Agile Focus Month(s)

Motivation

As an internal Meta Scrum Master, I wanted to have a clear impact, so that hopefully many things change into a good (sic) direction.

Because we do scrum in a lot of software development teams, its not that widespread in other parts of the value chain. Or is it a value network? A peach? A mushroom?

Stuff I learned before

I learned that non-software teams tend to do a diverse bunch of tasks and are not "able" to focus and create sprint goals. I observed that people split work in their mind into "projects" pretending to switch brains as needed ;) And I learned the hard way (diff story?) that there is always the so called "daily work" and sometimes this is everything and projects is something special that will be done in the remaining 2% of the capacity.

I learned that a PO role is essential even in a short term experiment. Its the question about power. Where it is and where we think, it should be. Its always a hard task but covered in the couriousness of this nice and friendly experiment its a good approach to tackle it.

Next is inviting leadership. Thanks to the german scrum day, I met Daniel Mezick with lots of insights in open space technology. So Invitations are most important. Its really something to emphasize here. It also fits into the basic things according to bas vodde and craig larman. The use of volunteering. The endless power of intrinsic motivated people to change something for the good. You guessed it right, one of the tasks is to concrete the "good" and the "something". ;)

So if I was asked to help a business unit of around 40 people, I asked for volunteers in a small number that fits into one team to do this experiment.

This fits also a bas and craig thing of

> Deep and narrow instead of broad and shallow.

Hopefully.

The Offer

I offered my work as a Scrum Master to a team, so we are able to try out a Scrum approach for one month. Nobody can predict the future whether this approach helps or not. So we set up an experiment and afterwards we know. Like always.

To not slip into zombie scrum, I am in a position where I can set some rules that will come with my offer. Otherwise I would just not offer it.

have 4 one-week-sprints

set up a PO role

bring all the work in

Sprint Zero

Yes. there is no sprint zero. I wanted to start with the experiment with a goal in itself. Having names of my volunteers, I invite them to consent to a driver of this experiment.

its from sociocracy30

Making a round with the volunteers makes it clear, whats the goal and what drives us. Because its a s3-round I am myself part of that so we are all of equal value. If we can express it, then we are ready to start at a certain date to fullfill the rule of min. 4 one-week-sprints in a row.

Head Start

To use Scrum as easy as it is and to make clear that scrum is a start and not a goal, we just start. I invited the team upfront with the task to write all the stuff they know already that they have to do this week and write those tasks on post its. Bringing them in, the first planning is a bit like a collaborative calendar merging.

That way the first planning is an easy one to do, no barriers there. bu then after the question of the sprint goal it gets interesting.

We use the first planning also to plan the exact times of our scrum events. This also needs explanations of the purpouse of each event. Sure, if the people haven't heard of scrum before and more importantly if they are already experienced scrum in a way. Maybe there is a missunderstanding to get uncovered and fixed.

In short the events are:

Planning, what are we up to this week

Daily, the most valueable action the developers want to do there

Review, with the most needed people invited

Retro, psych. safety increasing leading into the "experiment of the week"

The End

At the end, we share our experience with those who are interested to hear it.

The most interest until now was always the "experiments of the week", because if they sound like they would help others so they start experimenting too. And I know already a small framework that fits the purpouse of implementing a clear approach for experiments within an team.

Links

open space paper by mr owen. craig+bas things, my own retro.gmi(german)?

My take on Retros in german

Reflections

For the real results and impacts that we had, I hope my participants want to show that themselves and I like to create the space for that.