Part 7: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Designing Experiments Based on the Influencer Model

Multi-skilled teams hold the key to true agility with Scrum, yet many organizations still cling to the myth that specialization equals effectiveness. If you’ve wrestled with bottlenecks, stalled progress, and an inability to pivot quickly, chances are this mindset is hindering your progress.

In Part 6 of this series, we armed ourselves with the Influencer Change Model. Now, it’s time to use it strategically to create lasting change. This article kicks off a series of experiments designed to move your team, product group, or organization toward a multi-skilled paradigm.

The experiments, inspired by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde’s “Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development,” offer a structured way to make this a reality. Each experiment tackles specific practices with clear potential impact. Use them as inspiration to formulate your own change goals, identify effective indicators for tracking progress, and pinpoint key behaviors within your teams that need shifting. By extracting these insights from the experiments, you can visualize the desired future state, directly tying it to specific, actionable goals and measurable outcomes.

Success lies in a thoughtful, measured approach: pick relevant experiments, ensure all sides of the Influencer Model are addressed, try them one at a time, and make data-driven adjustments.

This article will cover experiments associated with the first two ingredients in the Influencer Change Model: Defining Goals and Measures and Identifying Vital Behaviors. More experiments linked to the other parts of the change model will follow in future articles in the series.

If you’re joining me for the first time, use the link to the series outline below to read the previous parts for context:

Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Series Outline

So, let’s dive right in as focusing and measuring meticulously is the foundational step, clearly delineating the objective and ensuring it resonates rationally and emotionally. It opens the way to pinpointing the behaviors that need a shift to achieve the desired outcome.

Chapter 10

10.1. Defining Goals and Measures

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Try … Defining Your Optimization Goals

When proposing change — like exploring a multi-skilled paradigm as we are in this article series — it’s never done without context. There’s an overarching goal, something we ultimately want to achieve as a team, product group, or even an entire organization.

This connection to higher-level goals is essential when guiding teams toward greater versatility. After all, a company’s plan for success lives in its business strategy: What markets it serves, the products and services it develops, and the values and behaviors that guide it all.

But a strategy needs capabilities to become a reality. Jay Galbraith defines an organizational capability as “the skills, mindsets, and alignment of people that create a competitive advantage” — those things your organization must be able to do to execute the strategy. Think “Produce leading-edge products” on a broader organizational scale and “Have autonomous teams that solve end-user problems” at product and team levels.

How an organization designs itself is all about optimizing to gain these needed capabilities. An organizational design — roles, responsibilities, reward systems, coordination and reporting lines, structures, processes, and policies — exists to fulfill the business strategy. Whether explicitly declared or not, some optimization goal (or several) drives that design.

“Creating Agile Organizations”: Business strategy drives organizational design.

Toyota’s Prius prioritized fuel efficiency and aerodynamics over top-end speed. The architecture Amazon.com uses lets them build new software components rapidly and independently. And think of a Formula 1 pitstop crew — every aspect of their setup revolves around changing those tires in under 2 seconds!

“Creating Agile Organizations” provides a few helpful examples for organizations:

• Resource efficiency: Efficient use of people and other resources.
• Ideation: Maximize the number of innovative ideas and creativity.
• Learning: Gain knowledge about customers and their needs, the market, and new technology.
• Security: Critical information protection.
• Speed: Shortest time from idea to delivery to learning.
• Adaptability: Ability for an organization to change direction fast and at a low cost.
• Reliability: Delivery with few deviations from the plan.
• Safety: Protection from danger, risk, or injury.
• Quality: Conformance to standards and product excellence.

Simply wishing for multi-skilled devs won’t make it happen. Uncovering your organization’s optimization goals and the capabilities required to succeed and making them transparent underpins this kind of change. These goals act as your compass, especially when considering tradeoffs.

For example, if maximizing resource efficiency is the top priority, specialization wins, with each task handled as swiftly as possible. However, if learning quickly and adapting course are more critical, “teams of multi-skilled individuals” becomes a crucial capability since it directly helps you stay focused on what matters most in the moment.

Try … Using a Single Product Goal and a Single Sprint Goal

The Product Goal outlines the product’s future state to fulfill a specific business objective, serving as a roadmap for the Scrum Team. Product Backlog Items evolve to detail the steps toward achieving the Product Goal.

Concentrating on one Product Goal at a time channels the team’s effort on what’s currently most crucial and rewarding. This might encompass a major new feature or a significant redesign, aiming to alter customer behaviors in response to market shifts.

The Sprint Goal is the Scrum Team’s singular aim for the Sprint, collectively crafted based on the upcoming Sprint’s business objective. The broader Product Goal is realized through a succession of Sprint Goals, with each Sprint Goal manifested as a Done increment, edging the team closer to the Product Goal.

Adhering to one Product Goal and one Sprint Goal at a time unveils the following impacts.

It narrows down the team’s work options, shifting each member’s focus from what they can do based on their specialization to what they should do to progress toward the Sprint and Product Goals.

This delineates the decisions needed during the Sprint. When a member’s capacity is free, starting a new backlog item matching their primary skill might seem valid, even if a more crucial item is ongoing. Prioritizing what’s needed most at any moment clarifies the choice — completing the current open item swiftly holds more value as only a Done piece advances us one step closer to the Sprint Goal. Initiated work doesn’t propel us forward; only finished, Done work does. It urges team members to find ways to help conclude the current item pivotal for the Sprint Goal by tackling tasks outside their primary skillset.

Aligning with the Sprint Goal and prioritizing tasks for its achievement creates a setting where solitary efforts fall short, instigating a co-dependence that catalyzes swarming and cooperation.

By emphasizing the priority of working towards the Sprint Goal over other tasks and valuing the completion of a product backlog item in progress over starting a new one, opportunities arise to significantly reduce Work in Progress (WIP), thereby accelerating the movement of each item.

A reduction in WIP may create a sense of underutilization, which presents opportunities for team members to join forces in pairs or groups. This scenario, where leadership roles rotate, stimulates knowledge sharing and allocates time for team members to acquire new skills through joint efforts on shared tasks or dedicated learning endeavors.

Having a Sprint Goal instills a genuine sense of purpose during the Daily Scrum, enabling inspection of progress towards the Sprint Goal and adapting the day’s plan to prioritize what’s crucial. This may help overcome the instinctive preference to stick to familiar skill sets for the broader benefit.

Attaining a shared valuable objective infuses the team with a sense of accomplishment at the Sprint’s conclusion, creating conditions for replicating collaborative behaviors devoid of primary skill set bias in the subsequent Sprint.

Avoid the opposite approach of working on multiple Product Goals and Sprint Goals, as it cultivates adverse behaviors: teams splinter into isolated efforts; Work in Progress (WIP) escalates; bottlenecks arise — all detrimental to the Sprint’s results. This prolongs lead time and diminishes cooperation and learning opportunities, escalating team and organizational stress.

Try … FOCUS When Defining a Sprint Goal

A proficient Sprint Goal incrementally adds value towards achieving the Product Goal. It also energizes the team to unite and work together, serving as a true North Star. This supersedes any lower-level intentions or individual preferences, which often manifest in sticking to specific work types only.

Both elements — the motivation generated by a well-crafted goal and the anticipation of delivering tangible value encapsulated in the goal — are pivotal in nudging the team towards stepping out of their comfort zones in functional silos for the greater good.

Maarten Dalmijn devised the FOCUS mnemonic to ensure your Sprint Goals encapsulate both elements, aiding the transition towards a multi-skilled paradigm.

FOCUS stands for

• Fun
• Outcome-oriented
• Collaborative
• Ultimate
• Singular

Fun

Fun revolves around drawing inspiration from the team’s objectives for the Sprint. It transitions us from a mundane task like “Refactor the search results page” to a more engaging “Make filtering great again.” Brief and impactful, this phrase serves as a common reference throughout the Sprint, guiding the team’s daily decisions and motivations. Of course, such a goal should be complemented with more specific expected outcomes to flesh out the path towards achieving it.

Outcome-oriented

This aspect emphasizes aligning the goal with a valuable outcome while leaving the exact path to achieve it open-ended. Maartin illustrates this with an example where a team aimed to “reduce costs by migrating to a different type database,” which inadvertently could have led them away from a more straightforward solution: reducing the number of database instances. Likewise, I encountered a scenario where a large retail chain initially sought an expensive e-queue management system to streamline in-store and online order processing. However, a cost-effective alternative was found by physically segregating in-store and online order queues, obviating the need for hefty software development.

Collaborative

The focus here is to avoid arriving at Sprint Planning with a predefined Sprint Goal. Doing so forgoes the opportunity for the team to fully grasp the Sprint’s importance and take ownership of the goal, making it more significant than any other task, both rationally and emotionally. This collective goal-setting promotes a shift in priority from individual specialized tasks to a shared objective. Hence, it’s advisable to have a business objective in mind at the outset of Sprint Planning, yet keep the Sprint Goal open for debate and discussion until the whole team finalizes it together.

Ultimate

Ultimate emphasizes the importance of elucidating the ‘why’ behind the goal. Take, for instance, Dr. Don Berwick’s goal to reduce the number of healthcare-related deaths we used in the previous article. A Sprint Goal should elucidate why it’s significant to customers and the business, transcending mere outcomes. This aspect imbues a mindset of “How will the world improve a tad after this Sprint?” shifting the team’s focus from solitary specialized tasks to collective endeavors to attain the ultimate goal.

Singular

Singular echoes the sentiments from the previous experiment. It revolves around delineating the paramount next step for the product, compelling the team to rally around this singular goal. This approach prompts team members to take on tasks crucial at the moment — even if beyond their primary skill set, with the reassuring notion that they won’t face the challenge alone. By teaming up with others, they can use collective expertise to navigate unfamiliar tasks, transforming potential anxiety into a shared learning experience.

10.2. Identifying Vital Behaviors

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Organizational Level

Try … Setting Ambitious Organizational Goals

Management articulates an ambitious goal, leaving the “how” open-ended, and steps back, granting teams the autonomy to devise solutions. It enables teams to operate like startups — navigating the intricacies, risks, and uncertainties of work independently. It’s now the teams’ prerogative to transcend customary thinking and working modalities to realize the goal, embracing a broader scope of creativity and cooperation.

Try … Treating the Organization as a Social System

View the organization and all its units, including teams, as a social system where achieving common goals hinges on the quality of interactions among system components rather than the efficiency of individual parts alone. Optimizing the system as a whole thus becomes the primary compass in making decisions at every organizational layer.

Try … Declaring Stepping Outside Skill Silos as the New Norm

Utilize organizational events as platforms to emphasize to teams that progressing towards and achieving the common goal surpasses the importance of working strictly within functional confines. Encourage team members to venture beyond their skill boundaries when necessary for goal advancement. Elevate such adaptive behavior as the organizational norm, underscoring that this is how we operate here. We have all the necessary resources and support at our disposal here and now to practice it.

Product Level

Try … Shifting the Team’s Focus from Resource Utilization to Goal Achievement

During team events and activities such as Sprint Reviews, Product Backlog Refinement sessions, and Sprint Planning, make the attainment of the single Product Goal and the corresponding business objective encapsulated in a singular Sprint Goal the central focus for the team, emphasizing their importance above all else. Apply an open-ended approach where the team takes the initiative to determine the best methods to reach these goals. In this setting, achieving collective objectives takes precedence over individual resource utilization.

Team Level

Try … Centering Daily Scrum Around Sprint Goal Progress

Make the visible advancement towards the Sprint Goal the core metric of success for the ongoing Sprint and the sole catalyst for the team’s daily planning endeavors. Use the approach to underscore the primacy of collective progress over individual task completions.

Try … Splitting Progress Toward the Sprint Goal into Discrete Daily Team Goals

Post evaluation of progress towards the Sprint Goal during the Daily Scrum, channel the discussion towards pinpointing the next significant thing that can be reached by day’s end to propel the team closer to the Sprint Goal and figuring out what the team needs to make it happen. Delve into collaborative dynamics: who teams up with whom, who needs help and where, what knowledge is required, and who can share it; what’s the smallest “Done” unit attainable by day’s close? Setting a foundation for inspection and further adaptation at the ensuing Daily Scrum, this approach creates a sense of urgency and nurtures collective progress through shared effort.

Try … Using Bottlenecks to Define What the Team Needs to Focus On

Upon encountering a bottleneck, escalate it as a critical and urgent issue for the team to resolve and trust the team to devise strategies to alleviate it. Other matters become secondary. Individuals at the bottleneck spearhead the effort, guiding the rest of the team on how to assist through swarming, knowledge sharing, and focused learning. Additionally, they can provide tools enabling the team to actively contribute to widening the bottleneck, thereby joining forces and maintaining progress towards the Sprint Goal.

Try … Curtailing the Impulse to Initiate New Work

Establish the rapid completion of ongoing work as the paramount factor when deciding on the next steps. Should a team member have spare capacity, the primary tactic shifts to assisting others rather than embarking on new tasks within their core skill set. Similarly, suppose a hurdle is identified, or a team member is swamped. In that case, the immediate and obvious response should be to voice the need for assistance, championing collective problem-solving and progress over individual task initiation.

A clear understanding of organizational goals and their connection to individual work is the bedrock for successfully transitioning to a multi-skilled paradigm. By exploring your organization’s optimization goals and the capabilities needed to fulfill its strategy, you create a roadmap that guides team members toward meaningful contributions.

The experiments in this article emphasize the power of focus — from organization-wide ambitions to product goals, all refined into achievable Sprint Goals and even smaller daily targets. This relentless focus shifts the emphasis from maximizing individual resource utilization towards achieving tangible, customer-centric outcomes. It also helps us view the organization, team, and product group as dynamic social systems by emphasizing collaborative interactions as the ultimate source of emerging capabilities.

Harnessing this focused perspective empowers teams to craft impactful Sprint Goals collaboratively. Additionally, paying close attention to bottlenecks and resisting the urge to initiate new work before finishing the tasks in progress are essential behaviors for overcoming functional silos and collaborating toward shared daily, Sprint, and Product Goals.

In our next article, we’ll turn inwards, understanding what motivates individuals to step outside their comfort zones. This personal drive paves the way for a true multi-skilled mindset. Exploring what sparks learning and how to align individual strengths with organizational goals will be central as we continue exploring techniques for nurturing this mindset shift.

Continue exploring the nuances of multi-skilling in transforming our Scrum practices and elevating our teams to new heights of agility in the next part of the series:

Part 8: Creating Personal Motivation and Ability to Transition to a Multi-Skilled Paradigm

References

1. Cesário Oliveira Ramos, Ilia Pavlichenko. Creating Agile Organizations. A Systemic Approach (Addison-Wesley, 2023)
2. Jay Galbraith et al. Designing Dynamic Organizations: A Hands-on Guide for Leaders at All Levels (Amacom, 2001)
3. Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler. Influencer. The New Science of Leading Change (McGraw Hill Education, 2013)
4. Craig Larman, Bas Vodde. Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development. Large, Multisite, and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum (Addison-Wesley, 2010)
5. Maarten Dalmijn. Apply FOCUS to set great Sprint Goals