Career Scrum — Managing your team's personal development the agile way.

That is usually how it happens. Your manager will come up to you and say we need to do a performance review. You scuttle away into some dusty part of the network drive to find the "development plan" or "yearly actions" you documented and agreed to 12 months ago.

You spend a few days trying to remember all the good things you have done during the year, attempting to articulate it in such a way to sound good enough for your boss to push for that pay rise you want. You do this because, let's face it, what you agreed to a year ago is nowhere close to what you have been doing for the last 12 months.

Unfortunately, end of year reviews at most organisations lean towards a HR tick boxing exercise rather than a method to support staff in developing their careers. Having been on both sides of the fence, it's equally frustrating.

Agile Performance Management

The light at the end of the tunnel.

Agile is typically and rightly associated with software development. Having worked in and led agile teams for almost 15 years, it's second nature to me, as I'm sure it is to many. Why can't we as leaders adopt a flexible, predictable, collaborative, and responsive principle and apply it to our staff's personal development? We can. It's called Agile Performance Management or Career Scrum.

Career Scrum

If you're leading engineers, you should always be focused on continuous improvement. This can't just be limited to your tech stack or products. It's your people as well. Career Scrum is the adaptation of the agile scrum framework to manage personal development.

If you know scrum, then it should be straightforward, and I bet you're already planning it out in your head. Here are some tips and structures to help.

The Scrum Master (SM) is the Engineer's line manager. They are there to direct, support and enable the Engineer to build their career scrum board. They also help create sprint goals, support delivery of tasks, coach and clear blockers.

Other Stakeholders are seniors, principles or other disciplines within the organisation that would act as a mentor or in a supporting capacity to coach and enable the Engineer to achieve their goals.

The Product Owner (PO) is the Engineer; they define the goals, plan them out on a board like Trello and prioritise them.

These three roles make up the Career Scrum Team or CST for short.

PO (Product Owner) Step 1

Filling out the Career Scrum Board.

The first step for the product owner is to define a set of goals (epics). Things they want to achieve over the next year, two years, five years. Cultivate an ambitious attitude in your engineers, or to quote captain Pike:

Encourage your staff to push themselves on picking these goals (epics). It doesn't matter if they are thinking about learning a skill-set outside of your team, they may see their current role as a stepping stone to something they really want to do, and that's fine, motivate and support them.

PO Step 2

The next step is to create sprint objectives (stories). These are more specific and aligned to your epics. As an example:

• Epics — Your high-level goals, between one and five years or beyond, there is no limit.
• Stories — Specific objectives you can achieve, usually aligned to your epics within a year.

The Scrum Master or other Stakeholders should be engaged throughout creating the scrum board, offering advice and direction on what the PO wants to achieve.

PO Step 3

The next step is to create tasks. These smaller actions aligned to your stories can be completed within a shorter period, i.e. a quarter.

• Tasks— A child of a story, small independent bits of work that can support the achievement of a story

As mentioned above, the Scrum Master and other Stakeholders should be engaged here; the scrum master specifically can assist the PO in aligning tasks to other organisation objectives connecting the Engineer's personal development to the organisation's growth.

The Career Sprint

Putting your goals into action.

A career sprint should be six months in length, giving you two opportunities every year to review performance and offer a review in salary or promotion.

Planning — A sprint begins with a planning session between the members of the Career Scrum Team. The PO should have already created the Epics and Stories with input from everyone. The planning session is to select what stories and tasks can be worked on during the next six months. Some of these should be within the context of the organisation's goings on.

Implementation — The PO works on the tasks throughout the sprint period.

121s — The PO and SM (Engineer and Line Manager) have regular 121s to catch up on tasks and review progress. Together they can adapt tasks as needed.

Review and Retro — At the end of the sprint, review progress and achievements. Identify areas for improvement as needed.

Ad-Hoc 121s — Done with the other stakeholders to catch up, review progress and assist.

The 6-month cadence should see your PO (Engineer) accomplish some great goals and grow as a valuable team member. As the SM (Line Manager), it's time to praise and acknowledge their success. It would be best if you aimed to raise pay, give a bonus or promotion at this point. They deserve it.

Summary

Career Scrum is an excellent method to support engineer development. It empowers them to grow and gives them purpose. Adopting this framework will help you develop high performing teams while retaining superb talent.