Start Your Own Zombie Scrum Learning Journey
6 Do-it-yourself workshops to learn more about Zombie Scrum, and to identify improvements to prevent or fix it
We started this year with a crazy experiment. Instead of hosting meetups only in our global user group, we wanted to run similar meetups in local user groups all around the world, simultaneously! This offered the opportunity to host meetups in different timezones, and languages, and to respect cultural differences. It allowed many more Scrum practitioners to join the meetups, which supported our belief in peer-to-peer inspiration to overcome the tough challenge everyone faces when working with Scrum.
In total, about 25 members of our community volunteered to kickstart 11 local user groups. You can find an overview of these user groups on our public Github page. Given the many hours they’ve spent preparing, hosting, and debriefing the meetups, a public shout-out is the least we can do. So, thank you Mahesh & Cipson (India), Carlo & Eleonora (Italy), Ulises (Panama), Sebastian (Poland), Luis (Mexico), Alex, Pol, Olga and Javier (Spain), Peter, Christian, Markus, Manuel, and Benji (Switzerland), Chungan & Tony (Taiwan), Umut (Turkey), Tom & Sean (UK), Jon & Christopher (US). You all rock!
The purpose of this blog post is to share the 6 do-it-yourself workshops we hosted with the local user groups. For each workshop, we’ll share the Google presentation that contains all the steps, invitations, and opportunities to learn more. We’ll also describe our lessons learned of hosting these meetups and include the articles that capture the outcome. We hope to give you enough inspiration and guidance to run these workshops with your own team, organization, or community. Let’s fight Zombie Scrum, together!
“Our hope is to give you enough inspiration and guidance to run these workshops with your own team, organization, or community.”
How to use these do-it-yourself workshops?
The 6 topics of the workshops are similar to the key chapters of our book the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide. It follows the flow and structure of the book. It’s definitely not necessary to buy the book, but it does offer an extra dimension to the sessions. One organization used the workshops to start a book club. Each month one of the chapters became the primary theme. As a preparation, all the participants studied the chapters individually and shared their findings, questions, and insights during the sessions.
Monthly sessions are probably a good rhythm. Schedule all of them upfront and make sure there’s enough time between the very first announcement and the actual first workshop. This gives people within your organization enough time to sign up. You can run these workshops within your own team, but you’ll have a bigger impact if you involve the entire organization. Many of the impediments a Scrum team faces are influenced by its environment, so this is an excellent opportunity to find support in the wider organization.
Use the material we shared as inspiration. Make a copy of the Google presentations, and feel free to change the timeboxes, invitations, or structures. Based on the experience, knowledge, and size of a group, we also continuously tweak and change our workshops. In general: less is more, and shorter beats longer. If you focus on one topic only, you can still explore it in detail and have profound conversations. As a timebox for the workshops, we prefer 90 minutes. Especially when they’re done online. It’s short enough to keep everyone engaged and long enough to dig deep into the topic at hand.
Workshop #1 — The Purpose Of Scrum
During this first workshop, you help the participants discover how Zombie Scrum compares to Scrum as intended. You’ll explore the underlying purpose of the Scrum framework, and how Scrum is all about navigating complex problems and reducing risk.
Scrum is a simple framework for navigating complex, adaptive problems. It only prescribes what teams should do to work empirically, but not how they should do it. Because every team, every product, and every organization is different, teams have to find their own way to make this work for them. When they do, they can reduce the risk of complex work, start delivering value to their stakeholders sooner and become more responsive. This journey will be easier for some Scrum teams than for others, but change will follow when you persist.
In this journey to make Scrum work for your organization, it’s easy to lose sight of the original purpose of Scrum. So, it’s useful to occasionally take a step back and to reflect on the principles, values, and rules of the Scrum framework. That’s the intention of this first workshop. You’ll work together to identify the essence of Scrum and unravel the differences with your own perception.
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow, steps, and invitations
- Articles about the Liberating Structures we used: Impromptu Networking, Appreciative Interviews, and 15% Solutions
Workshop #2 — Discover Your Stakeholders With A Stakeholder Map
A useful stakeholder is someone who has at least some “skin in the game”. When your product succeeds, they benefit from it. When it fails, they share the pain with you. Most Scrum teams have more ideas and possibilities than they have time and money for. Stakeholders help them balance what is valuable for your product with the resources that you have for developing it.
However, teams do need to know who their stakeholders are. And we mean their real stakeholders, not the people with an opinion about the team or product. During this workshop, you work together to create a “Stakeholder Map”. It’s designed to create transparency around who your stakeholders are, and how to most effectively involve them to determine what is valuable.
The workshop will help the participants understand the purpose of a Stakeholder Map, what the different types of stakeholders are, and how to get started with creating your own Stakeholder Map.
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the workshop
- The original do-it-yourself workshop with detailed steps
Workshop #3— Ship It Fast!
While shipping fast doesn’t guarantee success, it helps organizations find out faster whether their ideas are actually valuable, and adjust the product strategy based on feedback. This workshop is all about shipping fast, and how it’s your best survival strategy when faced with complex work. You’ll also explore the reasons — and excuses — that teams often encounter for not doing this.
For something that seems so obvious, people often have wildly different ideas about what “shipping fast” looks like in practice. A team may believe they’re “shipping fast” because they’re deploying to a test environment every day, but not actually to production. In other cases, teams may feel they’re shipping fast because they’ve delivered a visual design, a test plan, and done some meetings. And what is “fast”, actually? For some organizations, shipping something every month is already fast, for others, that would be extremely slow.
So it’s always important to get clear on when you’re actually “Shipping Fast”, and when you’re doing something that may look like it, but isn’t. We designed this do-it-yourself workshop to start a conversation with your team, management, or stakeholders about “shipping fast”, and what benefits it holds when it’s done right.
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the workshop
- The original do-it-yourself workshop with detailed steps
- A blog post with the outcome of the meetup
Workshop #4 — Amplify Learning In Your Team With More Double-Loop Learning
Single- and double-loop learning is a concept defined by the organizational theorist Chris Argyris. It is an important part of our book the “Zombie Scrum Survival Guide”. Single-loop learning focuses on solving a problem within an existing system that is defined by sets of beliefs, structures, roles, procedures, and norms. Double-loop learning challenges the system, and underlying beliefs themselves. But unfortunately, as our experience grows, we are often increasingly blinded by it to see new options.
Although both types of learning are important for continuous improvement to happen, double-loop learning is important in particular for complex work where teams have to constantly challenge not only how they do the work, but also why. Teams affected by Zombie Scrum tend to limit themselves to single-loop learning and can’t benefit from double-loop learning because their existing beliefs about management, products, how to manage people, and how to manage risk remain unchallenged.
During this workshop, you’ll explore why double-loop learning matters, what the difference is with single-loop learning, and how you can improve learning in your team and organization.
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the meetup
- The original do-it-yourself workshop with detailed steps
- A blog post with the outcome of the meetup
Workshop #5 — Measure And Improve How Your Environment Supports Your Team
Is the environment in your organization supportive of Scrum, or does it cause impediments? A common complaint, and frustration, among people who try to change behavior, is that it seems to be so incredibly hard. But one important insight from social and organizational psychologists is that the behavior of people in organizations is strongly shaped by the environment.
This is often called “the smell of the place”, and it gives you a sense of an organization’s culture. Although most of us are not always aware of this, our environment shapes how we behave and feel. Just like most of us feel more inspired and energized in a fresh, lush forest than in the drab, concrete jungle of a metropolitan city in the scorching heat of summer. Re-energizing people often have a lot less to do with changing people, and a lot more with changing the context those people work in.
We designed this workshop with three overlapping goals. The first is to look at how your work environment shapes your behavior as individuals and as teams. The second is to turn this into a (simple) metric that you can track, and see if you’re heading in the right direction. And finally, our goal with this workshop is to involve those people in your environment who have the power to change it (like management).
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the meetup
- The original do-it-yourself workshop with detailed steps
- A blog post with the outcome of the meetup
Workshop #6 — Maximize The Output, Or Optimize The Outcome?
What creates Zombie Scrum? One clear theme we — and many others — have found is that people use the Scrum framework for the wrong reasons. When you ask people in a Zombie Scrum organization what they are hoping to get out of Scrum, you’ll hear things like “more speed”, “more output” and “more efficiency”. That’s very different from the actual meaning of the word “agile”. It’s also very different from what the Scrum framework is designed for.
In this workshop, the participants discuss what outcome they hope to achieve with Scrum. Although the Scrum Guide answer could be “I want to create more value for stakeholders”, it could be they have other, more personal reasons to use Scrum as well. What is it, that drives them to use Scrum? Maybe from a human point of view, what do they hope Scrum makes possible?
The participants will have the opportunity to share experiences of times when they didn’t achieve the desired outcome, why that happened, and how it impacted them, personally. They’ll also share lessons learned, the things they’re doing differently nowadays that help them use Scrum more effectively.
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the meetup
- A blog post with the outcome of the meetup
Bonus Workshop — Your Journey To Recovery
About 6 months after the Zombie Scrum Survival Guide was released, we wanted to check what progress our community had made with putting the experiments we describe in our book, into practice. What are the success stories they’ve experienced with fighting Zombie Scrum? What happened? What did Zombie Scrum look like and how did they manage to improve the situation? During the workshop, we used the Liberating Structure “Drawing Together” to visualize everyone’s individual Scrum journey, and “Appreciative Interviews” to identify and share success stories.
Although this workshop wasn’t part of the series we organized together with the local user groups, it does make sense to connect it to your own Zombie Scrum learning journey. We recommend hosting this workshop 6 months after you hosted the final meetup (Maximize the output or optimize the outcome?). It’s a great opportunity to make the current state of Scrum transparent, to have the teams inspect the progress they’ve made, and to identify new improvements. After all, using Scrum effectively is a never-ending, ongoing journey!
Here’s some material to help you run this workshop yourself:
- The Google presentation with the flow & steps of the meetup
- A blog post with the outcome of the meetup
Closing
In this blog post, we shared the 6 workshops we hosted as The Liberators Network, together with the 11 local user groups. We offered you all the material we created for these workshops: the Google presentation with all the steps and related blog posts that captured the outcome and lessons learned.
We hope to give you enough inspiration and guidance to run these workshops with your own team, organization, or community. So, share the idea with your team and organization, schedule the first workshop, and start your own Zombie Scrum learning journey!
Send us a message if you want us to kickstart the Zombie Scrum learning journey in your organization. We’re always happy to support you!
Let’s fight Zombie Scrum, together!
