Book References
Project Retrospectives - A Handbook for Team Reviews by Norm Kerth
Sort of the “Godfather” of the modern day, agile retrospective is Norm Kerth. I always try and mention norm and his work as a means of giving folks a sense of the pre-Agile legacy of retrospectives. Point being, it pre-dates agile approaches.
The other nice thing about Norm’s work is his notion of “safety” in retrospectives and his Prime Directive. I almost always reference the prime directive at one point or another with each of my clients and in my teaching. It epitomizes the “mindset” of a healthy retrospective.
There’s a trend in the agile community of influencing folks away from saying no, instead saying: “Yes, And…” as a means of connecting various conflicting points together. I wanted to use the same mechanism for the title of this article, because I think we need to start looking at the basic Scrum certifications in a different way, perhaps the same way we view Peanut Butter AND Jelly. Let me try and explain.
I’ve seen an incredibly alarming trend over the last 1-2-3+ years in my coaching. It involves whoever is teaching Certified ScrumMaster classes; whether they be from the Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, or elsewhere.
I encounter quite a few organizations and many teams in my travels. Almost universally they are adopting Scrum and have a few to many CSM’s around to guide the transition.
But I’m finding that the “Scrum” that is being fostered and guided in these organizations leaves a lot to be desired. Often:
I have a good friend and colleague who works in a rather large enterprise. Among others, she’s tasked with bringing “agile” into the organization and “transforming” their work. She’s largely leading the effort, so has a tremendous amount of responsibility for its success.
They’ve chosen Scrum for this effort.
They’ve engaged a rather large agile coaching firm to help them “go Agile”.
So far their strategy has been along the following lines:
- Hire full-time agile coaches
- Do a little training for “Leaders and Managers”, less than a ½ day, usually 60-90 minutes
- Spin-up Scrum teams (a little training), with Technical Leads as ScrumMasters and limited Product Owners (time and skill)
- Start sprinting
- Hire more agile coaches
- Spin up more Scrum teams…start sprinting
- Rinse & repeat…
To-date, there are more than 50+ newly minted Scrum teams who are dutifully sprinting away creating lots and lots of value.
My colleague Josh Anderson and I were chatting on the Meta-Cast the other day about agile team sizes. While there are no prescriptive limits or guidelines to agile team size, there are general guidelines.
From Scrum, the size has always been recommended to b 7 +/- 2 (or 3..9 in the latest Scrum Guide) as the preferred size for teams. But as in all things agile, direct experience is always valuable. So what was ours?
Over the past few months I’ve been coaching my clients who are in the early stages of adopting agile approaches for software. Most of them are adopting Scrum, but a few are adopting Kanban.
Universally, one of their complaints is that their teams aren’t “stepping up” to the
- Empowerment
- Responsibility
- Accountability
- Passion & Energy
- Creativity
That is implied as part of the culture of self-directed, agile teams.
To say that they are disappointed is an understatement. And these comments are coming from all levels of the client leadership teams.
Giving feedback is one of the things I like most about agile methods. There’s this thing about it though. It’s not that easy to give effective feedback. Lately, I’ve been hearing agile team members start their feedback with the following statements:
- I don’t want to rain on your parade, but...
- I don’t mean to be negative, but...
- I don’t mean to criticize, but...
- I don’t mean for you to take this the wrong way, but...
And then there’s the Ricky Bobby quote from the movie Talladega Nights regarding – “With all due respect…”
I get bombarded with different points of view from agile coaching firms all of the time. This one crossed my screen from Mike Cottmeyer just this morning.
http://www.leadingagile.com/2015/03/lets-acknowledge-safe-for-what-it-is-and-move-on/
and here’s a snippet from Mike’s post, just to give you some flavor:
So… I want to say this one more time for emphasis… either you create the conditions to do agile well… or you do something else. SAFe is that something else.
We can say that SAFe is a cop out… or isn’t really agile… or that it’s the second coming of RUP… but don’t underestimate the complexity, the risk, or the cost of totally refactoring an enterprise to be the kind of organization that can really do agile at any kind of scale. Some organizations simply can’t or won’t invest in this. At the end of the day small batches are better than big batches. Iterative and incremental is better than waterfall, even if it isn’t agile.
I frequently get asked about the dynamics of building agile organizations from an organization structure point of view.
The most important point is that you don’t create a high-performance agile organization by the defined structure. Managers don’t do it; neither do VP’s or Directors.
Surely we set the stage. But the teams are the ones that create the organization. We don’t have to optimize the structure for every technical hurdle or risk. Or create a structure that perfectly balances skill-sets and experience across all functional roles.
Whew! I’m glad, because I never figured out how to do that perfectly anyway.
I’ve recently been reading about and discovering some agile coaching firms who have different views towards client coaching. To be honest, I’m struggling to understand and accept some of their perspectives. So as is often my practice, I thought I’d write something about it to clarify my thoughts and position on the matter.
But first, let me share a story from a close friend of mine in Southern California:
A Coaching Story
I’m one of the best, most experienced personal trainers on the planet. If you view my website, you’ll see testimonials about my:
- Helping transform the health of large groups by running health camps;
- Assisting incredibly famous actors and actresses increase their physical performance to get ready for challenging physical roles;
- Serving as a lead fitness consultant on The Greatest Loser show;
- There’s even a rumor that the President will be inviting me to serve on the Council for Physical Fitness.
I challenged a service organization leader the other day about their agile journey. The firm provides outsourced software development teams – mostly for agile-centric clients. I was asking him about his internal application of agile practices and he asked me the question:
But Bob, when are we “done” with Agile?
From his perspective, his clients were asking for agile aware and literate teams and he was providing them. But he really hadn’t wrapped his head around agility. And he struggled with the notion of adopting agile practices internally.
