All of Scrum Diagram – PDF

All of Scrum Diagram – OpenDocument Graphics

I also have a guidelines/rules-of-thumb list:

Scrum Rules of Thumb – PDF

And some pitfalls listed out:

General Scrum Pitfalls – PDF

Scrum Product Owner Pitfalls – PDF

Then you realize.. Oh, Oh.. Now what ?  How am I going to pull this off ?   You will find all kinds of interesting material on the net with complex formulas and calculations.  There are some well written and recognized books about this topic that can help.  *Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn is a great place to start.

What is important is that the TEAM should estimate the work required to complete a Sprint (or a Project).  The people doing the work, really know best how long their work will take.

Please remember though, estimation is just that, and should not be cast in stone.  The reality is that at this early stage (or even 1/2 way through a project), there are still many unknowns.

I have used the following approach with as many as approximately 20 team members at the same time.  Maybe it will work for you.

The following procedure assumes you already have a team or teams that are familiar with their velocity and capabilities.

Here’s how it works….

At this early stage, their may be some stories, but likely everything is in Epic or Theme sizes.  Perfect.  You don’t need too much detail.

The Product Owner can give a brief overview of the vision.  You might find it useful to have stakeholders there to listen in and answer questions at this early stage.  This will help them to have an idea already of what obstacles they will need to be removing for the team in the future :->

Then, let the team use what they already know….  Planning Poker Cards.  For an overview of the process, here’s a link for a documented procedure from Mountain Goat Software.

Just change the scale of the cards to be 10 times more.  A 2 would become 20, a 20 would become 200.  The team members already know this system.  It will be easy for them to learn.

So, if your usual numbers are  1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100, use the same cards for team voting.  The values would just be 10,20,30,50,80,130,200,400,1000..

You will quickly get an overall estimate for each Epic with numbers from the team.  Just add up the numbers to get an overall number and divide it by the overall velocity and you’ll have some idea of how many sprints of work are left.

More importantly, you will also have started the process of communication among the team members and the Product Owner.  The Product Owner will already know which parts of the project may present challenges to assist them in their overall product planning.

Card Values Transformed

As estimates really are just that, don’t get excited if the numbers aren’t what you deem to be perfect.  You will have an idea based on existing velocity of the “broad estimate” for the project.

Nothing fancy, works quickly, and gets everybody thinking about the big picture.

NO, it is NOT perfect.  That’s not the idea.  Spending too much time on this won’t necessarily give you more accurate results.  I find that letting everyone know it’s not perfect, removes a lot of pressure and keeps things moving forward.  People will STILL do what’s right and give their opinions on issues that really matter to them. Don’t worry about that ! :->

The hardest part is to keep things moving forward, especially with a larger group.  Be prepared for this or this will take far too long.

You may find that the numbers are Not what you expected and may be higher than you had hoped for.  Think about it this way.  If today, the team is telling you based on what they CURRENTLY know that the project will take 6 months to complete, what is the point of saying, NO, the exact amount of scope will get done in 3 months? As agilists, we know better.  Besides, at this point in time, we really don’t know what the work actually is yet.

Try and avoid having only developers, or only a certain group, and please don’t exclude testers or BA’s.  The idea here is that since you are working cross-functionally, you should be getting a cross-functional vote. Depending on your group size, you may have a hard time getting your WHOLE team involved.  Just resist the temptation to only have a few people.  You’re really missing the benefit.

This process has also worked for me half way through a very large project for a new team (it was not possible to do this at the beginning).   I was fortunate to be in a company that had a great attitude towards the results and used the information obtained to re-align their corporate objectives based on the teams’ input about how long epics would take.  That was a great experience and allowed for a very successful project delivery!

Listen to what the team is telling you!  They have all given their input this way.  There is no reason to think they are wrong about the their capabilities or the capabilities of the company to keep up with them.  The team will also automatically factor in the environment they work in and the corporate development culture.

I’ve successfully used this technique with a group as large as approximately 20 people from a variety of teams working on the same project in the same room with a Product Owner and 2 Stakeholders.

That same team also estimated approximately 6 months worth of epics in just under 2 hours. Longer than that would not likely have produced better results.

The goal isn’t to create procedures here, but to find a way to allow the team to estimate work instead of schedules being handed down to them.  More importantly, it will start the goal of communication between the Team and the Product Owner.

Maybe this approach will work for your team.  If you try this, please let me know how it worked out for you either way.

Mike Caspar

References:

Mike Caspar – Mike Caspar’s Blog

OpenAgile – http://www.openagile.com

Scrum – http://www.scrumalliance.org

*Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn

If you are considering SCRUM, XP, Lean or any other Agile Framework, or if you are considering using OpenAgile which is an Open Learning System, you will be changing the organization.

Many people think they can do “Agile in a bubble” and therefore not interact with the rest of the organization.  You will likely find that you will quickly run into obstacles to using the Framework.

Just the iterative process alone will change the way stakeholders interact with teams, meeting rooms are scheduled, vacation schedules, communication requirements, team spaces and/or seating, the responsibilities of stakeholders, and even the interactions between team members and other departments.  Because of this, working towards Agility WILL change your organization.

You may start out with an aggressive framework such as XP(Extreme Programming), or something a little more gentle such as Kanban or Lean (which let you start out as you are and visualize your process).  However, please don’t kid yourself; you will eventually need to change the way things get done in the company.  This is the goal.

Whether you are the OpenAgile Growth Facilitator, a Scrum Master trying to introduce Agile from the grass-roots, or if you are the CEO or CIO trying to introduce change from that level, you will eventually need to address the WHY for the change.

Managers and employees alike need to know why they are being asked to leave their comfort zones.  In some cases they will be going against everything they have learned in the past about people management or how they should work.  They need to know the reason.

Whatever level you are in at your company, please be ready to explain why you are making the change to an Agile Environment.  Something like “to be more efficient”, isn’t really going to cut it.

I was observing the activities of a new team that did not have a Scrum Master but were trying to use the SCRUM Framework. The company had unfortunately not added this role in their new SCRUM team(s). The reasons why are not important. Let’s just say, they now have those roles.

When the Scrum Master was selected, some issues showed up over a perception of that person getting a “promotion” to a management type position. They were now the “Master of the Team” (or so the perception was).

I managed to help that team out by simply reminding them the intention is that the Scrum Master role is as a Master of SCRUM, not a Master of the Team.

There are some management type abilities to be a Scrum Master for sure, but they are more directed to interfacing with the outside world and removing obstacles for the team. There are some management skills required to be able to have the confidence to keep the rules of Scrum and push back and deal with different levels within the organization.

Remember, the word is SCRUM Master, not TEAM Master, Team lead, Project manager, etc.

Of course, changing the order of the words would be inappropriate, but perhaps explaining the distinction to others might help clear up some of the confusion for your teams.

The term is SCRUM Master

Mike Caspar

If you change the Scrum framework you just simply aren’t using Scrum and are probably canceling some of its most important benefits.

Thank you Ken!  I wholeheartedly agree.  Every CSM class I teach, I emphasize the complete nature of Scrum as a single tool, not a collection of tools.  Learning Scrum is about learning the tool, not learning how to pick and choose pieces of a tool.  Let’s explore this metaphor of Scrum as a tool.

Consider a hammer.  A hammer is ideally suited for pounding nails into wood.  It has two parts: a head and a handle.  If you take the parts and use them separately, they can still be used for pounding nails into wood… but they are very ineffective compared to the hammer (although better than using your bare fist).  It is non-sensical to decompose the hammer and try to use the pieces separately.  However, a hammer is not suited to other purposes such as driving screws or cutting wood.  It’s perfection is not just in its form, but also in its proper application.  A hammer works through a balanced combination of leverage and momentum.

Scrum is like a hammer.  It has parts (daily Scrum, Sprints, ScrumMaster, etc.), but taking the parts and trying to use them separately is… you guessed it… non-sensical.  The parts of Scrum combine to be an extremely effective tool for new product development.  Just like a hammer, there are things you wouldn’t want to do with Scrum such as manufacturing or painting a wall.  (We might not all agree on the limits of the use of Scrum… that’s something for another article.)  Scrum works through a combination of pressure on the organization and “inspect and adapt” (continuous improvement).

Please.  Don’t modify Scrum.  If you must change things about Scrum, please stop calling it Scrum.

Option One: Follow Scrum Strictly

The rules of Scrum are clear: if it isn’t part of the team’s work for a Sprint, then it shouldn’t be done.  From the moment the team commits to work in Sprint Planning to the end of the Sprint with the Sprint Review, the team needs to be protected from interruptions.  If an interruption is truly urgent enough to warrant the team’s attention mid-Sprint, then the Sprint can be canceled.  This is a pretty extreme result however since it invalidates the team’s previous commitment.

The Scrum approach is based on the basic philosophy that Scrum is a system to expose the problems and obstacles in the organization.  This is painful!  In the case of interruptions, Scrum then is metaphorically throwing them back in the face of the organization and saying “this is bad behavior!  Fix the behavior that causes so many interruptions, don’t find a way to accommodate interruptions.”

For example, many teams are faced with interruptions related to their support of the software they are creating.  In Scrum, deflecting the interruptions forces the team and the organization to examine the root causes of the support issues and fix them.  If the team is producing software with lots of defects, then that needs to change.  If the team is producing software that is hard to use, then that needs to change.  If the team is producing software without the appropriate level of user documentation, then that needs to change.  But what doesn’t change is the team breaking the safety of the Sprint defined by the rules of Scrum.

Option Two: Allocate a Portion of Time to Interruptions

Given certain conditions, the amount of interruption of a team can be “stable”. If this is the case, then the team can reasonably set aside a certain percentage of their time to handle interruptions. Determining if this is possible can be done by tracking the occurrence of interruptions and the level of effort to handle them.

In a team using this method, there are two ways to allocate this time: everyone on the team gives a certain amount of time each day to handling interruptions OR one or two people on the team are committed full-time for a cycle to handling interruptions. In either case, if the amount of actual time spent on interruptions is less than the amount of time available, then that difference of time must be used carefully. Generally, the best use of this extra time is to work on resolving the root causes of interruptions. For example, if one person of a team is dedicated to dealing with interruptions, and most interruptions come from in-the-field bug support requests, then that person might spend any extra time working on fixing older lower-severity defects.

The amount of time that the team is allocated to handling interruptions should never be exceeded otherwise the team’s commitments at the start of the cycle are not really commitments.

This option is by far the most common systematic approach to dealing with defects

Option Three: Visible Negotiation of Change

Another common method of handling interruptions is the “fluorescent note card” method which requires visible stakeholder negotiation around the impact of interruptions. With this method, any time a stakeholder comes to the team with an interruption request, the ScrumMaster/Coach/Process Facilitator writes the request on a bright colored note card so that it is easy to distinguish it from the other tasks the team is working on in their current cycle.   The ScrumMaster then asks the team to do a task breakdown on the card and using their normal process (whatever that is) estimates the work effort. The requesting stakeholder then has to negotiate with any other stakeholders (and in particular the Product Owner/Growth Facilitator about what work to remove from the iteration in order to make room for the new work. This process works well primarily because it makes the tradeoffs visible. It does not work so well with letting the team make and keep their commitments which can have a long-term impact on trust.

This approach requires a few things to be in place to be effective:

1. A visible task board instead of electronic tools for task tracking.  The visibility makes the change much more immediate and you must have the stakeholders involved right in the same physical space.  An electronic tool makes this too abstract and can lead to some important stakeholders not being properly aware of changes.
2. A team that is reasonably good at estimating.  By “good” I mean both accurate and fast.  If it takes the team half an hour to do an accurate estimate, then that is already a significant interruption in itself!  A team should be able to look at an interruption, break down the tasks and come up with a reasonably accurate estimate within no more than 10 minutes.  Remember that doing this is already task switching so there is going to be an additional cost to the team.
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a clear agreement must be in place among stakeholders that this approach to interruptions is allowed and that the consequence of it is that the team cannot be held accountable for their commitments!!!  I cannot stress this enough!

Option Four: Separate Team for Interruptions

This option is fairly self-explanatory and in fact is just a way of saying that you have a separate support group who deals with interruptions.  The more technically capable this group is, and the more authority they have to make changes to the code/database/etc., the more effective they will be at protecting the agile teams from interruptions.

In some ways, this is a good approach because it makes the cost of interruptions very visible to the business: how much does your support team cost?  If this cost is growing, then it means that the development teams are creating software that is harder and harder to support.

If you follow this approach, please ensure that you do not rotate development team members through the support team as this damages the team-building process for both the development team and the support team.

(One radical option to try as an add-on to this is to defray the cost of this support team by tying developer’s salaries to the cost of support.  To make this palatable, you might simply say to the development team that any time a support person can be laid off due to improved quality in the product/system, that person’s salary will be permanently distributed and added as a raise to the salaries of the development folks.  PS.  I’ve never seen any organization do this – it’s just a theory.)

Option Five: Extremely Short Cycles

A less common, but interesting method for handling interruptions is to have extremely short iterations. In this method, choose your iteration length to be so short that you can always start work on urgent interruptions before anyone gets impatient! This can be exhausting, but it is one of the best ways to get the team and the organization to understand the large toll that these interruptions take.

There is a simple way to determine how long your cycle should be based on measurement.  Choose a “normal” duration (e.g. one or two weeks) and for several cycles track how many interruptions are submitted to the team, and how urgent is the turn-around time on those interruptions.  After several cycles, the team can then adjust its cycle length so that, on average, the team is able to start and finish a cycle in a time shorter than the expected frequency of interruptions.

For example, one team I worked with found that in general, they were getting interruptions that needed to be handled within three or four days, but more urgent interruptions were rare.  They decided to use a cycle that was only two days long so that on average they would complete handling an interruption in three days.  (Interruption comes half way through a cycle and is put on the backlog at the top.  The next cycle they start and finish the interruption.  Elapsed time is three days.)

Option Six: Status Quo / Suffering

There is nothing inherently wrong with continuing with your current approach to handling interruptions.  It probably makes some people miserable, but there are also some people who really enjoy crisis and constant change.  In fact, it may be part of the culture of your organization or something that is strategically important in your particular industry.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be agile, but it may mean that you are making compromises where you are trading off team performance for some other benefit.  it is important that if you choose to continue with your status quo, that you make the trade-off transparent.  Tell everyone on your teams exactly why you are making the trade-off and what is the expected benefit of doing so.

Option Seven: Commitment Velocity

The most sophisticated option is based on measuring a special kind of velocity called “Commitment Velocity”.  This is a mechanism that allows both interruptions to be handled mid-cycle and for teams to make commitments that they can keep.  In the simplest terms, Commitment Velocity is the minimum historical slope of a team’s Sprint burndown.

For example, if a team in Sprint 1 has 240 units of effort at the start of the Sprint, but, partly due to interruptions, does not finish and then has 40 units of effort left unfinished at the end of the Sprint, then the Commitment Velocity (slope) of the team is 240 – 40 = 200.  In their next Sprint planning meeting, they would plan such that they had at most 200 unites of effort in their Sprint plan.  The team then does their second Sprint and again, partly due to interruptions, they don’t finish everything.  Perhaps this second sprint started with 195 units of effort (<200) and finished with 10 units of effort remaining.  Their new Commitment Velocity is 195 – 10 = 185.  They do a third sprint, but they finish everything.

It is tempting for the team to perhaps take an average – maybe they finished 200 units of effort in their third Sprint so they average 200, 185 and 200 leaving 195.  This is not Commitment Velocity.  By definition, an average means that the team will successfully complete all their work 50% of the time.

Instead, the team maintains its Commitment Velocity of 185 for their fourth Sprint.  By the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, as the team uses this tool of Commitment Velocity for more and more Sprints, eventually their ability to keep their commitments, even with interruptions) will become closer and closer to 100% certain.

Selecting an Option

Ultimately, the most important thing in selecting one of these options is to do so consciously and in the spirit of learning that underlies agile methods.  Choose  an option and then stick with it long enough to truly understand if it is working for you or not.

There are some things to consider as well:

• If you are trying to do a dramatic improvement in how your organization gets stuff done, I would recommend choosing either Option One (Follow Scrum Strictly) or Option Seven (Commitment Velocity).  Both of these are options that put pressure on the team and the organization to improve.
• If you don’t have strong executive support for Agile, then probably Options Two (Time Allocation), Four (Separate Team) and Five (Short Cycles) are going to be your best bet at first.
• If you do have strong executive support, but you aren’t desperate to improve your organization, you might consider Option Three (Visible Negotiation).
• Of course, Option Six (Status Quo) is the easiest… I don’t really recommend it though!  Agility requires systematic change to encourage continuous improvement.  All the other options assist with this.