Good Housekeeping

Published in

Scrum Mastery Community

9 min readAug 5, 2021

Imagine the picture above is your desk, your personal workplace. And you are looking for a pen, a blue pen to be specific. How much time and effort do you think you would need?

Now imagine in a slightly different scenario but using the same imaginary desk. Your team mate would need a note that is within this pile of mess. How much more time and effort would your team mate need?

Information age is upon for professional people in the 21st century. And for most, we consider this as humanity’s advantage. But let’s take a moment to look at the other perspective where we have just tons of information leading to most of the populace to have lost focus, lost in direction. In this article, we take a look at the concept from Scrum Playbook’s “Good Housekeeping”.

Abstract

Keeping only what is needed in the regular day-to-day business of each is another way of defining a “Good Housekeeping” practice. The keyword, housekeeping, is having that “-ing” signifies it is a continuous effort. It is having an agreed set of rules with a principle behind each of them in a team. Having a simple intuitive structure or framework aimed to require minimum effort should be the focus. The ultimate aim is to make the routinary work as effective and efficient as possible.

Without doing good housekeeping activities might lead to these unwanted situations:

Physically:

Messy workplaces (digitally, physically)
Hazardous work area

Mentally

Increase of stress levels
Loss of focus

Both physically and mentally

Confusions of the location of the necessary artefacts
Waste of time, energy and skills spent on superfluous activities (e.g. inconsistent practices)

Do take into consideration when doing good housekeeping the affected parties:

The Scrum Team — as they are the primary people who will be maintaining the Housekeeping activities
Management — as they need to know that the team has allocated some effort for housekeeping. Keeping in mind that the first round of housekeeping might not yield immediate ROI (return on investment)
Rest of organization — although they might not be directly affected but down the road, one team’s habit will become a company culture, whether this habit is good or bad, as long as it is accepted as a norm

Impediments

Good housekeeping needs team effort to get the most benefit out of the team. Most of the time, if not always, good housekeeping entails a substantial amount of investment.

Our first impediment in our list is the delayed return-on-investment (ROI). This is one of the reasons why organizations are hesitant to do good housekeeping activity. Most would always look for the immediate return-of-incentives. People tend to shy away when ROI would need a longer time frame (e.g. a quarter or a year) where any delayed benefit is not considered worth trying for.

The Second impediment is that most people might think that this kind of boring, unwanted activity is for Scrum Masters only. While SMs (Scrum Masters) are the servant leader, they are mostly misinterpreted to do the work as secretariat, housekeeper and do-it-all person in the team. Most of the time these are the dirty tasks or those pieces of work that people don’t want to do.

Third impediment on our list is about the tyranny of the urgent. This is a scenario where firefighting is the norm. Most of the organization has a list where everything is a priority. In this kind of situation any other non-value adding activities in the short term are mostly discouraged.

Fourth impediment point is individuals in the team have different perspectives, different ways of doing things and different assessment standards. If a person does not have it his way, there will always be a chance that this individual will do what he feels, deviating from what was initially agreed with the team.

Fifth and our last on the list: Good housekeeping is just a misunderstood and a boring concept. It might be viewed as a useless initiative, even to the extent that this is a liability to the team or to the team’s velocity.

Our Experiences

Doing Good Housekeeping can be a dire task, but if we consider them as investments, in the end we will be reaping the rewards later. Sharing some real life anecdotes from the ScrumMastery’s team in the following paragraph and hoping that the reader can get an insight or a couple more.

“We have minimized doing redundant tasks, redundant information” A tool is not missing for a year (since housekeeping implementation) thus saving time, effort (around 10%) and avoiding a lot of frustration for just searching for a tool.”

“All necessary information can be found in a single place, in a single file. Maintaining lesser files, folders, tools is better as it brings standardization and the implementation of the “single source of truth” located at a single place, or in a single file. Reduction of confusion and promoting transparency and alignment as the information communication gap is greatly reduced.”

“ My Scrum projects without clear Definition of Ready (DoR) and Definition of Done (DoD) tend to be more bumpy. The developers normally lacked common understanding and way of working. They shared no definitions of “ready” user story and potentially shippable product increment. The user stories were poorly written without acceptance criteria. The developers struggled to understand requirements and failed to meet the expectation of the Product Owner at the end of the sprints. Without clear DoD, the product increments were seldom potentially shippable with many technical debts to be solved later. Projects with DoR and DoD introduced early, developers were normally more productive and happier, had less friction with the Product Owner and less technical debts in the product increments.”

“I’ve been working with one team were the Acceptance Criteria of PBIs was often not well defined, which lead to a number of problems such as: (1) Discussion with whole team during Sprint Review to determine what was the criterion to accept the work as done; (2) Doubts about what to show to stakeholders for certain work items and; (3) Rework of a PBI after Sprint Review and need to schedule extra slot to review and accept the PBI.

Afterwards, we had a discussion about the importance of investing time on defining a good Acceptance Criteria. From then on, the Sprint Reviews went much smoother and we almost never had the need to perform rework on a backlog item.”

Our Recommendation

The following items are the learnings we can share so that good housekeeping will start to be appreciated with the value that it brings to the organization. The effects, at first, may not be very obvious to the revenue of a company but in the long run they are sure to bring efficiency and effectiveness from each individual, and bring a better synergy to the overall team’s outcome.

Checks before doing Good Housekeeping

Define the necessary resources/ cost, time and effort to do self-assessment on understanding, defining the current and future state.
Having the team commitment to improve within a specified timeframe reducing the gap of the current and future state. Each individual in the team is accountable for the success or failure of the endeavor with the support of the management. For instance, a team agrees that they are now at 2/10. The members commits that a span of 6 months, they will improve to 5/10. Team does this by establishing their own standards and doing their own self-assessment.
Alignment between the team on how to do the activities. The time and effort to set the processes and the agreement of the whole team and the organization. E.g. regular update of task tickets, Scrum board, Burn-down charts.
Having S.M.A.R.T Goals (not directly associated with Product Goal or Sprint Goal). That is the immediate goal and vision and its level of understanding among members are constantly self-checked or self-assessed. Highlighting what benefit in a certain timeframe is the team looking after some actions are being done to address the gap from current to the desired condition.
Maintain the eagerness and motivation factor where the majority is benefitted by doing Housekeeping. Only then we can call this activity or any other activity as “Good”.

While doing Good Housekeeping

Start small, run small pilots and use 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Sustain, Standardize and Shine) as guidance to develop the culture.
Regular allocation of time and effort. Maintain activities, sustaining what works for the team, ensuring the team follows the nomenclature or formats e.g. Team Charters
Prioritize according to the team’s feedback. Maintain the team’s engagement by listening more to the team member over to what other people outside of the organization are stating. Each application of Good Housekeeping will vary according to the unique dynamics and ambiance of the team.

Outcomes of doing Good Housekeeping

When a pilot is implemented successfully, the result is shared immediately. Clearly documented in a brief and concise manner and communicated as a success story. Most of the time it will inspire other departments to do the same or something similar.
Definition of Done (DoD) and Definition of Ready (DoR) are established and understood among stakeholders.

Getting to Desired Outcomes

Identifying what matters to the team vs what matters to the stakeholders will be the last challenge. The following items are the learnings we can share so that good housekeeping will start to be appreciated with the value that it brings to the organization. The effects, at first, may not be very obvious to the revenue of a company but in the long run they are sure to bring efficiency and effectiveness from each individual, and bring a better synergy to the overall team’s outcome.

Here are some criteria you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of housekeeping efforts. Do keep in mind that these points are coming from the perspective of the ScrumMastery community members.

Team Velocity. There has been a steady increase of team velocity having the same input and resources. Scrum team achieves better effectiveness or gains in productivity.
Minimalism. The milieu of the team will be intuitive. All that can be seen be it in the physical world or in the digital world are the things that the individual will need in the day-to-day work.
Effectiveness and Focus. Time and effort looking, sifting through purposeless items, searching for the item of the moment will be greatly reduced, if not eliminated. This will then increase the overall focus and effectiveness of the team.
Ease of onboarding. New team members easily understand the team’s guidelines, workflow as the work environment is void of non-essential but attention grabbing items.
Intuitiveness. Everything has its place and a place for everything. This famous adage can be associated with a harmonious work environment. Conveying information within the team’s system is straightforward and requires minimum effort both for the information source and receiver.
Clarity of Intent. Product backlog items are easy to understand and complete with a clear and concise acceptance criteria. An example of this scenario at the Software Developer domain, this intent is expressed by the following points:

Safe — can be used without causing harm to the existing system
Secure — the system can’t be hacked
Reliable — the system behaves as it should everytime, all the time
Testable — the system can be tested from the code level until the product or user interface (UI) level
Maintainable & Scalable — effort maintaining and feature adding are at a minimal level
Portable — can be deployed to multiple environments, platforms and Operating Systems (OS)

In conclusion, the condition of a workplace be it in digital, physical or both; or the product’s code, documentation may translate the team’s collective mental state. Also aim for Good Housekeeping activities to be sustainable, making it a habit in a person and overtime build a culture out of it. One of the ultimate outcomes that everybody would aspire is the well-being of all in the organization.