We are not generating enough high-performing teams. Why? Well, to be honest, I do not care much why we are NOT having this success — what I care about is: How do we do it? (Yes, understanding some root causes of failure will help us.) *** What *is* happening? In my opinion, the typical thing for most companies is, to my eyes, very modest success. That is, the typical team is 20% more productive. Which, compared to the “investment” (mostly training), is a VERY good ROI.  But, compared to what they could have, very modest success. *** Let’s start now to describe what you should do. These ar ..read more

Here is the situation from many managers: We need more productivity now! There is TONS of opportunity, but we can’t get to it.  We cannot hire people (fast enough). Our staff want a nicer situation (or they will…) Again, this means that we need to use the staff we have to maximum effect.   Part of that is making the game more fun. *** How can Scrum help? Here are 4 short answers.  (We will address these at greater length in another post.) Scrum enables a Team to adjust quickly to changing information, and, under uncertainty, deliver better on the 80-20 concept. That i ..read more

This is the 3rd of 4 parts. Part 1 starts things. ________________________________ Now we come to a harder meeting. The Sprint Review. It is hard because no one in this team is used to showing anything completed in two weeks. They are often used to showing Powerpoints. Vaporware. “Thoughts.” With knowledge workers or managers, when they show this stuff, can you tell if you have made any progress? Of course they say they have done excellent work. Meaningless. How do you know? You don’t. Sometimes they have actually made tons of progress. Other times, the progress is negative. Very hard to know ..read more

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One reason: Managers need to learn about Scrum. They can take a course, but they also need the ‘reality’ of being in a real Scrum Team. (Real does not have to mean a software dev team.) Another important reason: Managers can be more effective in a multi-functional Scrum Team. Often, we need to help them be more effective. Now, the purpose of this post is to learn. Start to define this idea; kick it around, and see how it might be improved or be more useful. This idea may not be totally figured out. In fact, my main purpose ..read more

Many of the readers know Scrum. Scrum is a bare framework, but it does talk a bit about leadership. Some examples regarding leadership: 1. The Product Owner (PO) is the final prioritizer of the Product Backlog By this I mean that anyone (Team member or business stakeholder or customer, etc) can have an opinion, and offer that thinking.  But because these people seldom agree, the PO must make the “final” call.  In some sense it is never final final, but you get the idea. The decision-making authority puts that person, to some degree, in the role of leader. 2. The PO must inspire the T ..read more

There are two main things to say about a ScrumMaster. The SM is a servant leader. The SM is the impediment-remover-in-chief. With this latter one, we are saying that the SM is not the only one who can remove impediments (the rest of the Team, Managers, people outside the company could all help do that).  But, for the Team, the SM is the main person driving that — making sure it is always happening.  And getting tremendous results.  Or at least keeping the Team winning the Super Bowl every year (you see what I mean). But for now, let’s turn to servant leadership. Note: Robert G ..read more

In Scrum, the whole team is supposed to self-organize. By “whole team” we mean all seven people, the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the “Doers.” They always self-organize — well, we can’t say they always do it successfully. Occasionally they do not self-organize well, but they did self-organize, kind of, given the conditions they were in. I guess we should say quickly that there can be many reasons why a team does not self-organize well, and these reasons or conditions can be inside the team or outside the team. But let’s not talk about the negative cases. I want to focus on the positive ..read more

The Harvard Business Review has three new resources on Agile now. The original classic article is “The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi and Nonaka. The first of three new resources is here. This is by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Rigby is with Bain, Sutherland is the co-creator of Scrum and Takeuchi is a business school leader (now at Harvard) who also co-wrote “The New New Product Development Game.” Key Topics: Learn How Agile Really Works Understand Where Agile Does or Does Not Work Start Small and Let the Word Spread Allow “Master” Teams to Customiz ..read more

You know, of course, that Scrum is named for the Scrum formation in rugby. Generally, Takeuchi and Nonaka were inspired by the ‘rugby’ they saw in several great companies and how they created new product innovation. Sutherland and Schwaber read that article in HBR titled “The New New Product Development Game.” That was a key point to creating Scrum. Here’s where we are, I think: “Life is hard, life is confusing and I can never tell if I am making progress. It starts to be no fun, no real people to talk to usefully, no way to see if we are making progress. I am always late and it all seems nev ..read more

This is the last of 4 parts. See here for the first part. Links to all four parts are there, or search to the right. __________________________________ Retrospective. Again, telling the truth here can be difficult. The whole MST comes to this meeting at the end of every Sprint. For a two-week Sprint, maybe two hours. The purpose: To get better. What do we do in the meeting? We discuss the good and the bad. Some of the bad gets added to the impediment list (a list of things we want to fix or mitigate to make things work better here). I suggest we give the SM (the ScrumMaster for the team) a 10 ..read more