Reflecting on Scrum’s Mirror
There’s an old adage often echoed by agile enthusiasts: Scrum is like a mirror. But what does this mirror reveal?
And why is this revelation so valuable?
Let’s delve into the intricacies of Scrum, a methodology that doesn’t necessarily solve problems but illuminates them, offering a pathway to innovative solutions.
The Essence of Scrum: A Mirror to Organizational Challenges
Embarking on the Scrum journey requires an understanding of its core principles. Scrum is fundamentally a framework that emphasises iterative progress, collaboration, and feedback. It’s not just a set of rules but a mindset that transforms the way organisations approach problem-solving.
Unpacking Scrum: More Than Just a Methodology
Delving into the nuances of Scrum, it becomes evident that it extends beyond being just a methodology, serving instead as a transformative approach to project management and team collaboration.
🤔 Understanding Scrum’s Nature: At its heart, Scrum is straightforward. A team works together towards a shared objective, taking on a piece of work, building it, and then delivering it. This cycle is repeated, with each iteration informed by the feedback received from the previous one.
💡 A Continuous Learning Path: Scrum encourages learning and adapting. It’s like teaching a child to walk – they observe, try, fall, and get back up. Scrum instils a similar mindset in organizations, urging them to learn from their experiences and continually improve.
Reflecting on the Way We Work
Scrum, often likened to a mirror, meticulously reflects the intricacies of our work processes, exposing bottlenecks and inefficiencies that may otherwise go unnoticed.
🪞 A Mirror to Work Dynamics: Scrum acts as a mirror reflecting the dynamics of an organization’s work processes. It doesn’t prescribe unreasonable tasks but reveals how teams function and collaborate.
🧐 Probing the Seemingly Simple: While Scrum may seem simple, implementing it can often be challenging. Why? Because it reflects the inherent complexities and blockages in an organization’s workflow.
Scrum’s Agile Approach: A Symphony of Collaboration
Scrum orchestrates a harmonious symphony of collaboration, leveraging Agile principles to ensure that diverse roles and functions seamlessly converge towards achieving shared objectives.
🎼 Harmony in Diversity: Scrum values diverse roles – the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Development Team – and brings them together in a harmonious symphony of collaboration.
🌟 Emphasising Common Goals: By highlighting the common goal, Scrum fosters a sense of unity and purpose among team members.
The Value of Transparency and Inspection
Emphasising openness and regular scrutiny, Scrum underscores the importance of transparency and inspection in fostering an environment of continuous improvement and accountability.
🌈 Transparent Processes: Scrum’s essence lies in promoting transparency. Every team member has a clear understanding of their responsibilities, progress, and potential roadblocks.
🔎 Regular Inspections: Regular meetings, such as Sprint Reviews and Daily Stand-ups, ensure that the work is continually inspected and adapted as necessary.
🤔 Understanding Scrum’s Nature: Scrum isn’t about presenting unreasonable demands. It’s about working collaboratively towards a common goal, iteratively building, and delivering work while incorporating feedback.
Scrum Roles and Responsibilities
Clarifying expectations and functions, the delineation of roles and responsibilities within Scrum ensures a cohesive and efficient workflow that drives projects towards success.
🚀 Adopting Scrum: Organisations often turn to Scrum when facing delivery struggles. Yet, implementing Scrum often unveils unexpected hurdles.
📜 Bureaucratic Barriers: Trying to ship a product may expose bureaucratic processes, like filling out numerous forms, inhibiting swift deployment.
Importance of Sprint Planning: Unravelling Hidden Hitches
Sprint planning, a pivotal phase in Scrum, acts as a detective, unravelling potential challenges and hitches that, if left unchecked, could derail progress.
🧩 Example from Merrill Lynch: The requirement of paperwork six weeks before a deployment became a mirror, revealing the need for a procedural overhaul.
🏆 Continuous Delivery: Embracing continuous delivery exposed organizational black marks, highlighting the need for strong leadership to support innovative processes.
The Power of Daily Stand-ups: Revealing Communication Gaps
The ritual of Daily Stand-ups serves as a powerful tool within Scrum, revealing communication gaps and ensuring a consistent flow of information among team members.
🤝 Staying Connected: Daily stand-ups are meant to foster collaboration, but sometimes they reveal communication siloes and roadblocks.
✅ Feedback Loops: Kids learn to walk by continually trying and falling. Similarly, organizations should embrace the feedback loop Scrum offers.
Sprint Review and Retrospective Insights: Learning from Reflection
Through Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives, Scrum facilitates a culture of reflection, enabling teams to learn from their experiences and continually refine their strategies.
🔍 Mirror to Organizational Rules: Scrum can reveal how established rules may hinder progress and prompt organizations to reevaluate their practices.
🔄 Scrum’s Challenging Role: Scrum challenges rules, urging organizations to question established norms that inhibit innovation.
How Scrum’s Revelations Are Invaluable
Scrum’s ability to unearth underlying issues and bring them to the forefront is invaluable, acting as a catalyst for organisational change and process optimisation.
🌟 Exposing Problems for Resolution: Scrum doesn’t solve problems; it points them out, triggering mechanisms to rectify issues.
🎯 The Art of the Negative: Scrum stresses what you can’t do, urging organizations to find solutions.
How-to Advice: Turning Revelations into Solutions
Armed with insights gleaned from Scrum’s revelations, teams are better positioned to devise effective solutions, turning challenges into opportunities for growth and innovation.
🌱 Foster a Problem-Solving Culture: Instead of accepting a “can’t do” attitude, encourage discussions around how to navigate barriers.
🛠️ Leverage Scrum for Business Goals: Ensure every department understands that Scrum’s revelations aim to support the business in making money.
In conclusion, Scrum acts as a mirror, revealing problems rather than solving them. By highlighting these issues it pushes organisations to innovate and iterate towards effective solutions. The revelations brought about by Scrum are the first step towards fostering a resilient, adaptable, and successful organisation.
So Scrum doesn’t solve problems; it reveals them. How and why is that valuable?
Um, there’s an old adage that Ken Schwaber used to say all the time, and Scrum’s like a mirror. It gives you a way of doing things, and if you can’t do it that way, why? That’s your mirror, right? What is the thing? Because it doesn’t sound unreasonable, right? There’s nothing unreasonable in Scrum. You have a group of people who are working together towards a common goal, right? They’re a team working together towards a common goal. You give them some work, they take a piece of that work, they build that work, and they deliver that work. You take the feedback from people using that work and inform the next thing that you build, and you keep going around that loop, right?
Why is that so hard for organisations? It seems like a no-brainer, right? We do it all the time. How did your kids learn to walk? They fell over a lot, and they kept picking themselves up and kept trying. They would see other people doing those things, right? They could see other people doing those things—the walking. I want to do that. For my daughter, we bought squeaky shoes. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these squeaky shoes. That’s basically shoes with a squeaker in it, and when you walk, it goes “squeak.” She loved that noise, so she learned to walk at nine months with those shoes on, and she was running down concrete concourses on holiday with those shoes.
And it’s just that mirror that other people are doing it. You have some incentive to do it, and then you get the outcome, right? Most organisations move to adopting Scrum because they’re struggling to deliver, right? They’ve failed in some way to achieve the desirable outcome, and people are like, “Oh, this sucks. Why is this taking so long? Why are we building the wrong thing? How do we build the right thing?” And somebody’s like, “Well, there’s this Agile thing that people are talking about. They seem to be talking about these short feedback loops, delivering more value, maximising that amount of—oh, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that.” And then you go to try and do it in your organisation, and suddenly all these mirrors pop up and say, “You know, you go to try the simplest one ever. You go to try and ship your product to production, and what happens? The mirror pops up and says, ‘You can’t ship to production. I’m sorry, you have to fill out these 14 forms, and you have to fill them out a minimum of six weeks in advance before you do a deployment.’ There you go.”
Well, there’s something we need to fix, right? That’s the first thing we need to fix. That’s an example. I used to work at Merrill Lynch, and that’s exactly—if we didn’t submit all the paperwork six weeks before a deployment, it was considered an emergency deployment, and every emergency deployment got a black mark against your name in the hierarchy of departments. If you get too many black marks at a particular level, then leadership comes down to slap people around and say, “Why are you doing this?”
The group that I worked for, because we were trying to do ideal delivery, we were doing continuous delivery, right? So we were maybe shipping twice a day. We had more black marks than any other part of the organisation. I think it was—somebody said it as we had more black marks than the whole rest of the organisation combined, right? Because we were generating two or three of them a day, and that was just my products. There were other products in our group as well.
So that then disincentivises people to do the right thing, right? Why is the rest of the organisation not doing continuous delivery? Well, because they’re not willing to just go, “Yeah, whatever, your black marks,” right? They didn’t have strong enough leadership who says to the rest of the organisation, “No, this is fine. We’re okay with this level of black marks. This is perfectly acceptable, and we’re getting the value we need. This is okay.”
And why did that exist? Why does that black mark system exist? It’s organisational crap, right? Our organisations build up a whole bunch of rules. I’m going to call them rules. They build up a whole bunch of rules because they did something, it worked well, and they wanted to enshrine that in the way they do things so that they continue to do well.
And that idea worked fantastically when we existed in slow-moving markets, right? And you’ll see the organisations with the most bureaucracy are the organisations that have traditionally existed in the slowest moving markets, right? Governments always had lots of high levels of bureaucracy and rules and procedures. Banks have been around for—well, I think the first bank was, was it not Royal Bank of Scotland? 250 years. There’s still an organisation that still exists. Can you imagine having 250 years of these rules and procedures? I worked with Kongsberg in Norway. That’s a 200-year-old mining company that found diamonds and then got into everything, right? They have all these rules.
So, for example, at Merrill Lynch, I had a rule that the software that I create had to be tested to make sure that it didn’t interfere with the trading desk software if it was installed on the trading desk. But the software I was building was for a small group of people in a call centre who were calling people and had nothing to—not even in the same league as the trading desk folks. So this piece of software would never be installed over there, but yet I had to spend six months in testing and assessment to validate that that was true, even though it was of no relevance whatsoever.
That’s a rule that’s applied across an entire organisation for a very small group. Now, risk mitigation, right? If that software was installed on the trading desk and it interfered with it, maybe that’s hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of risk to the organisation. So they applied it across the board, but there needs to be a reasonableness test, right? There needs to be a reasonable test across all of the organisation’s rules.
So challenge—that’s Scrum’s job. It pops up that mirror and says, “No, you should be able to do this. You should be able to do continuous delivery. You should be able to have an ordered backlog that’s just a list of stuff that you need to do with the most important thing at the top. You should be able to say, ‘Product Owner, here’s the product. You own it. You make the decisions.’ If you can’t do that, there’s a problem for leadership.”
That pops up that mirror immediately. We’ve got to fix this. So the whole purpose of Scrum is not to solve your problems for you; it’s to highlight that you have them in the first place, right? It’s a little trigger mechanism that you can’t do the short feedback loop. You can’t deliver stuff into production. You can’t get working products. You can’t—you can’t—you can’t—you can’t, right? That’s—I don’t know what to call that. Is that the art of the negative? I don’t know. I work with so many organisations where here’s how I would expect the conversation to go, right?
“We need to do this.” “We can’t do this.” “Okay, how? We can’t do it that way, but if you did this and you did that, then you would be able to do it this way.” Or, “Let’s pull in that compliance person that we need to sign off on this so we can make this change because it’s a business need, right? We need to be able to ship more quickly.”
Whereas what really happens in organisations is you go, “Oh, we need to be able to do this,” and the other person goes, “Nope, you can’t do that.” That’s the end of the conversation. How is that supporting the business, right? The whole purpose for every department in your organisation’s existence is to support the business making money. Anything that’s inhibiting the business making money is getting in the way, and you need those mirrors, right?
DevOps pops up those mirrors. Scrum pops up those mirrors. Damn man pops up those mirrors. These are all tools to help you see what’s wrong because the way we do things is the thing that’s getting in the way of actually delivering value.
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