Agile teams have been struggling since the earliest days with how to bring new people on to a team. In one of the first Agile books, there was a story of Alistair Cockburn walking a new hire through the team’s flip charts and telling the story of their work. I haven’t seen a team use flip charts in a long time, however Alistair was onto something. Most of the writing around Onboarding covers the obvious traditional stuff: mission, values, culture, etc. I won’t cover that. I will focus instead on the challenges of bringing someone new onto an effective Scrum team, specifically. Make onboarding ..read more

Is your Scrum team struggling with questions about who owns quality? Is testing way behind development? Are team members claiming no time for retrospective because they’re focused on delivery? They might be victims of what some call Scrummerfall, or Mini Waterfall. Let’s use our fictional World’s Smallest Online Bookstore (WSOBS) Scrum team to explore what this Scrum anti-pattern is and the damage is causes. Dramatis Personae: Steve – a ScrumMaster and the hero of our story Paula – Product Owner of Steve’s Team Tonia – Quality Assurance specialist Brad – Business Analyst Martin – Database Deve ..read more

Many people who attend Scrum training courses start with the impression that the Daily Scrum is the whole of Scrum. Others think the Daily Scrum centres on three questions (this was true a long time ago). This guide to the Daily Scrum meeting was created to address these misconceptions as well as answer common questions. What is the main purpose of a daily scrum meeting? I don’t run around quoting the Scrum Guide as if it is the final word on anything, however it does provide a good starting point: “The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Spri ..read more

The “Spotify Model” probably isn’t a model and definitely isn’t what is currently practiced at Spotify today. (Some suggest it never was.) The below image was made famous in a video by Henrik Kniberg, where he explains how work was organized into Squads, Tribes, and Guilds. Many people see the structure and try to mimic it in their organization. Worse, many attempt to get the supposed benefit by renaming existing organizational structures with the same labels. As a result, most attempts at the Spotify Model are in fact Cargo Cult. Figure 1 – The famous picture from: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-co ..read more

A stable team is one in which team membership doesn’t change often and, instead, is consistent over time. Why should we care? Isn’t Scrum like basketball where you can change the players on the court anytime there is an interruption? Let’s find out… High-performing teams —or teams that gets stuff done with insanely high quality— is the goal of many who arrive in Scrum expecting to get amazing performance out of their system. But building a high-performing team from scratch takes time. The popular picture of Tuckman’s Model of Team Formation shows a team going through the stages of Forming -> ..read more

When I’m working with new Scrum Teams and say that Scrum encourages collaboration among team members, everyone nods and smiles. When I ask them to describe their actual collaboration, I hear about collaboration in Sprint Planning, Review and Retrospective. If I’m lucky, someone mentions solving impediments found in Daily Scrum through collaboration. Wow. Jaw drops. Jaw hits the floor and shatters. That is a seriously low bar for collaboration. This suggests that only 10% of a Scrum team’s work is collaborative. Let’s define our terms: Coordination – synchronizing the independent work among a ..read more

If your Scrum Team has been together for years and you’ve been following the Agile principles and Scrum structure, you might be feeling quite confident. Scrum isn’t an inherently easy methodology to adapt, especially since it requires change beyond the personal behaviour level to see the biggest results. So if your team has gotten to the point that your retrospectives are empty and your improvement list is slim to none, pat yourselves on the backs! … And then put your arms down, because there is still much work to be done. Many teams stop growing because they become satisfied with the status q ..read more

In December the Treasury Board of Canada ordered that, starting in mid-January, all employees would be expected to return to the office for two to three days a week. Among the stated goals were: Innovation, Creativity, Fairness, and Consistency. This all ties in well with the Agile Manifesto which includes the principle “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Prior to the pandemic, I would have trotted out reason after reason, study after study, why this was always 100% the best choice. I would have gone ..read more

A design pattern is a description of a solution to a recurring problem. It outlines the elements that are necessary to solve the challenge without prompting the reader to address the issue in a specific way. Unfortunately, we also regularly see recurring patterns of ineffective behaviour. These are called Anti-Patterns. The following explores the common anti-pattern of a performance bonus. Micromanagement. A few months ago a friend asked me about setting up a bonus scheme at his work. From working with Scrum and Kanban teams, I know that bonuses are counter-productive anywhere team members are ..read more

Work is humming along nicely when your Marketing VP stops by your desk and says, “We need to double monthly sales.” That’s it. That their entire instruction. After you recover from this bombshell,  you will need to decide what tool you will use and who you will grab to help you start to tackle this problem. Do you use Story Maps? (A great tool when you have an idea of where you’re going.) A Journey Map? (Also requires that you have an idea of where you’re going.) A Traditional Roadmap? I’m going to suggest that you create Impact Maps in situations like this, where you have a vague goal bu ..read more