Scrum Guide 2020 updates (compared to 2017)

2020 Scrum Guide is out and we thought of sharing some insights with you so you are aware of the changes. Scrum and it’s essence is the same and that means the core elements of the framework are still relevant. Here are a few things for you to remember –

Highlights of changes –

  1. Less prescriptive
  2. Introduction of Product Goal
  3. One Team (no sub-teams) and One Product focus
  4. Simplification of language (IT references removed) for wider audience

Prescriptions Removed –

Few prescriptions are removed. It doesn’t mean that those details are not relevant anymore. If your teams find these valuable, continuing with them is a good idea. However, if you want to experiment with different alternatives, give it a try.

Events:

  • Optional “three questions” for Daily Scrum removed
  • Sprint Retrospective commitments are no longer required in Sprint Backlog
  • Typical 10% capacity needed for Product Backlog Refinement (not a formal event) removed
  • Prescriptive elements about the events are condensed or removed (activities mentioned in 2017 guide are still valid, but teams can take up alternative approaches toward achieving the purpose)
  • Optional meeting after Daily Scrum for in-depth discussion

Artifacts:

  • Attributes of Product Backlog Items (Description, Order and Size) are optional
  • Monitoring progress towards the goals section
  • Product Owner decides when to release Increment

 

Product Goal –

It describes a future state of the product which can serve as a target for the Scrum Team to plan against. The long-term objective for the Scrum Team. They must fulfill (or abandon) one objective before taking on the next. Read more.

 

Artifacts Commitment –

Each artifact contains a commitment to ensure it provides information that enhances transparency and focus against which progress can be measured. These commitments exist to reinforce empiricism. Read more.

Artifact Commitment
Product BacklogProduct Goal
Sprint BacklogSprint Goal
IncrementDefinition of Done

 

Updates –

Development Team to Developers: There is no separate (Development) Team within the Scrum Team, thereby promoting ONE Scrum Team focused on the same objective.

From Roles to Accountabilities: This change has been introduced to stress on the accountabilities and not job titles. Scrum Team consists of three different sets of accountabilities – Product Owner, Developers and Scrum Master.

From Self-organize to Self-manage: “Scrum Team is self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.” This change in term is a way of calling out that more empowered your Scrum Team is, the better their chances of success. Read more.

Introducing “Why” in Sprint Planning: Along with “What and “How”, Scrum Team discuss “Why is this Sprint valuable?” This provides the answer to decide the Sprint Goal. In essence, we would recommend starting your Sprint Planning with Why. Read more.

 

Other changes –

  • Suggested Scrum Team size of 10 or fewer people
  • Multiple increments can be created within a Sprint
  • Along with Empiricism, addition of “Lean Thinking” as a foundation of Scrum framework
  • Replacement of term “estimate” with “size”
  • The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint

Hiren’s secret conversation with Covid

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This article discusses the Scrum framework and empiricism.

Covid-19: Knock! Knock!

Hiren: Who’s there?

Covid-19: Covid.

Hiren: Covid who?  

Covid-19: It’s me, the Corona Virus of 2019. These Homo sapiens have nicknamed me as Covid-19. I like it. Hiren, you can call me Covid. How are you?

Hiren: Oh boy…COVID!! Err… I am doing well, but what do you want from me? Are you here to get me?

Covid-19: Oh no. I am just here for general chitchat with you. Tell me, how’s your Scrum training business?

Hiren: Are you kidding me about the business? You have single-handedly paused the entire world. Every person on this planet is scared of you. Why don’t you just disappear?

Covid-19: How rude. Why should I disappear? I love this beautiful planet too. It is equally mine, and I have been in existence here for a long time too. Let’s co-exist.

Hiren: Co-exist with you? Nonsense. I don’t want to argue with you. Tell me how may I help you?

Covid-19: I have heard the scientist communities from these Homo sapiens are using some framework called Scrum to eradicate me. Haha… Is this true? Please educate me. How?

Hiren: Correct. Well, we humans are the most intelligent race on this planet Covid. Over the years you must have heard from your friends Polio, AIDS, Ebola, Nipah, Influenza, and others how we handled them and we will handle you too.

Covid-19: But right now I am handling the entire Homo sapiens race. Haha. What do you know about me?

Hiren: Using the Scrum Framework, we have been continuously experimenting. Everyday iteratively and incrementally we are learning more about you. And with regular inspection and adaptation and through empirical scientific evidence we have identified many facts about you Covid.

Covid-19: Like?

Hiren: We know your Genome sequence. We know what you are made of now. We conduct Daily Scrums to put a solid plan for 24 hours and check the progress towards our goal, Sprint Review to get feedback from the key stakeholders and Sprint Retrospective to improve ourselves. We have about 80 fast paced heavily funded projects going around the globe and we will find a vaccination to destroy you soon.

Covid-19: Why is your race always angry and looking to destroy everything that comes their way? Have some respect and compassion for other organisms too.

Hiren: Why should I have respect for you? Because of you, we have lost many precious lives. And only because of you the world’s economy is in shambles.

Covid-19: Honestly, I have more reasons to get angry with you. Your race is very greedy and in that greed, you all have destroyed this beautiful planet. As a virus, I only have the ‘need’ to find a host to survive. But in your race, even after you meet your basic ‘needs’ you have unlimited ‘wants’ and these never end. Everyone always wants more… So I am equally angry with you. But I have respect for you Homo sapiens.

Hiren: You are joking right?

Covid-19: Not really. Let me prove it to you. Your innovative race came up with a new concept called “Social Distancing”, correct?

Hiren: Yes. What about it?

Covid-19: Our race self-organized and we have agreed to not bother Homo sapiens who practice “Social Distancing” sincerely. In fact, we have extended our respect to stay away from anyone who is going to wear a mask and follow the hygiene guidelines from W.H.O. Makes sense?

Hiren: Wow Self-organized. Huh? I am glad to hear this and I will pass this message around. So are you suggesting that we both can co-exist in this ecosystem and over time we will get used to each other and maybe even complement each other?

Covid-19: Yes, of course. And Hiren…

Hiren: What?

Covid-19: Show humility.

Hiren: I will work on it Covid. In the meantime, please stop bothering and hurting my people.

Covid-19: Sure Hiren. Stay healthy and I will come to meet you soon to learn a bit more about Scrum. Bye.

Hiren: Meet me for chitchat only 🙂

[…]

Big Room Planning / Nexus Sprint Planning

Consider this post as a first step in learning about Big Room Planning, or a refresher to those who know about it already or a toolkit for those who have it planned on the cards.

Complex, cross-team projects often pose challenges to Stakeholders as to who is going to do what, when, and how. What is my dependency on others and how accountable I am for the dependencies faced by others? Over the years Agile has managed to ease the life of many involved. The concept of Big Room Planning / Nexus Sprint Planning or BRP helps break big goals into smaller manageable chunks, enables business and technology alignment, and makes elephantine problems seem feasible to solve.

So what are the basics of BRP advantages and how to do it effectively? I will walk you through the basics and how we conducted an effective BRP recently for a major tech organization at Bangalore. It was surreal, 15+ Scrum Teams working across geographies, building a complex software product.

What is BRP

When you have many teams working towards a common goal, we can bring all these together to one room towards one common goal. The goals are then broken down into various scrum teams to identify which team delivers what and how. This can also include teams from various geographies calling in from various locations to provide their valuable inputs or take stock of the situation.

The strategies and effectiveness of the BRP conducted by the Scrum masters, scrum coaches, and stakeholders help decide:

  • The path from goals to integrated incremental deliverables.
  • Clear release goals for the next 2-3 months.
  • The stakeholders are aligned.
  • Whether to increase release frequency or the agreed deliverables during sprints.

What can BRP help achieve?

But why do BRP? Is the effort worth, so many people are going to share time and effort for two crucial days? The answer is yes. Two days of effort preceded by an effective Scrum coach can make a sea of difference to the project. Some of the top benefits you can achieve from BRP are:

  • Define the Release Cycle. Plan the work and effort for the next few weeks and months.
  • Identify and Visualize dependencies and integration points across various teams.
  • Improve Collaboration. Teams get to see a quick white-boarded view of what each team is doing.
  • Helps with quick decisions making promoting a feeling of one-unit, making everyone inclusive to the cause. ·
  • Diverse views help look at angles you never thought of before.
  • People own their goals since they have planned them together.

What are some insights from my BRP session

In this section, I will sprinkle my own wisdom dust on how you can execute successful and really effective BRPs. These are like ingredients and you can experiment with these but some are necessary to lead to convincing results for all.

  • Need a strong facilitator – The importance of this cannot be underlined more. Without a good captain, the ship can go astray. The Scrum masters play a pivotal role in clearly defining what the end goals are, what we are trying to achieve, and how we are going to achieve it.
  • Agenda, crystal clear agenda – A clear Agenda and the outcome desired at the end of the sessions as well as BRP.
  • Objectives – Need clear and crisp objectives for teams to be aligned. Embed this in the planning, motive, and efforts of the teams
  • Answers – Availability of Product Owner and SMEs to help with any clarifying questions the teams have in the BRP session.
  • Alignment – A clear alignment between Product Owners, SMEs, and the respective ScrumTeams.

Different Flavors, Equal Goals

Nexus Sprint Planning is also a flavor of the above that helps plan and coordinate work done by Scrum Teams in the current sprint. Attended by all Scrum teams and all stakeholders, it helps teams look at the Product backlog and prioritize work for the upcoming sprints. All team members equally participate to make adjustments of the work during refinement events, participation from all scrum members helps minimize communication issues. We will talk more about this in the posts to follow.

5 Psychological Aspects for being an awesome Scrum Master

We all understand, every field has a skill quotient that you need to achieve to be able to qualify and deliver. It’s a Doctor of Medicine for someone who wants to practice medicine, be a Doctor, and save lives. An Arts degree for an Artist who wants to paint the town in their colors. Similarly, it’s educational degrees, some authentic time-tested certifications, and real world hands-on practical experiences that qualify us to become Scrum Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile Consultants and so on.

A Doctor at work

What makes a better artist is the ability to see the world and empathize with the art it requires. Doctors can have a degree qualifying them to be the best in their profession, but would you visit them again if they don’t give you a listening ear? What if they don’t ask open-ended questions from their experience to seek first to understand, then to be understood?  What if they prescribe medicine without taking into account your allergies, immunity and actual health conditions?

An Artist engrossed in creation

Similarly, there are some psychological aspects, call it invisible forces, that are needed to be an awesome Scrum Master, Coach or Consultant that you just can’t ignore.

How do you ensure powerful collaborations?

I want to take this opportunity to share the top five values that have helped me to be a better Scrum professional in today’s ever evolving, beautiful, but at times chaotic world.

  1. Empathy: Spend time connecting with people to gain their trust and earn their respect. Respect cannot be demanded with titles.  Be positive, keep an open mind, and believe that everyone is doing the best job to his or her potential.

    Evaluate how you are practicing these values

  2. Humility: Serve people and teams to make a measurable positive difference in their lives. Don’t be judgmental. Use evidence, data and facts as a compass to help with your decisions.
  3. Compassionate: Be kind, down to earth and practice tolerance. Have faith in yourself and believe in your abilities. Make your own magic.
  4. Authentic: Be honest, be genuine and be real. Copying or imitating is easy, but that’s not you. Use your imagination and creativity and contribute something new and useful back to the community.
  5. Forgive:  Everyone makes mistakes. Let go, make peace with yourself, and learn the art of forgiveness and move on. Practice collaboration over competition.

I don’t claim to have mastered the above values and I honestly feel one lifetime is too short a time to master them. But, by being mindful and by practicing these values it has helped me be a better Agile Consultant and I sincerely hope it helps you too.

Collaborative and Happy Working Spaces

There are many more advances in corporate awareness, organizational development, Agile, and Scrum that are paving way for more values and psychological inputs. As PracticeAgile delivers more and more trainings, workshops, and consulting services, we will share more of our learnings as we walk on this journey together.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this article and what you would like us to cover in our upcoming posts. If you want to collaborate and learn more in our next workshop, check out our training calendar and sign up for the trainings that interest you. Share this with your fellow colleagues and friends to share the knowledge and spread the wisdom!

Agile Metrics: Velocity

Agile Metrics are meant to serve a certain purpose(s) and can be very useful if leveraged appropriately. In this series, I want to share my experiences of how metrics may be used, abused and effectively become focal point of failure of Agile adoption in an organization.

Velocity is an indication of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint by a Scrum Team, tracked by the Development Team for use within the Scrum Team.

There is no such thing as a Good Velocity or a Bad Velocity. Remember, it is based on relative estimations.

Let’s understand with some examples on how a powerful Velocity metric can turn from Good, to Bad, to Ugly.

The Good: Along with other inputs like team capacity, prior commitments, Velocity helps Development Team decide how many Product Backlog Items they may forecast for current Sprint. Velocity also helps Product Owner to gauge how quickly a team may work through the backlog, because the report tracks the forecasted and completed work over several iterations. The Product Owner may revise the forecasted delivery timelines based on the variations in velocity of the Development Team.

Velocity is absolutely awesome and GOOD metric when it is used by the Scrum team themselves to understand their progress, their strengths and how they can improve Sprint over Sprint to become better. Leveraging Velocity for any other purpose by people outside the Scrum Team may quickly result in this metric being abused and making it BAD.

The Bad: I have had instances where leaders have asked me questions like, “If two teams have similar skillset, shouldn’t their velocities be similar?”, “Team A’s Velocity is 2 times that of Team B’s – shouldn’t Team A work on the remaining Product Backlog Items for faster delivery?” This prompts me to explain to them that each team would use their internal consensus to estimate the size of tasks at hand. Such sizing of efforts may differ from team-to-team due to differences in the reference points for these two teams. Size of task ‘X’ for Team A may be larger than its size for Team B, because former may be used to slicing efforts to smaller sizes and thus resulting in ‘larger’ estimates. This may make Team A’s velocity appear higher than Team B’s velocity.

Leveraging velocities for such comparisons will not yield any benefits. In fact, such comparisons make teams very uncomfortable, as they quickly understand that leaders are using this metric to measure the collective team and possibly their individual productivity.

The Ugly: When Leadership decides to use improvement in Velocity as a measure to gauge Development Teams’ performance and teams become aware about it, things become ugly. Now Development Teams will start fudging the sizes of their PBI’s / tasks to ‘bloat’ their velocity, just to ensure they appear to meet (may be even beat) their target velocity. At this point transparency will cease to exist in the team ensuring mechanical Scrum implementation resulting in sub-optimal metrics and delivery.

To sum up, Velocity is a result, not a desire. Velocity is a good metric for Scrum Teams to leverage for its internal purpose with the idea of continuous improvement. At the same time if the Scrum Team optimizes their velocity to be able to deliver value faster, but other teams within the system are unable to consume their outcomes, it will result in waste per Lean principles. Optimization is best done at system level rather than locally.

The moment this metric is used for any other purpose, the teams and organization will lose the benefits that Scrum has to offer. This will result in Zero-sum game for the entire organization and they will lose focus on their Agility goals.

References

Scrum Insights for Practitioners – Hiren Doshi

Source: https://www.scrum.org/Resources/Scrum-Glossary

Scrum.org PSF – What, Why, and How?

Certifications and training courses help establish a fact that the participant knows about a subject and can be questioned to ascertain. The Scrum.org, Professional Scrum Foundation (PSF) is one such course that prepares you for the Scrum world.

Here is a straight-to-the-point short post about PSF. Like our course curriculum, trainings, and our consulting, we like to get straight to it than beat around the idea!

 What is PSF?

Professional Scrum Foundations or PSF helps master everyday Scrum duties and responsibilities. This covers the eligibility needed to appear for the prestigious Professional Scrum Master Credential examination.

 Why should I do PSF?

To lead better, function effectively as a Scrum-practitioner, and be a self-organized Scrum player. Without these, effective deliveries of project leave a lot desired. A Scrum master is someone who has to learn to be active and deliver effective value. The PSF foundation course will enable you to attempt the PSM I assessment and prove your mettle.

How do I do PSF?

We at PracticeAgile.com help train our students to learn and master PSF. The course comprises of expert instructions and team based exercises that help you gain mastery over Scrum nitty-gritties, lead teams to collaborate more. We will cover:

  • Fundamentals of Scrum
  • The Scrum Framework
  • Mastering Scrum
  • Planning with Scrum
  • Getting Started and keeping Scrum healthy

It’s a Hands-on workshop where we do scrum from the trenches. An example case study of an HTML based website is carried out, where we build the Website as a Scrum-project over duration of 4 sprints. It helps get first-hand experience on how to deal with dependencies and integration challenges in scaled environment.

Contact us through my linked in presence or drop us a note at Practiceagile.com. Happy to answer any queries you have about PSF. For folks based out of Mumbai, India and nearby areas, we have a training scheduled next week. Check the training calendar to know more and register.

How to manage unplanned work during the Sprint

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Hiren Doshi discusses a model to assess and control unplanned work that may come up during a Sprint and reviewing its impact during the Sprint Review.

Agile Coach Toolkit #3: Asking Powerful Questions

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is the third part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Asking Powerful Questions.

Purpose – As a Scrum Master, you will deal with different personas in the Scrum Team with clear goal to build a high performing team. Dealing with human psychology is complex at best (though I feel that it is chaotic at times). At times you are pulled into situations where there are conflicts among the team members and you may need to coach them to ensure it is constructive and doesn’t go down into war zone.

Description – Coaching is a guided discussion meant to sort out conversations, set goals or learn new behaviors. Start your coaching conversation by welcoming the participant and asking the person what he/ she would like to get out of the discussion. This will help set the objectives for the discussion and serve as a guardrail for channeling the conversation. This stage should not take more than 10% of the time.

Let the participant open up and talk about his/ her concerns. To get the person open up more, you may need to ask open ended question like –

“Tell me more about it?” or “What else?”

In order to gauge if the person has tried solving the issue by himself/ herself, you may ask below question –

“What have you tried and how has that worked out?”

Sometimes I find it helpful to ask below question to understand the person’s emotional state by asking –

“How does that make you feel?”

In addition to helping the person express his/ her feelings, it also provides us with good insight into how emotional aspects play into the issue. One of the useful follow up questions I find helpful is –

“If you were to give a suggestion to friend who in this scenario, what would it be?”

This helps the person to take a step back and analyze the problem from third party perspective. Sometimes, even a short question like below also help explore few options

“What is possible?” 

Unless that person has not come up with options and you want to give any suggestion, first ask the person –

“May I offer you a suggestion?”

Then add your thoughts by stating –

“Have you explored … <option>?”

After the conversation has run its course, you would like to wrap up by asking the participant to summarize the take aways and next steps to ensure there will be a fruitful follow up. This should ideally be no more than 10% of the entire conversation.

Have you used this technique in coaching your team? If yes, please share your story.

References

http://www.coachingagileteams.com/2008/04/15/agile/powerful-questions-for-agile-teams/ – Lyssa Adkins

Agile Coach Toolkit #2: Timeboxing

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is second part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Timeboxing.

Timeboxing is a time management tool that allocates a fixed time period, called a timebox, to an activity. Timeboxing is generally used for ensuring that effort is spent well on activity at hand and reduce waste.

Benefits of Timeboxing

  • It help everyone aligned and focus on the problem/ issue at hand.
  • Timeboxes encourage the team members who are working hands-on on the problem to create the best possible outcome in the time allotted, within the current context.
  • Timeboxing serves as guardrails and make the team safe by restricting the risk.
  • It avoids procrastination by helping the team to avoid distractions and prioritize their work.
  • It helps prevent unnecessary perfectionism by the team members.

Note of Caution – As a Scrum Master, timeboxing would be a great tool in your kit. But care must be taken in certain scenarios –

  • Do not go aggressive in timeboxing a particular discussion that the team may be engaged in. Sometimes they may be ‘in the zone’ and shorter time duration my end up doing more damage than to help them.

I have found this simple and yet effective idea of timeboxing very beneficial in my role and would encourage Scrum Masters to leverage it in their roles. You may find it helpful to remind the team about time whenever they tend to digress from the problem at hand. Sometimes a periodic reminder helps ensure that discussions/ activities keep progressing.

Have you used this simple technique in your role? If yes, I would love to hear back from you.

References

Scrum Insights for Practitioners – Hiren Doshi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing – Wikipedia