Mark Levison
Posts: 877
Nickname: mlevison
Registered: Jan, 2003
|
Mark Levison an agile software developer who writes Notes from a tool user.
|
|
|
|
ScrumMaster for Three Teams? What are the Alternatives?
|
Posted: Apr 22, 2014 7:13 AM
|
|
The ScrumMaster Tales is a series of stories about ScrumMaster John who attended one of my courses. He is the ScrumMaster for the WorldsSmallestOnlineBookstore. Scrum succeeds because it helps build a high performance team, i.e. a team that is capable of delivering significantly more work than the individuals are capable of separately. The role of the ScrumMaster is to help build the high performing team through observing their relationships, helping them understand Scrum, improving their technical practices, improving their relationship with their product owner, and improving the organization they’re part of. Read this story through the lens of building team(s) and ask what John could have done. After the stress of the last release, John and his team are slowly paying down the technical debt (mess) they created. They maintain a technical debt backlog, knocking off a few items every sprint in addition to the work they do creating new features. If they keep this up it will take only another three to four months before they’re as productive as they were before the release. Jeff (CTO – Jeff -> Don -> John) calls John and Don, into his office. He says, “I have great news. The VCs have given us the go ahead to hire two new teams right now. Unfortunately they don’t think there is enough need to justify the hiring of any more ScrumMasters”. He continues, “John, I’m sure you can play this role for all of our teams. There can’t be anything more than scheduling a few meetings. John, we’re counting on you to make this a success.” John has learned to speak up more than he had in the past, and he tries to explain that the role is far more involved than just booking a few meetings. Jeff, however, stands his ground. “I’ve just attended SAFe training and my trainer told me we could get away with a 1:4 ScrumMaster to Team ratio.” He continues, “John, I know you can make this work for us.” In the following weeks, two additional teams are hired and John does his best to split his time fairly between them. He mostly abandons his own team (we will call them Alpha) and splits his time between the other two new teams. John, being an aficionado of personal improvement, keeps track of roughly how much truly productive time he has for each team just by measuring the number of Pomodoro he completes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this number goes down. He used to average six a day, and now he only achieves four. (John has just discovered Multitasking – which is a great way to get everything done later at both the team and individual level.) Luckily, he’s figured out that he can mostly ignore his existing team since they’re already so far along the team performance curve. Three months in, and let’s see how the teams are doing. The two new teams, Beta and Gamma, are struggling. Team Beta run all the mechanical elements of Scrum correctly, and they have all the meetings (Sprint Planning, Review, Retrospective and Daily Scrum). They have – and consistently meet – their definition of done, but it is so weak and watered down as to be useless. So the letter of the Scrum law is being practiced, with no spirit. There is limited collaboration and everyone is working in silos. Worst of all, the Beta Product Owner writes all the user stories for team members, treating them as order takers and not partners. Our fearless ScrumMaster John has a fair idea about what needs to be done, but little time to act. Complicating things further, team Beta have decided that they’re really not a big fan of John since he never removes any of their impediments directly, instead challenging them to solve their own problems. Team Gamma are off to a better start. They’re trying to follow not just the letter of Scrum law, but also appreciate that there is a spirit of collaboration. They’re really struggling to make it happen. They’ve heard all about Test Driven Development, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, Collective Code Ownership, Refactoring, Simple Design, etc, however they’re having trouble getting past rudimentary Unit Testing. It took them several weeks to get a Continuous Integration server up and running as they were snowed under with requests from the Product Owner. They need someone to hold their hands and act as a backbone when required. They need someone who can coach their collaborative skills, in addition to the technical ones. This team has a fair chance of becoming high performing, but are unlikely to do so by stumbling towards their goal. Their issues are two fold: they don’t really understand what’s going wrong, and John doesn’t have the time to coach them correctly. Meanwhile John’s regular team is suffering under his almost complete absence. In an attempt to get the other teams up and running, John is only booking meetings for Alpha, he helicopters in to facilitate meetings, and then disappears again. As a result, Retrospective meetings are happening but the action items aren’t being completed. The team had been focusing on improving their technical practices, but this has fallen by the wayside. They’ve been using Sonar to track historical information around their builds including: Build Failures, # of Unit Tests run, Code Coverage, PMD warnings, and more. In the past few months it’s easy enough to see that their technical quality has slipped. It would appear that, without John to question, they struggle to finish their commitment every sprint, even when it’s clear that they overcommitted. Worst of all, they seem to have forgotten about the importance of regular backlog refinement, because the product backlog has hardly changed in the past six weeks. This makes it increasingly likely that the team isn’t actually working to meet the current needs of the customers. Since they spent limited time collaborating on acceptance criteria, they’ve had more surprises where Product Owner Sue says that feature doesn’t work the way she wanted and […]
Read: ScrumMaster for Three Teams? What are the Alternatives?
|
|
Previous Topic
