Scrum Master

Or

Agile Master

SAIKAT DAS

SA, SASM, KMP, CSP, CSD, CSM, DAD-Yellow Belt,

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” --- more emphasis towards the right part

‘tools and technologies’ now due to -- Distributed Development and DevOps Automation

“Working software over comprehensive documentation” – Delivering incremental working software

is not enough. Teams now deliver a complete usable business functions at regular cadence.

“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” – Developing solution not only require

communication and collaboration with customer/end-users, but a whole lot of other stakeholders

“Responding to change over following a plan” Agile ways of working are all about planning with

a range of reoccurring planning events

Eclipsed Agile Values ??

Ken Schwaber In an interview in February 2008

The intention of Scrum is to make every inadequacy or dysfunction in product Development

transparent.

Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the those instead of solving

them.”

I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in

getting the benefits that they hope for from it.

1. Does Scrum really expose the dysfunctions to be seen? Do we need Lean-Thinking ?.

2. Second, why do “many organizations change Scrum to accommodate exposed problem

instead of solving them”?

Is management incompetent, unmotivated?

- Alan Shalloway CEO, Net Objectives

Are we Change Ready?

• Organizational Change

• Leadership Change

• Team Change

• Status Change

• Job Description Change

• Role Change

• Culture Change

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eClear Team Vision, Sprint goal or focus, good quality User stories?

Scrum board up to date to make our work visible and transparent?

A dashboard to communicate to others the status of progress?

Does the team feel recognized and valuable?

Does the team, want to work with you again?

Do you Measure and shift Focus?

By knowing WHY we do what we do that…. we can do our best work, Scrum Masters ensures that this basic enabler of team performance is clear.

Help the team define their purpose, so that the team finds their own definition of success

It Is Important To Try New Things and

adapt your practices

The team you worked with yesterday

is not the same you will work with tomorrow

Clarity on how to think, without clarity on how to act,

leaves people unmoved. – Daniel H Pink

Measure all the things, keep notes and see the big picture

Get numbers on everything to see

trends and flagging

Look at metrics that show you how the “system” behaves so that you can help the team

understand their own context.

Crunch information to see Risk and

plan to mitigate, absorb or transfer

Categorize details to have broader

view to the areas of impact

Pick the high priority issue/risk/

impediment/blocker to work upon

Is that what is meant by self-organization as it pertains to agile?

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No managers; team decide

what problems to solve or

what product to build.

No constraints –

tooling, architectural ,

budget, timing

Team decides the team and work to be done.

Just facilitate and watch

Shift focus to the team

dynamics,

organizational

impediments,

interaction with

stakeholders, etc.

Once Team “Owns” the

process the Scrum Master

role is not over it grows

beyond

Agile is simply about managing (and shortening) your feedback cycles

Our methods must keep pace with an increasingly complex world

• Agile shows the greatest promise but was

developed for small teams

• We need a new approach, one that

harnesses the power of Agile and Lean and

applies to the needs of the largest

development Enterprises

Decentralize decision-

making

Take an economic

view

Apply systems thinking

Assume variability; preserve optionsBuild incrementally with

fast, integrated learning cycles Visualize and limit WIP,

reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths

Base milestones

on objective evaluation of working

systems

Apply cadence,

synchronize with

cross-domain

planning

Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

Lean – Agile Principles

© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“Understanding economics requires understanding of the interaction amongst multiple variables.”

Taking an economic view does not always require knowing “dollarized value” but is rather a general thinking tool

Define the economic logic behind decisions; empower individuals and teams to actually make them

Validate key decisions based on how they impact the

Five variables

Indicators that may have surprisingly high economic impact in the long run:

1. Cost of late defect fixing

2. Cost of branching with late merge

3. Cost of delayed performance testing

4. Cost of large batch of cross-team dependencies

5. Economic value of test automation

6. Economic value of “Enablers,” such as research spikes, refactors, etc.

• Severe project slippage is the most likely result• The most important batch is the transport (handoff)

batch• Proximity (collocation) enables small batch size• Good infrastructure enables small batches

Systems thinkingComplex systems development requires disciplined, systematic systems thinking

Optimizing a component does not optimize the system

The value of a system passes through its interconnections

A system can evolve no faster than its

slowest integration point

Understand and optimize the full

Value Stream

Most inefficiencies and impediments in your process will

surface themselves as delays in value delivery

Consider all steps as part of the Value Stream, including

definition, analysis, validation, and delivery

Customers and Suppliers are part of

your Value Stream

Establish a culture of continuous improvement of

the full Value Stream

The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course

• How large is your product

backlog? .

• Typical age of a user story in the

product backlog?

• Average lead time from an idea

to the backlog to delivery?

• Backlog with user stories team is

not familiar with?

• Frequency of Product Backlog

grooming?

• No. of user stories worked in

parallel during backlog

grooming?

The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course

• Time to groom a typical user

story take?

• How are you creating user

stories?

• Where are you discussing user

stories?

• Do you apply a “definition of

ready” standard to your user

stories? If so, of what ?

• Who is writing acceptance

criteria and in what format

• How are you estimating the

likely effort of a user story?

The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course

• Estimating in man-hours or story

points?

• Typical distribution of story sizes

in your sprint backlogs?

• Are you re-estimating user

stories at the end of a sprint?

• Velocity of the last three

sprints?

• Unfinished user stories within a

sprint and for what reasons?

• Are you changing user stories

once they become an item of a

sprint backlog?

The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course

• Obstacles the team is facing

today?

• Dependencies on other teams

• Define and discuss at least three

key team goals for the project.

• What do team members hope to

achieve with this project?

• What can we do as a team to

make sure that we support each

other to achieve our team

goals?

• How should we celebrate success

for achieving our goals?

Linkedin - https://in.linkedin.com/in/saikatdas16Twitter - @dsaikats