Being Agile, Doing Scrum: Agile Principles — What Is The Highest Priority?
This is another in a series of posts aimed at helping Scrum Masters coach “team members in self-management and cross-functionality []including [l]eading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption.”
With a simple cut and paste, Scrum Masters can share this post weekly or once per sprint, concurrently adding some frivolity with several fun facts and content.
Note: Some posts come with an intro to provide background and additional information/tips, followed by the ‘cut/paste’ content that can be shared with the team.
Note: There are lots of fun facts and content. Feel free to pick and choose what to include/omit.
Check back next week for another post, and more content to share!
[For an index of all Being Agile, Doing Scrum posts click here.]
Background:
This week we return to the Agile Manifesto, in a short but important post that breaks down the first Principle:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Cut/Paste:
Once again we return to the Agile Manifesto, focusing on the first of the twelve Principles:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
This might be a single sentence but we need to break it down into three components:
(i) “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer”
We have all heard “the customer is always right”, a statement attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field, who collectively advocated for the rights of the consumer. Does this apply in an agile world? In order to ‘satisfy the customer’ do we have to accept they are always right?
The three Scrum pillars, transparency, inspection and adaptation, promote an iterative approach to product development allowing the team to routinely and frequently consider end user, or customer, feedback, and factor it into future feature development. While that doesn’t exactly mean that the customer is always right, when a Scrum Team hears the same comments from enough customers one would hope they start to believe they might at least have a point :)
(ii) “through early and continuous delivery”
In his post “First Things First: Agile Principles Revisited” Bruce Nix comments “Getting to a point where we can do multiple releases a day should be our target.”
CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) “automates much or all of the manual human intervention traditionally needed to get new code from a commit into production”, and is an aspiration for many Scrum Teams. CI/CD is multiple releases a day, and is the pinnacle of “early and continuous delivery.”
(iii) “of valuable software.”
The Scrum Guide is clear:
“Scrum is simple. Try it as is and determine if its philosophy, theory, and structure help to achieve goals and create value.”
In fact the Scrum Guide mentions “value” seventeen times. So who determines value? It makes sense that it is the end user or customer, and remember our highest priority is to satisfy the customer. So we go full circle:
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
Inspirational Quote:
“Creating value is an inherently cooperative process, capturing value is inherently competitive.” — Barry Nalebuff
Fascinating Fact:
Our taste buds are replaced every week.
Scientists believe human taste buds have an important purpose: protecting us from poisoning. Taste buds age and lose sensitivity, working so hard their cells die off quickly. This is why the body regenerates them about every two weeks.
They aren’t all replaced at once; on any given day, about 10% of the sensors expire, while 20% to 30% are in the process of developing, leaving us with 60% of the buds active to analyze the food we consume.
Word of the Day:
Quaesitum — Something sought or required.
Example: “The quaesitum to our problems seems to come after the team participate in detailed conversation.”
National Day Calendar: June 30th
International Asteroid Day
International Cream Tea Day
Social Media Day
Drive Your Corvette To Work Day
National Food Truck Day
National SAFER Workplace Day
Born On This Day:
Charles VIII: King of France (1483–98) who invaded Italy, born in Château d’Amboise, France. (1470)
Mike Tyson: American boxer and youngest ever heavyweight champion, born in Brooklyn, New York. (1966)
Michael Phelps: American swimmer (record 23 Olympic gold medals), born in Baltimore, Maryland. (1985)
On This Day In History:
First Longitude Clock: British Commissioners of Longitude grant self-taught clockmaker John Harrison £500 after the successful trial of his first longitude clock. (1737)
Famous Debate on Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: Held at the Oxford University Museum and dominated by arguments between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. (1860)
Yosemite Grant Act: Signed by President Abraham Lincoln bestowing 200,000 acres to the state of California, establishes America’s first state-controlled park. (1864)
An Alien Event? A giant fireball, most likely caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet flattens 80 million trees near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, in the largest impact event in recorded history. (1908)
Gandhi’s First Arrest: Mahatma Gandhi’s first arrest after campaigning for Indian rights in South Africa. (1914)
Battle of the Somme: British General Douglas Haig reports “The men are in splendid spirits” the day before the Battle of the Somme began. (1916)
“Night of Long Knives” : Adolf Hitler stages a bloody purge of the Nazi party. (1934)
Gone With The Wind: Margaret Mitchell’s novel “Gone With The Wind” published. (1936)
Television Debut: “Johnny Carson Show” debuts on CBS-TV. (1955)
Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr.: Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. named 1st black astronaut. (1967)
North Korea Visit: President Donald Trump becomes first sitting US president to set foot in North Korea in the Korean Demilitarized Zone meeting Kim Jong Un. (2019)
