In the End I Did It My Way
It has been over two years since I started working with Scrum. I have been a part of different Scrum teams both as a developer and leader. I have read books, blogs and have had the opportunity to attend courses. After all my research, this is my way of implementing Scrum.
Shu Ha Ri
It’s widely known that Scrum can be traced all the way back to one of Japan’s, and the world’s biggest car manufacturers, Toyota. But not only that, there is a Japanese martial arts concept, Shuhari, that is used for describing the progression of learning or training that can be applied to any discipline, in three stages. It is regarded as the ideal way to implement Scrum in any team.
Stage one: ‘SHU’
During this stage, we are our own motivators to learn to follow the rules of Scrum and repeat the fundamentals until you master them.
Stage two: ‘HA’
Once you have mastered the rules, break them. This stage is for innovating and changing the rules, to question what you have learned. Once you have an understanding of “why”, you can follow your own path, improving your own practices.
Stage three: ‘RI’
Finally, this is the moment when everything moves effortlessly as the team works in perfect cohesion. Although it may mark the completion of the three stages, one is still constantly learning.
Sounds great doesn’t it? The catch is, this is the ideal way but certainly not the easy way. In fact, it’s rather difficult to put into practice within a team. Every time there is a change, you must relearn to work as a team and you are back to to stage one, the SHU state. This method, in my previous experience, has shown little to no opportunities to adapt for unexpected cases. We work in an industry of constant change, therefore this method can be great for a single person or a static team that has no intention of changing in a short period of time. However, with how dynamic things are these days, it’s not recommended to use with your Scrum teams.
Acme Scrum
You may know this method by another name, ‘Scrum, But’. This is when your team starts to do scrum, but leaves the daily meetings out because they don’t see the value. This happens when the deadline is near but there is no “sprint” planning because they believe more time will help. By doing this, there is no consistency within the team and there is no way of analyzing the improvements of each sprint, in the case you don’t let sprints out. Almost every framework has it’s elements for a reason and often removing any of them would create an effective hybrid or a defective TNT that will never help you to catch the roadrunner.
Scrum-ception
Scrum is an evolutive framework, it is based on continuous improvement obtained through constant feedback. What if this feedback was based on how the framework was implemented? What could we change (without removing any of the key ingredients) in order to get the most out of Scrum?
This is how I work with my teams at Wolox!
We start by defining the rules of the first sprint which are essentially the basic steps of any Scrum process. By the end, at the retrospective, we gather the whole team and discuss the impediments that we had during the sprints and everyone offers advice to improve the process.
For example, we changed how we did the daily meetings, instead of doing what the theory says by answering the same 3 questions, we started asking the people about their objective for that work day to add extra focus on a daily basis.
By doing things like this, the teams adapt to what is best for them. Since each team is different, the amount of people vary and each person has their own input. In these meetings, we allow each team member to really be happy doing what they are doing, to have a voice and to create a positive work environment.
See also: Automatic Documentation
These methods are especially effective when teams are being created or when new people are mixed in with those who have been with the company for a while. By doing this, it would take one sprint to adapt to the new member and the new dynamic, basing everything on what the older part of the team has learned already.
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Encourage your teams to do this, let them voice their opinions, let them be part of the change and help them build their best way to work. Trust me you will see the rise in motivation. You never know, maybe you will find your own way to implement the scrum method nothing is set in stone, be open to changes!
Post by Ignacio Rivera, @nachorivera7, (ignacio.rivera@wolox.com.ar)
