Getting Started with Product Delivery

The Daily Scrum (Part 8 of 10)

Culture will eat your Daily Scrum for breakfast

CULTURE WAKA WAKA WAKA

Culture drives your organization and it also drives your Daily Scrum. The culture of an organization and the departments within an organization can easily be observed just by attending a Daily Scrum. At your Daily Scrum, are each of the Developers listing off the work that they completed and then the work that they are planning to do? This reflects an organization or department that is internally focused (on employees and output) leaning more towards a Bureaucratic or Community based culture. Are the Developers discussing how their combined work is progressing towards achieving the Sprint Goal? This tends to reflect an organization or department that is externally focused (on customers and outcomes) leaning more towards a Competitive or Entrepreneurial based culture. Is the Scrum Master and/or Product Owner attending the Daily Scrum and possibly even the Manager for the Developers? This tends to reflect a culture that leans more heavily towards stability and control (Bureaucratic or Competitive culture) rather than a culture that leans towards flexibility and change (Community or Entrepreneurial culture).

Each organization, and even the departments within an organization, has a unique culture and most do not fall completely into one category or another. An organization’s culture is a blend of Bureaucratic, Community, Competitive, and Entrepreneurial. There is not a right or wrong mix of these cultures, it completely depends on each organization’s business strategy. However, if your organization has or is planning to move towards Product Development using Scrum, then you are making a commitment towards a certain business strategy and therefore a certain blend of culture. Scrum promotes a culture of maximizing customer value, trust, quality, continuous improvement, and as well as the Scrum Values of focus, respect, openness, courage, and commitment. Take a look at your Daily Scrum event and see how it aligns with both the culture of Scrum and your organization.

FOR THE DEVELOPERS, BY THE DEVELOPERS

The Daily Scrum is probably the one event out of all of the Scrum events that most Scrum Teams consistently hold and it is also the one that most Scrum Teams do wrong. The Daily Scrum section within the latest 2020 Scrum Guide contains only nine sentences and there are two of them that are the most important.

1. “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team”
2. “The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work.”

Within these two sentences, it is made crystal clear what is the length, who should attend, the purpose, and the outcome of the Daily Scrum. It’s also within these two sentences that a lot of Scrum Teams severely screw up their Daily Scrum.

At your next Daily Scrum, silently observe the team with the following questions in mind. If you find that you answer “YES” to any of them, there’s a chance that your Daily Scrum is screwed up and the chances of achieving the Sprint Goal can easily end up off-course.

• The Daily Scrum takes longer than 15-minutes?
• The Daily Scrum doesn’t start on schedule?
• Attendees often arrive after the meeting has already started, disturbing the others?
• There are people, other than the Developers, that are actively participating in the Daily Scrum?
• Someone else, other than the Developers, is constantly running the Daily Scrum?
• The Developers consistently discuss topics that are not directly related to the Sprint Goal?
• The Developers are having discussions with people other than the Developers?
• The Scrum Master or someone else, other than the Developers, uses the Daily Scrum to assign work to individuals?
• Item aging and/or flow metrics are NOT part of the discussion?
• The conversations feel like a status update instead of a planning session?
• The discussions seem to go into solution solving and only a fraction of the team is interested?
• The majority of the Developers are not interested in what another person has to say?
• The Developers did not produce an actionable plan for the next day of work?
• At the end of the Daily Scrum, no one leaves the event with more information than when they entered it?

COME ON AND STIR IT UP

If the Daily Scrum is still following the format of answering the “3 Questions”, stir it up and get rid of them. Change the format. There are some really good Daily Scrum formats that the Developers can use to help make this event so much more valuable and effective. The ideas below are designed to help improve your Daily Scrum as well as help stop habituation.

1–2–4-All: The folks from Agile for Humans offer up a suggestion in their book called “Fixing Your Scrum” for how to run the Daily Scrum using a liberating structure called 1–2–4-All while having the Developers answer the question, “What opportunities do you see for making progress on the team’s Sprint Goal?” This is a great way to run the Daily Scrum so that all of the Developers’ voices are heard and when it is done well, it easily takes less than 15 minutes. Bring this idea to the Developers and see if they would like to experiment running it maybe once a week during the Daily Scrum.

The Format for 1–2–3-All:
1 Minute Alone: The Developers spend 1 minute silently considering the following question: "What opportunities do you see for making progress on the team's Sprint Goal?"
2 Minutes in Pairs: The Developers work in pairs for 2 minutes generating ideas and building on their insights from Step 1.
4 in Foursomes: The Developer Pairs now form a foursome and spend four minutes sharing and building on their previous ideas.
All Together: The Developers all get together and discuss what ideas stood out during the conversations. A good practice is to have each of the Foursomes share at least one idea with the team.

Keep Everyone Guessing: Here’s a technique that you can try if you are finding that the Developers are constantly multitasking or simply not paying attention.

Keep Everyone Guessing Steps:
• Use whatever fun random technique you can to come up with in order to decide who will go first in the Daily Scrum.
• Once that person finishes, have that person pick who goes next.
• Here’s a twist or two. Whoever speaks next, starts their first sentence with the last word the previous person used. Or, maybe simply add a 4th question such as a Scrum trivia question each time someone completes answering their 3rd question. Yes, these can be a bit gimmicky but it can help all of the Developers to actively listen to the people that go before them. The thing here is to stir up things.

Fist-of-Five: The Fist-of-Five is a technique for quickly getting feedback or gauging consensus during the Daily Scrum. The name comes from everyone using their fingers to vote on a topic using a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest). After everyone votes, use the low results as a way to have a discussion and a chance for a better understanding of the topic. Then have everyone vote again on the same topic. Some thought-provoking questions that can be asked while using the Fist-of-Five include:

Questions for First-of-Five:
• How confident are you that we are on track to meet the Sprint Goal?
• How confident are you that you will accomplish what you have planned for today?
• How comfortable are you with the Item Aging (how long has an Item on the board stayed active in its current state)?
• How comfortable are you with the current Flow Metrics?

Inverted Daily Scrum with a Slight Change to the “3 Questions”:
If the Developers still like using the 3 question format, maybe suggest running them in reverse with a slight change on the questions. In the suggestion below, two of the questions were modified from the traditional Daily Scrum questions to include the word “accomplish”. Focus on what will be accomplished today and what was accomplished yesterday (outcomes), instead of answering what will you do today and what did you do yesterday (output). This focuses the conversation around the Product and Sprint Goal while helping to reduce the useless chatter of someone listing off everything they did or plan to do.

Inverted Daily Scrum Steps:
1. Start with, are there any impediments that can potentially prevent you or Developers from meeting the Sprint Goal? This puts emphasis on the most important thing first, which is staying on track with achieving the Sprint Goal.
2. Answer what you will accomplish today?
3. Finally, what did you accomplish yesterday?

Another twist on this is to run your Daily Scrum at the end of the day instead of the traditional first thing in the morning time slots. One of the benefits includes whatever impediments that can prevent the Developers from meeting the Sprint Goal is freshly on everyone’s mind.

NO “I”: Try running an experiment where for 15 minutes during the Daily Scrum, no one uses the word “I”. Instead, they can use “we”, “the team”, “the Developers”, etc. The purpose is to help reinforce that the Developers should be working together as a team and that we shouldn’t be looking at the work as if individuals on the team own parts of it.

ELMO (“Enough Let’s Move On”): ELMO is a technique that you can use with your team to cut unnecessary discussions. There are different ways to invoke ELMO. Everyone can have a card with ELMO written on it and someone holds up the ELMO card, you can use the very low-tech approach of just raising your hand, or someone can just say, “ELMO.” Be careful because you can get hit with a counterstrike by someone using the acronym, WINTY (“Wait, I’m Not Through Yet!”). I personally prefer to skip the whole ELMO thing and simply ask if this is a topic that can be held until after we wrap up the Daily Scrum.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I was first introduced to Scrum when I read a book back in 2002 called, “Agile Software Development with Scrum” by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle. I’m not sure how I heard about this book but the cover caught my attention with its black background and the various names of colors written on it that did not match their actual color. I read the book in one night. Everything is in there that you would need to know in order to get started using Scrum; however, the concepts and ideas were in contrast to the way that I was delivering software at that time. It took me over ten years after first reading it to fully grasp the true purpose of Scrum and actually start implementing it. The only thing that I did after reading the book back in 2002 was to introduce the concept of the Daily Scrum to the team. We didn’t use Sprints, Sprint Planning, Sprint Goals, or even Sprint Reviews (note: the book did not include any mention of Sprint Retrospectives though we did do lessons learned at the end of every project). The only nugget of usefulness for me at that time was the Daily Scrum. After only a few days of introducing the Daily Scrum (probably better renamed the Daily Meeting since we weren’t really doing Scrum), we quickly found that we were getting much better at communicating as a team and understanding where we stood each day with progress towards completing our project. The Daily Scrum proved to us to be a powerful event and probably was the panacea that kept our project from failing.

INSTALLMENTS

• Introduction with Table of Contents
• Previous Installment: Getting Started with Product Delivery: Sprint Planning & Sprint Backlog (Part 7 of 10)
• Next Installment: Getting Started with Product Delivery: Sprint Review & The Increment (Part 9 of 10)

I am very interested to learn what you think about this topic. My LinkedIn profile is https://www.linkedin.com/in/phooey

GO MAKE A HULLABALOO!!!