How to manage the challenges of scaling agile across many teams?
How do you get all teams together, discuss about the features they built for the product and gather feedback? Get familiar with the project bazaar — a powerful and energizing format to get valuable feedback from users and stakeholders.
Bazaar Format
Are you familiar with scaled agile frameworks (like LeSS)? Then you most likely also know the terms product bazaar, review bazaar, application bazaar, showcase, or science fair.
As soon as we are working in an environment where not only one but several Scrum teams are working on something together, a simple sprint review per team is not sufficient anymore. We require a new format which enables us to bring the work of all teams involved together. Since we are aware that it’s not a product review’s sole purpose to show potentially shippable increments we try to actively gather feedback, exchange opinions with stakeholders and jointly rethink the further product development. In order to satisfy our customers and continuously deliver value, we frequently need to get their feedback.
The challenge
How can we scale the collecting of feedback, the exchange with stakeholders and customers from one team to many teams without losing the developer’s motivation and without investing a great amount of time?
Some practitioners have already found possible solutions for this challenge:
- The LeSS Framework is using sprint review bazaars as part of the diverge-converge cycles at the end of each sprint: https://less.works/less/framework/sprint-review.html
- Christiaan Verwijs has used product bazaars for gathering feedback from users: https://medium.com/the-liberators/7-powerful-ways-to-get-feedback-from-users-in-scrum-b683d39143ca
- The SAFe Framework uses so-called system demos as an event where the teams demonstrate their integrated work to stakeholders, business owners and customers after each iteration. However the character is more of a meeting and less of a bazaar:
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/system-demo/ - Colleagues from one of our scaled Scrum projects in the automotive industry have successfully tried out the concept of a product bazaar in order to align and communicate with many teams and stakeholders involved in one product.
Bazaar — What is that?
You might wonder how such a bazaar could take place. It’s actually quite simple:
1) Contents: Each team presenting something on a market stall conveys the impression of an oriental market. At their booth, they present and show the results of their daily work, let people try out functionality, gather feedback or whatever serves the bazaar’s purpose. Just like the agile manifesto tells us: working software over comprehensive documentation. — So please don’t bring documentation or Powerpoint presentations ;)
2) Communication: The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Therefore: If possible, rather invest the money in a productive onsite bazaar instead of trying to make a video or a remote conference. It just won’t work as good as the face-to-face communication and feedback. Of course, we know it’s not always possible. At Comsysto Reply, we also constantly try to find ways to integrate our remote colleagues. In Part II you can find some experiments and tips for the remote version.
3) Interaction: Last but not least: All relevant persons and roles should be there (just like at any other sprint product review). Remember: Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools. Don’t try to over-engineer your bazaar but instead get all relevant persons ( developers, business and customers) there so that they can talk to each other.
4) Timeline: Possibly a bazaar can start and / or close with a mutual official part. There is no real best practice how often a bazaar should take place since it depends on a lot of factors:
- How long are the team’s sprint cycles?
- Which iteration length makes most sense in the product’s environment?
- How often are new features being built?
- How many people will be at the Bazaar?
- How much travel time do you need to take into account for all participants?
- Which time intervals are logistically and organisationally doable?
You will find more details regarding the organization and implementation of a bazaar mentioned below.
2. Comsysto Reply’s main challenge
However, we are working on many different projects and in various teams. Therefore we benefit a lot from transparency and shared knowledge. To be precise, it is not easy for an employee to get an overview of all our projects and respective teams. It is even harder to get down to details like the technologies, team setup, project duration, team processes and product vision.
Since we are an agile company with an emphasis on transparency and self-organization as well as personal responsibility, the described knowledge and exchange above are important for us. To be honest, it is not only important for us but a precondition for our agile values and principles to stay alive. We (the employees) are challenged to look for a suitable new project within Comsysto Reply where we could join and support colleagues wherever help is needed.
In addition, a few of the Comsysto Reply colleagues have already participated at several product bazaars as part of their projects for one of our automotive customers. They are working on a product where more than ten teams are involved and we constantly put a lot of effort into the alignment and communication between all teams involved and their respective stakeholders. Thus, a product bazaar seemed to be a good idea in that environment and it was proven to be very valuable.
As a result of these thoughts we concluded quickly that a bazaar can help us a lot. In our case (a consulting company), the bazaar is not a typical product bazaar but rather a project bazaar. Instead of presenting different product features, we are presenting different projects we are working on. And feedback regarding features and users is replaced by feedback regarding the project and team setup.
3. In general: Different bazaar formats
At Comsysto Reply, we found two formats to be very useful:
- The application bazaar / product bazaar: For product companies or teams who work together on a product and need to integrate their work as well as gather feedback from stakeholders, customers, users, …
- The project bazaar: For project organizations like consultancies where teams work in different projects but still need feedback, transparency and knowledge transfers across the projects.
In this blog post, we mainly talk about our experiences with the first Comsysto project bazaar. We try to point out some slight differences to an application (or product) bazaar, but the main idea remains the same.
4. Bazaar experiment at Comsysto Reply — How to?
We divided the development of our project bazaar in several phases as well as categories and worked in short cycles since we didn’t know yet how exactly it would turn out.
Iteration 1
What’s the purpose of your bazaar and what do you want to achieve? — The answer to this question will determine how your bazaar will look like in the end.
In our case, that was quite clear, we wanted to achieve exactly what is described above in the article: Provide our teams a chance to get an overview of all our projects, talk to other teams about their projects, give feedback and identify new potentials.
Iteration 2
Try to find organizational categories to split the work and find a group of people who is motivated to help. Don’t go into detail yet with planning.
For our project bazaar, the categories that needed further thinking and planning were:
If you would like to see more generic information about the different categories, you can download our overview here. Further description of our Comsysto bazaar will follow in Iteration 4.
Iteration 3
Before investing a lot of time in planning and organizing, go out and validate some of your hypotheses:
- Are your colleagues and teams (and in case of a product bazaar also: stakeholders, customers, users, business owners) really in need of something, do they miss something and does this correlate with your defined purpose above?
- How many colleagues / teams would like to participate with a market stall?
- How many colleagues would like to visit the bazaar?
- In case of a product bazaar: How many stakeholders, customers, users, business owners would like to visit the bazaar?
As a learning of our first Comsysto Reply project bazaar, we can tell you that you might want to proceed with the validation of your hypotheses even before you think about the topics we mentioned in Iteration 2. Depending on your context, you might want to switch Iteration 2 and 3 from this blog post.
Project Bazaar registration form
You can validate your hypotheses simply by talking to people and by doing surveys. In our case, we created a short survey that we distributed with our first round of communication (see marketing). In this survey, our colleagues were asked if they would like to participate, if they would like to have a booth with their team and how many team members they are. Within only a few days, we already had more than 10 Comsysto teams signed up for the bazaar and we knew that we were on the right track. This was the sign for us to proceed with the more detailed planning and organization phase.
Does it stop after Iteration 3?
Are you intrigued to plan your own bazaar journey, but don’t really know where to start? Talk to us — we are passionate about this topic and would love to help out. Contact us now!
Well — that depends. How did the validation of your hypotheses go? Did you find the right problem? Did you find the right people to talk about your assumed problem?
Is there potential to further think about a bazaar format? In our case — the answers were yes and we continued!
We used that format and converted it into a project bazaar for Comsysto Reply. Our goal was to get our different project teams together, talking about their projects and discussing new opportunities.
Now we would like to continue and tell you how we implemented the bazaar idea at Comsysto Reply and which additional challenges we faced. Again, we will talk about the so-called project bazaar and point out differences to a product/ application bazaar. However the basic idea remains the same.
Iteration 4
Once the hypotheses are validated and the organizational categories are set, you can start a more detailed planning. Keep in mind to still work in short iterations if this is your first time of organizing a bazaar in your context. We had a 1-hour sync every week in order to talk about the status of the bazaar, difficulties and upcoming tasks. At these syncs, sometimes we changed our plans, re-ordered priorities of tasks and decided who we needed further alignment with.
Timeframe and bazaar format
We decided to go with a “real” bazaar-style. So we only specified an overall timeslot to define in which timeframe the bazaar should take place. During the bazaar itself, there were no defined timeslots or restrictions. However, we felt we would like a mutual opening and closing with all participants together. Therefore we used the intro for a small check-in game and a general explanation about the bazaar’s purpose, timeframes and how it would work. The closing was used for the general bazaar feedback.
Location
Our project bazaar took place in our headquarter office. We used the entire area, created a preliminary location plan and estimated how many booth places we could offer.
Market stands
A floor plan of our office was quickly created and we distributed the various booths throughout the rooms. For big rooms (with many market stands) we ordered a few whiteboards/ other walls that could serve as separators and also provide space to show posters etc. Our colleagues could choose if they wanted a flipchart, monitor or other technical equipment at their market stand. In addition, we created a so-called bazaar canvas with a few fields (like project name, customer, user, technologies used, purpose, product, …). We sent this canvas to each team and asked them to go wild with designing and filling their bazaar canvas. For a product bazaar (instead of a project bazaar) you could think about general topics you would like to have covered on your canvas (for example feature, customer value, timeframe, involved teams, …).
Marketing
We started with different marketing activities at the same time:
- First Announcement: What is a project bazaar? What is our goal? Which needs or problems do we want to solve with this bazaar?
- Bazaar registration: Date and start of bazaar, requirements for exhibitors, information and material we provide, request and deadline for registration as a exhibitor
- Calendar invitation
- Communication regarding the bazaar canvas
- Reminders regarding location preparations
- Announcement for remote-participants: Creation of a remote communication
Since Comsysto Reply’s communication tool of choice is Slack (a widely used Chat-Tool: https://slack.com/intl/de-de/), we used Slack for mainly the entire marketing campaign. The only thing that happened via e-mail was the calendar invitation for all participants.
Feedback
We found it important to engage our colleagues a bit in the project bazaar and therefore distributed 2 kinds of stickers:
Our colleagues were asked to mark their “favorite” project by putting heart stickers on the bazaar canvas. A beautiful thing happened: in the end a lot of our bazaar cards had many hearts on them and the teams used them as kind of recognition and kudos.
We also asked the participants to try to identify further potentials within the projects. Wherever they found that an additional skill or area of development could be helpful, they marked the project with a thumbs-up sticker and wrote next to it.
Of course, for a product bazaar, your choice for feedback would look differently. Think about what kind of feedback would be valuable for the product teams.
In addition to the project feedback, we were eager to gather some feedback regarding the format and organization of our project bazaar. Therefore, we created a quick survey using the tool Mentimeter in the end (a digital tool to interactively collect feedback: https://www.mentimeter.com/). It took approximately 5 minutes for the participants to put in their feedback and requests. This is a great help for us when organizing our next project bazaar.
Catering
This turned out to not be relevant for our Comsysto project bazaar, since we all went out for a big Christmas dinner afterwards.
Networking
Also not relevant for us for the same reason as above.
Iteration X
After a few syncs, we realized that there were still a few major challenges that we didn’t discuss or solve yet:
1. Remote participants: Sometimes, it is simply not possible to get all colleagues to the same office location. If this is the case, basically you have three options:
a) The bazaar is fully onsite, meaning that whoever isn’t there, can’t participate.
b) The bazaar is fully remote, meaning you need to find a virtual conference setup with different rooms, as well as great camera and microphone setup for everyone. You would need to create a virtual experience where people can still switch between different rooms, present their contents and talk to each other. The organizational effort and preparation for everyone will increase in comparison to the bazaar described in this blog post.
c) The bazaar is onsite at a location of your choice but you try to somehow incorporate your remote colleagues. It is definitely not ideal because the remotee’s experience will be a different one. Here is what we tried out:
- The opening and closing part was shared via videoconferencing.
- We created a remote_bazaar Slack channel. Here, we invited all remotees and provided them different information.
- Before the bazaar started, we sent the remote participants all bazaar canvases and asked them to print them out or somehow look at them.
- During the setup of the market stalls we shot a video of all teams and some introducing sentences and distributed the video via the Slack channel.
- During the bazaar, we encouraged our remote colleagues to post questions regarding teams or projects in the channel. One or two people constantly monitored the Slack channel and tried to get the answers to the posted questions.
- During the bazaar, a few of us constantly posted pictures with small descriptions in the Slack channel.
- After the bazaar, we took pictures of all final bazaar canvases (including the stickers) and provided them to all colleagues in case they wanted to look at them again.
- There was another idea (which we didn’t try out yet): During the bazaar you could schedule fixed interview times for each market stand. For example: 3pm booth A, 3:15pm booth B, etc. There could be a specified set of questions, an interviewer and a camera person to follow that interviewer. The interviewer would then walk from booth to booth and hold the little interviews which would be shared in a video conference.
- We are sure, there are many other ideas about how to incorporate remote colleagues. If you have suggestions or remarks, feel free to comment this blog post :)
2. New unknown format for our colleagues
If your colleagues have never experienced something like a bazaar or open space, it can be a bit scary. They don’t know what’s going to happen and furthermore it can be overwhelming to prepare a market stall. They might ask themselves what is expected from them and what should be shown or presented. At this point we recommend to talk to each team. Tell them what will happen and how they can prepare.
In addition, we would like to refer to the principles of an open space format. If you haven’t experienced an open space yet, we encourage you to visit an open space and to do some research about it (you will find more information online). In short, here are the 4 principles. Feel free to think about them:
Whoever comes is the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
When it starts is the right time.
When it’s over it’s over.
Are you intrigued to launch your own bazaar journey, but don’t really know where to start? Talk to us — we are passionate about this topic and would love to help out.
References
Icons made by Freepik, Prettycons, Smashicons, Linector, surang, Those Icons, Maxim Basinski from www.flaticon.com
Originally published at https://comsystoreply.de.
