The APS Advantage: Exploring Professional Scrum Mastery
Navigating the Scrum world, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the weight of the Applied Professional Scrum (APS). 🚀
From my own explorations and experiences, I’ve discerned a few elements that stand out, pushing this approach to the forefront for those yearning for genuine Scrum mastery.
Rooted in the Fundamentals
Let me clarify a conviction I’ve long held about Scrum: “You must have a working, usable product at the end of every iteration, including the first.” 💡
Without this, as I see it, we’re meandering away from the heart of agility. We unequivocally need those tangible, working products.
Why? They’re our foundation.
They let us test, refine, and solicit the pivotal feedback that steers our path.
Scrum Myths and Reality: The Tale of the Barnacles
I often recount this analogy that takes inspiration from the world of sailing. Think of a boat accumulating barnacles over time. Those very barnacles, while small, can dramatically slow it down.
Similarly, Scrum teams, especially those that have been in the game for a while, often acquire practices - or ‘barnacles’ if you will - that, over time, can become more of a hindrance than a help.
These might be practices introduced to patch up a momentary issue or perhaps to meet a specific organisational demand.
But, as I often point out, “Scrum picks up a bunch of barnacles.”
The challenge is recognising when these have outstayed their welcome.
In my view, APS offers that necessary lens to “scrape off those barnacles,” differentiating the core principles of Scrum from the extraneous ones we’ve picked up along the way.
Interactive Reflection: The APS’s Barnacle Exercise
One of the standout elements of the APS sessions I guide is this introspective exercise I’ve affectionately named the “Barnacle Exercise.”
Its design is straightforward: to aid teams, whether rookies on their Scrum voyage or seasoned sailors, in identifying and ultimately shedding their ‘barnacles’.
When we collaborate closely with specific organisations, this takes on an added layer, culminating in creating an “organisational change backlog.”
It’s essentially an agile transformation blueprint crafted by those knee-deep in the work each day. 🔄
The Ultimate Goal: Crafting True Professional Scrum Teams
As I’ve seen and believed, the soul of APS is its unwavering commitment to equipping teams with the right expertise and tools. 🎯
The aim?
To create teams that don’t just ‘do’ Scrum but truly embody it - authentically and proficiently.
Embark on the APS Odyssey with Me
If Scrum is your chosen path, and you’re seeking to optimise each step, I invite you to join me in the APS realm. 🌟
Engage, learn, transform. For those keen on exploring Agile further or simply keen to share their own Scrum tales, let’s connect.
Reach out via Naked Agility, and let’s pen your Scrum success saga together.
The EPS prepares a team for professional Scrum and by really doubling down on those core fundamentals of Scrum you must have a working usable product at the end of every iteration, including the first. If you don’t, there’s no agility there if we don’t have working usable products, right? Because we need to be able to test and get feedback from that.
What else is really important from the EPS? One of the most powerful features of the APS, which is why it actually is super effective for existing teams as well, like teams that are already doing Scrum, is that level set of what is and is not Scrum. Quite often in our organisation, we pick up Scrum, we learn Scrum, we’ve been doing Scrum for a little bit within our organisation, and it picks up a bunch of barnacles. I don’t know, well, I go with a sailing metaphor. Yeah, let’s go with the sailing metaphor. My brother sails; he does races across the channel in the UK from England over to France. I don’t think he’s come second once, but you know, these are really, really heavy races.
The thing is, anything that goes in the water that slows down the boat, that slows down the stream of water, because he’s dragged, right? Even the smallest amount of drag can severely impact your place over a race. Barnacles are the bane of the ships—not ships, sailboats, boats. You can tell I’m not an expert sailor, right? But the barnacles get on the side and then they cause drag. That’s what happens when you’ve been doing Scrum for a while in your organisation; it picks up a bunch of barnacles, right? Stuff that gets stuck onto it at some point because you needed to solve a problem, because your organisation didn’t do things in a way that was as effective as it could be.
So we have to stick this thing into Scrum. Maybe that thing was user stories or story points, or maybe that thing was, I don’t know, we’re going to have a burndown, or it could be some other report that your organisation really, really wanted, so you had to capitulate for, and then it’s just kind of stuck there. Maybe it’s outlived its usefulness, but we as a team think of it as part of that overall package because when we say Scrum within our organisation, that’s what we mean—the whole package, including all the barnacles that we’ve had attached to our process.
So the EPS is a great place to come and scrape off those barnacles, right? What are the things that are and are not core to Scrum? Because everything else is a choice. So how do we disambiguate the choices that we’ve made from Scrum itself so that perhaps there’s other choices that are maybe more effective now than they were before?
One of my favourite exercises at the end of the class is where can we—I kind of have a choice, and I let teams decide, the groups decide. They can either do a kind of getting started because we’re not doing Scrum and we want to figure out how do we get started doing Scrum in our organisation, and then there’s a kind of barnacle exercise, right? Which is how do we improve, like a little retrospective on our implementation of Scrum to start at least identifying the barnacles that we have in our Scrum process within our organisation and then figuring out how to address them a little bit, right? That’s a great exercise.
If we do it privately within organisations, there’s an additional exercise that I run, which is the people in the class create an organisational change backlog. What needs to be in an organisational change backlog to make Scrum successful or more successful or valid within our organisation? Really, it’s an agile transformation backlog from the people who are actually doing the work, right? What are their problems going to be? Hopefully, there’s leadership available who are able to take ownership of that and take it forward.
We do that mainly in the private classes, not so much in the public ones, right? Because it doesn’t make sense if you get 20 people from 20 different companies. That is how the APS effectively prefers teams to be professional Scrum teams.
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