ScrumMaster Show-n-Tell
I had been at a client engagement where there are several teams that have introduced Scrum and making great progress over the last several Sprints. I had not visited the client for about a week, and needed a way to get up to date quickly on what is happening on each of teams. I knew that I would need to talk to each ScrumMaster for more of the conversation, but wanted to be as informed as possible going into those conversations.
Each of their teams have a common area where they conduct their Daily Scrum (standup). These team areas have different information radiators (or large visible charts) that help the ScrumMaster and team track progress during the Sprint. They have electronic tools for much of this information but have found it valuable to maintain on walls so the focus is on conversations during the daily meetings and not focused staring at a tool. The visibility of the walls also provides the ability for stakeholders to walk around the organization and see progress without having to get into a tool that they are unfamiliar with. Instead of questions on how to use the tool, they spent that time walking around and asking questions to people on how things are going based on the information they see on the walls. For coaches, the team spaces have been invaluable to see what is going on across all teams and determine what conversations to have and where support is needed.
However, this time I felt a little different as I went around looking at all of the team areas. While some of the task boards gave me most of the information I was looking for, not all of them did. In fact, some of the task boards had become difficult to understand, some looked a few days out of date, and for somebody looking across team areas there was a enough of a level of inconsistency that it became difficult to find all of the information I was looking for.
Now, if I were a manager or the “process police”, I may have had the tendency to send an email (or even more formally a procedure document) stating that there were inconsistencies and that those were “bad”. Then, there would have been requirements spelled out to define a “good” team area and procedures in place to make sure changes are implemented immediately and that this kind of thing never happens again. I would have said something crazy like “Your team areas are not Scrum or Agile, and you need to fix it”. Sound familiar?
As a coach, especially a Scrum coach, I have a different perspective. I know that some inconsistency is ok, in fact diversity is what will drive a self-managed team as you take advantage of the unique skills and experiences of each team member. I want the teams to come up with team areas that work well for them. I want these areas to reflect the personalities of the team members, and is part of the identify of the team. Therefore, there is an expectation that they will have some differences. I also know that forcing something to happen wasn’t going to work, instead each ScrumMaster must see the value themselves of any changes they would make. Forcing would only cause resistance, and resistance would kill any creativity. I don’t want to lose creativity. In fact, there are several things that I really liked about the team areas that came from the team members or the ScrumMaster that I thought were pretty clever. If only there was a way for others to see for themselves what I was seeing….
My thoughts took me to back to my days in elementary school and how they encouraged sharing of knowledge – “Show-n-Tell”. I remember as a student (and later as a parent as my son participated), how excited I would get about the prospects of sharing something of mine with other students. How proud I would be, and how much I wanted others to appreciate what I brought. The time I would take to find just the right thing to share. I had fond memories of those events. I also thought about the retrospectives that come at the end of each iteration, and that Scrum is an empirical-based process focused on inspecting and adapting. Take the learnings you just experienced and with that new knowledge making things better in the future.
So, why not combine the two? I rounded up the ScrumMasters after morning standups and had them take a tour with me around the organization. We visited each team area and I posed the following questions to them: 1) What do you like about what you see and why?, 2) What is missing or hard to understand and why?, 3) What improvements would you make to the area and why? The ScrumMaster for the team area would be there to answer questions and provide context. Other ScrumMasters would answer the three questions. I found all people taking a LOT of notes. For all, they found the event very fun and exciting and felt that they learned a lot. As a result, they identified all of the challenges that I was having in looking at the team areas. They also discovered some other challenges that I understood but took for granted since I had worked directly for the teams. Some information wasn’t as useful if you were outside the team but improvements were suggested that would be valuable to outside stakeholders. This encouraged each ScrumMaster to make the necessary changes based on others’ feedback.
As I walk around now, this event made all of the team areas much more valuable to all concerned. While they haven’t done another “show-n-tell” like this, they are now working directly with other on sharing new ideas and providing feedback to each other. Before this event, they hadn’t even looked at the other team areas! Now they use them as a basis for cross-learning and improvement across the organization.
I wonder what would have happened if directives or enforced procedural changes were sent down from above. On second thought, I think I already know the answer to that.
Tags: change, coaching, improvement, scrummasters