing individual skills, build environment for team collaboration.

Relationships maters.

• Don’t hide things behind tools, roles and processes. Share everything so everyone knows what’s happening.

Crete radical transparency.

• You don’t need to control everything. Trust the team they can make it together.

Become an Agile Leader.

So if you are wondering how much of “Fake”, “Grey/processed” or “Dark” Scrum you have make an assessment around the following points on a 0-100 scale. If your overall score is 0-30 you’re stuck in traditional management, 31-49 it’s a blend, and it surely feels that way. No that it’s not a start but there is a lot of pain over here and there. Finally, if your overall score is 50-70, congratulations. You are on the journey. It’s not about being ideal but improving along the way. Embrace the Kaizen principles.

People always ask how to start, what are the practices we need to do, what is the magic. They are looking for a cookbook, something to copy step by step. And they are often disappointed that I refrain from recommending them where to see the ideal example. Look what good or bad copying Spotify way of working brought to the industry. So if not copy what someone else did, how shall we start?

First step of every change is to create a sense of urgency. If you don’t have it, you won’t change. Ever. Because we are fine, we are good enough. We always did it this way. So to break a habit, you need to find a strong reason why keeping your habits is not a way forward. Only then you can start moving.

• Why do we have to change?
• What happen if we don’t?

Often, we see reasons why the change is inevitable. But ask yourself, hat about the others? Do they feel the same way? Communication is the key here. Communicate over and over again. Why are we doing it. The higher the urgency the higher the chance of success.

Second phase is start experimenting. Start small. No big changes. Note we are not looking for perfection, we look for good enough and inspect and adapt form there. One team after another. Learn from mistakes, develop the habit of continuous improvement. Implement the Kizen mindset. You can run the whole transformation in Scrum, iterating is Sprints, learning from retrospectives, getting feedback in Reviews, creating a Backlog with organizational impediments, and through that process inspect and adapt. Very agile, and very simple as well.

And how do you know it’s working? In general, when I go to organizations, I check two things:

1. Do they work as individuals, or as a team.
2. Are they delivering work, or end-to-end business value.

Individuals distribute work, deliver it and then try to merge it together. There is my work and your work. They don’t need each other much. It’s the world of work distribution, allocation, and individual responsibility. Team on the contrary are collaborating to achieve a goal. They don’t have roles; they do whatever it takes to achieve the common goal. Teams often leverage the pair work, swarming or mobbing. They learn, help each other. They are more creative and innovative and therefore more effective in solving complex problems.

The traditional world was full of managing dependencies. The skill-oriented departments were not value oriented but optimizing for individual performance. And don’t take me wrong, it totally made sense as the majority of their problems were just complicated, far from being unpredictable and complex. In the world where we know what needs to be done, the whole difficulty is how to plan and deliver it exactly according to the plan. The complexity and unpredictability of the nowadays business environment changed that. We realized we don’t know what needs to be done and all we can do is to inspect and adapt. Find a way how to achieve the business goals. Learn from feedback the sooner the better.

Both points are fundamentally changing the way we work. Both are necessary for agile to be successful. So, you can do a simple assessment 0-10. What is the quality of our collaboration, are we working as individuals, or self-managing, cross-functional, dedicated team? Are we output, skills, and effort oriented or are we outcome driven delivering end-to-end customer value? Just two scales to reflect. Agile is simple, right?