SCRUM UPDATE
What’s New In the 2020 Scrum Guide Update
Highlights of the 2020 Scrum Guide
Are you as excited as I am about the new Scrum Guide update?
I hope so!
To give you a preview:
- A new concept of a “Product Goal” appeared.
- The term “Development Team” has disappeared.
- There is no more mention of the three questions during the Daily Scrum.
Intriguing, isn’t it?
The release of the new Scrum Guide took place on November 18th, 2020. And at the same time, its creators celebrated 25 years of Scrum. The last update took place three years ago, in 2017.
Today I will walk you through 8 key changes that got my attention.
Less prescriptive
Remember how I said “Scrum is more prescriptive” in the Scrum vs Kanban video? Well, it just got less prescriptive! And that’s a fact.
The authors say that over the years they kept on adding more guidelines to the Scrum Guide. And that made it more and more prescriptive. And in 2020 they decided to clear things up. They use simple words and removed all that made them entangled and complex.
Simpler and shorter
The Scrum Guide has been completely re-written. There are just a few sentences left from the 2017 version. And it also decreased in size from 19 pages in 2017 to 13 as we have it today. This means more work for me to bring you updates about all the changes in detail!
Now let’s check out the 8 biggest changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide Update
1. No more three questions on the Daily Scrum
In 2017 the three questions “What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?” and so on were made optional. And in 2020 they disappeared. The motivation behind that is to keep the framework open and less prescriptive. It means that the “Developers” can propose any structure they want, provided that it focuses on the progress towards the Sprint Goal and produces a plan for the day.
If you’re looking for inspiration, check out my video about how to “Walk the Board” on your Daily Scrum!
2. No more Development Team
The term “Development Team” got replaced with the term “Developers”. Its aim is to eliminate the team within a team. The strange relationship between the Product Owner and the Development Team. And bring the focus back to delivering value and being responsible for it as one team and not just as the Product Owner. Whenever the team does what the Product Owners tell them to, we have a problem. We need people to challenge the decisions, and focus on delivering value. Not just following the orders of a Product Owner. The important takeaway is:
Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-teams or hierarchies.
3. Introduction of Product Goal
This is a whole new term in the Scrum Guide. And yes, now all of us who thought we knew Scrum, have to deal with it and learn about it. Yet it’s still exciting!
The Product Goal is to the Product Backlog what a Sprint Goal is to Sprint Backlog. It’s what all your Sprints should add up to. It describes your Product Backlog and gives direction to the Scrum team.
It is meant to help the teams to get somewhere with Scrum, not just to do Scrum for its own sake. To deliver value derived from the Product Goal. And it helps frame the Sprint Goal, your Sprint Reviews and give meaning to what you are doing.
We all know how difficult it is to choose one goal. Even for the Sprint. So now think that according to the new Scrum Guide, you should stick to one Product Goal at a time. It is time for all of us to learn to say “no” to having multiple goals and keep focus.
4. Three Commitments
In 2017’s version we had only one mention of “Commitment” and it was represented by one of the five Scrum Values. Now, this value is embodied in three commitments, each one derived from one Artifact.
Each of the three artifacts now contain ‘commitments’ to them.
- Product Goal is the commitment for the Product Backlog.
- Sprint Goal is the commitment for Sprint Backlog.
- Definition of Done is the commitment for the Increment.
Those commitments exist to bring transparency and focus to each of the artifacts. And just to refresh everyone’s memory the Artifacts represent work or value. And they help to keep the most important information (work backlog) transparent.
5. Self-Managing over Self-Organizing
There is no more self-organization of the Development Team. Well, there is no more Dev Team either. Now we are moving towards a self-managing Scrum Team. Scrum Guide clarifies that it means “they internally decide who does what, when, and how.” Self-managing goes a step further than self-organization. You not only organize the work anymore. It gives the Scrum Team more responsibility and as such removes it from the managers. As Jurgen Appelo from Management 3.0 says “management is too important to leave to the managers”.
6. Sprint Planning replanned
Since 2017 we were talking about two parts of the Sprint planning. The “what” and the “how”. Now we have three equally important topics to cover:
- Why is this Sprint valuable? — Product Owner proposes how this Sprint could increase the product’s value. And we have an obligatory Sprint Goal to be defined by the whole Scrum Team before finishing the Sprint planning.
- What can be done this Sprint? — through a discussion with the Product Owner, select items from the Product Backlog to include in the current Sprint
- How will the chosen work get done? — the Developers decide on how they will do the work and split or decompose the Product Backlog Items.
7. No more servant leader
There is also quite a change to the description of the Scrum Master role. As you can imagine it directly impacts my daily work and I took a closer look at it.
I checked and in the 2017 version the word “accountable” appears only once about the Product Owner being accountable for managing the Product Backlog. In the recent update it appears eight times and two of them are applied to the Scrum Master:
The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide.
The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness.
Apart from gaining accountability within the Scrum Team, the Scrum Masters should serve the larger organization. They serve as catalysts for organizational change. They need to manage up and manage down — as Jeff Sutherland explains— they need to deal with the management as well as facilitate the team. They both go together.” And this time we do it as “true leaders who serve”.
I don’t know how about you but it took me over a year to fully grasp the meaning of a “servant leader”. Well, I can only rejoice in the fact that I got it before it was too late. Now it is, so the good news is that you can stop trying!
The term “Servant leader” has been replaced with a “true leader who serves”. Clear, isn’t it? Well, it was meant to take the emphasis off the serving part. Scrum Masters are not merely the team’s secretaries or people who bring donuts. And that used to be a widespread misconception about the role. Scrum Masters lead the teams on their way to high performance. Jeff Sutherland explains it by comparing a Scrum Master to a rugby captain. In the end, the term “Scrum” comes from rugby.
“Not that you are going to tell people what to do. But you are going to talk to the people, inject the sense of mission, and explain the importance of what we are doing. Create inspiration. And then you’re going to get out there and take blows for the team. And because of that people follow you.”
Jeff Sutherland
8. Simplification of language and opening it to everyone, not only IT
The term “Developers” might sound odd to us who work in IT. That’s because we directly see a programmer behind it and not a Quality Engineer or a Designer. But in other fields, you can say you develop a marketing campaign, for example, and this language is meant to be actually more inclusive. There have been some words tossed out too that refer to IT like testing, system, design, requirement, etc.
Scrum is made for all fields and industries and now the language reflects it.
During the presentation of the new update, the authors said: “Scrum hasn’t changed, we just found a better way to describe it”. It got “lighter, clearer, and more tightly coupled”.
Know your Scrum! And stay tuned for more detailed updates about it!
