Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC
Pete BehrensAgile Leadership Coach
@petebehrenstrailridgeconsulting.com
Death by Scrum Meeting @ Agile2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC
Stories and pictures from around the US and more...Friday, August 13, 2010
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What challenges are you facing?
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Its about leadership
of people
and environments
P = (p,e)Derby, 2009
Its not about meetings...
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The JourneyFocus Visualize Engage
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FocusContext Matters
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Why was Scrum created?
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Teams & Timeboxes
Focus & Feedback
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Scru
m M
eetin
gs
Sprint Planning
Sprint Review
Daily Scrum
Sprint Retrospective
Release Planning
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Does Scrum have too many meetings?
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Meetings are boring and ineffective
They drive the culture of an organization
Lencioni doesnt think there are too many meetings, but...
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They lack contextor focus
Meetings are ineffective
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StrategicQuarterly
TacticalBi-weekly
Daily
Focus/FrequencyLencionis
recommendation
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Scru
m M
eetin
gs
Sprint Planning
Sprint Review
Daily Scrum
Sprint Retrospective
Release PlanningStrategicQuarterly
TacticalBi-weekly
Daily
Focus/Frequency Meeting
Looks alot like Scrum...
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0
4
8
12
16
1 2 3 4
hour
s
Sprint Length (in weeks)
Planning
Review
Retrospective
Daily Scrum
Most complaints come from too much time...
10%
Keep meeting time under 10%
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0
4
8
12
16
1 2 3 4
hour
s
Sprint Length (in weeks)
PlanningReviewRetrospectiveDaily Scrum
Sprint Meeting Time
10%
In order to reduce sprint meeting times and increase meeting effectiveness, a number of things need to be addressed - Strategy, Visualization and Engagement. Each of these will be addressed in this presentation.
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Sprint Planning
Sprint Review
Daily Scrum
Sprint Retrospective
Release Planning
Scru
m M
eetin
gsStrategicQuarterly
TacticalBi-weekly
Daily 5-15 min
15-30 min
30-60 min
60-120 min
120-240 min
Meeting DurationFocus/Frequency
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Sprint Planning
Sprint Review
Daily Scrum
Sprint Retrospective
Release Planning
Scru
m M
eetin
gs
5-15 min
15-30 min
30-60 min
60-120 min
120-240 min
Meeting Duration
30-60 min
60-120 min
60-120 min
240-960 min
0 minS*
*t fa
lls d
own
When we skip strategy, everything falls apart
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Story: The 1 hour daily
With a two week release cycle, often teams are just focused on the immediate work. In this case, it turned every day into a 1 hour daily meeting. Create a quarterly release cycle to address strategy, which will focus each sprint more clearly. Use the sprint planning to address the tactical, and only the daily for immediate coordination issues.
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Story: The stealth release
Even with a 3 year development release, as in the case of this medical device company, create quarterly release milestones for focus and feedback. Here they are engaging actual physicians, clinicians and IT administrators in a milestone internal release.
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Story: Creating a rhythm
Create a daily, sprint and release rhythm to keep the flow, focus and feedback. In this case, Salesforce.com has created a seasonal release timeline with monthly corporate sprint cycles and 2 week team sprint cycles. They have met release deadlines for 3 straight years.
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FocusConclusion: Meeting Context Matters
Meetings are critical to collaboration/coordination of teams focusing on work in short productive sprints
Spend more time on strategy every quarter
If Sprint and Daily meetings are long - typically indicates that strategy was not addressed properly
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Why is strategy so hard and often left out?
Because its not hard-wired
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VisualizeOur potential is just being realized
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Prefrontal CortexMemorizing
UnderstandingDecidingRecalling
Inhibiting
PFC
Small
LimitedHungry
The PFC is a relatively new development in the brain. It is the primary thinking part of our brain. Unfortunately, it is very small and can only hold about 4 items at a time. To do more complex thinking, memory swapping and complex maps allow it to process more. However, this uses a lot of energy within the brain and degrades throughout the day of using it.
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Visual Cortex
EfficientPowerfulEvolved
VCStore, recall, linkImages
We think in pictures
Helper
The VC is one of the most powerful elements of our brain and can help our PFC. The brain stores either visual or auditory maps - however the auditory maps are also relatively new to language development and therefore much less powerful. In order to help our thinking, we must do more to incorporate the visual cortex to help people see the space we are working in.
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Problems vs. Solutions
Problems are hard-wired
Solutions are not
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Thinking inside the
box
Known problems
Current solutions
Our brain only stores what we have seen and created. Therefore, when we think, we mostly think about things we have seen before or know about. This is what we call thinking inside the box. To create new solutions, it requires our PFC to form new ideas from existing ones.
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New Solutions Must be
Envisioned
This depicts the eyes seeing a picture, using the VC to visualize it in the brain, then through the PFC, moving the pieces around to form new configurations. Doing this almost always engages the visual cortex. The more we can external engage the visual cortext in meetings will help our teams think outside the box.
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Do you play planning poker?
Why? When?
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Planning poker relies primarily on the auditory brain
While Planning Poker is an excellent way to engage team members in conversation around a story, they tend to limit the visual cortex. Not being able to see the stories in context of each other creates silod thinking. We will see other ways to visualize story points.
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Do you use User Stories?
User Stories are another primarily auditory communication that can invoke the visual cortex.
However, the noise involved in all of the other words within the User Story tend to obscure the picture and it looks like static.
One technique is to highlight key words or phrases to separate the key points from the noise to help the brain visualize it more clearly.
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Use titles and underline words in User Stories.
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Categorize and Color Backlogs
To help the PFC process more easily, categorize the backlog in themes. Color coding themes also helps the brain visually distinguish work, especially when cards are moved around for sizing and prioritization. Here you see that only titles are used - no user stories. This is a quarterly strategy session output - a release backlog.
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Stories
Roles
Areas
ReleaseGoal
Before the quarterly strategy release planning session...
Before their quarterly release strategy session, they had a release goal and some proposed User Stories for the roles and product areas.
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Stories
AcceptanceCriteria
Roles
Spikes
After a quarterly strategy release planning session...
Working as a team, they discussed the known stories, created and split other stories, discussed acceptance criteria, and filled in all of the holes in their knowledge with spikes to go research. This was a strategy session for one quarter of their 3 year product release. In addition, roles and product areas are visualized in a grid to help isolate functionality and usability.
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Visualize Size
A more effective visualization approach to estimating size is to use an affinity-based estimation technique. Just arrange backlog items smallest to largest, then bucket into story points. The team does this collaboratively moving them around a table or on a wall.
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Visualize Time
This is a 6 month release cycle with multiple themes represented. Each story has been estimated and prioritized. The dates are only approximations, but will be validated and negotiated through actual velocity.
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Visualize Time
Another time visualization with various themes represented. In this case, they have separated what their two quarter goals are and will track accordingly.
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Visualize Assignments
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Visualize Goals
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Visualize Dependencies
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Visualize Strategy
To support their seasonal release rhythm, Salesforce.com has a multi-team (30-60 teams) coordinate all of their strategy release sessions together. This helps identify shared goals, collaboration and dependencies across teams and product areas.
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Visualize Dependencies
Here is a picture of evaluating some of the technical dependencies between teams.
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VisualizeConclusion: In order to run effective meetings, visualize as much as possible to help people see new solutions
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EngageUnleash the power of the organization
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Organizational PatternsAll organizations have communication patterns based on their structures - roles, responsibilities, and environments. This chart shows communication of a development process - brighter red is more central in communication.
In this case, there are two patterns present which are limiting effectiveness - the number of roles is large and the manager roles are central in the communication path.
Through changing the structure of the organization, we can impact their effectiveness in productivity and meetings.
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0
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Harrison, 2004
% C
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# Organization Roles
Roles and communication
Because there are so many roles in this organization, their communication saturation is very low - this measures the actual role-to-role communication versus their potential. To increase communication, and thus meeting effectiveness, they need to reduce their roles and re-locate their producer-type roles into the center of the communication.
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Team StructureHere is another communication map from a different company. In this case the number of roles is much less and the developer is at the center of the communication, but there is still a very limited communication saturation.
In this case, team structure was central to their communication. As this team was modeled, each developer was responsible for a different product set. There was very little shared development, learning or growing within the organization.
Friday, August 13, 2010
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Harrison, 2004
% C
omm
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# Organization Roles
Reducing roles increases communication
Through some team and product focus restructuring, the team was able to not only increase their communication saturation as shown in this picture, but also increase their productivity and quality. In this case, they were formed into two Scrum teams which funneled multiple product backlogs into their work queue.
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0
21
42
63
84
105
35
79
11
13
15
Team Communication
Cut the team in half
Cut
com
m. b
y 5x
In order to increase effectiveness on a team, and therefore make meetings more effective, team size and the number of roles in an organization is critical. By reducing a team in half, you can reduce the number of communication paths by a factor of 5. Smaller teams are just more efficient, they are much more efficient.
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Team Size and Distribution
Many companies leverage offshore development. However, one of the strongest at this is McKinsey & Company as presented through two reports at Agile 2009. In one case, they reduced onshore-offshore team size from 9 to an onshore team of 3 with improved productivity. In another case, they restructured their support and architecture organizations into a Scrum team to reduce support costs by a factor of 4.
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Visual Sprint Planning
This team uses whiteboard walls to fully immerse into their sprint planning. After printing out their User Stories from Rally, they post them on the wall and then begin to discuss, diagram, split, share, write tasks, communicate, etc. After all of that is complete, they bring in their laptops and write the tasks back in Rally. Sprint planning in less than an hour.
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Through using themes and stores represented on cards, the team is fully engaged in a visual release planning session. It is through this hands on approach that begins to transition the ownership of the release from management to the team members. The team will identify all stories within a theme, size and prioritize them visually.
Visual Release Planning
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Viasually Engaged
Teams are more engaged when there is a visual representation of their work. When teams are engaged, they share more ownership and responsibility in the result. To transfer ownership from managers and ScrumMasters to team members, give the team something to hold do and own.
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Team Immersion Visual & Engaged
Wireless Generation has one of the best team and meeting environments available. Their office space is a warehouse-like open shell with team pods throughout. Each team pod has their visual release and sprint backlogs, space for the team members to work, and space for the team members to hold ALL of their meetings. Environments help make or break meeting effectiveness.
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EngageConclusion: Evaluate Organization and Team Patterns to
effect their performance and meeting effectiveness
In each of these cases, the organizational and team structures played a key role in a teams ability to be effective in delivering value. This is directly impacted by their meeting effectiveness. So when looking at meeting effectiveness, it is necessary to look beyond the meeting behaviors.
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Summary
To run effective meetings which drive productive and effective teams, separate the strategic and tactical context and create a quarterly strategic planning session.Visualize the work as much as possible to help the team foster new thinking and new solutions. Visualization also helps speed up the meeting.Finally, evaluate the organizational patterns of roles and team structures to create effective teams which can communicate, collaborate and engage.
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Thank you
Pete Behrens@petebehrens
Friday, August 13, 2010
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