The digital transformation leader creates the conditions where great performance can happen

"As leaders we are leaving behind the old world of managing performance, we are instead focusing on creating the conditions where great performance can happen"

The Scrum Master defends the Scrum process and nurtures the organization to successfully use Scrum. Scrum is founded on a new mindset, new practices and structures. As a Scrum Master community, are we clearly communicating about the structural and systemic changes needed for agility and Scrum to work?

The Scrum@Scale guide states the importance to develop a reference model for a small set of teams before scaling. So, what is this reference model? I see this reference model to include how we create backlogs, how we form teams and how we create the condition where a team can get to a working increment after every sprint.

What do we mean by a Backlog?

• Clear and focused product or service vision
• The team can create user stories in the format of "INVEST"
• The backlog is ordered by value
• The top valued items are broken down to 1-2 days pieces of work, end-2-end

What do we mean by a Team?

• 7+-2 fully dedicated people with end-2-end responsibility and capabilities to deliver the backlog
• Constantly strives to get to done
• Relentless at getting better and better at what they do
• Team members trust each other

What do we mean with working increments?

• Tested, usable and validated product or service increment potentially releasable to the customer every sprint
• No known defects or technical debt
• Everything that did not benefit the customer is questioned by everyone

Most large organizations will struggle to create these conditions. Breaking down a business and technology problem end-2-end for a team to solve is difficult. Dependencies between departments, legacy and tightly coupled architecture and the inability to create fully autonomous, cross-functional, collocated, small and stable teams gets in the way.

In the agile community we might be guilty to talk a lot about the "mindset" shift and the importance of agile practices, but I hear little to no discussion about the reference model and how to get there. I believe that most practices in Scrum, or any other agile framework for that matter, will break down without these conditions in place and no number of daily stand-ups or retrospectives will fix that. Furthermore, I am convinced that our desired mindset change can only happen once we truly experience something different.

"The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences…The world doesn’t fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can’t pigeon-hole a real new experience." - D.H. Lawrence

As Scrum Masters our job is to communicate and educate the organization about the environment needed for agility to work. Many of the impediments and blockers at the beginning of our journey towards agility are often outside our direct control and needs management attention and dedication to resolve as they touch on the structural parts of the organization. 

Scrum@Scale suggests establishing an Executive Action Team (EAT) which consists of individuals who are empowered, politically and financially, to remove organizational impediment together with the Scrum Master. For example investing in architecture to support frequent releases, strategy for how we form autonomous, cross-functional, collocated, small teams that stay together and can work on a business problem end-2-end.

So, if we truly seek to drastically improve business value delivery and we are sincere about our need to optimize for time-to-market over resource utilization we need to define our reference model for how we form teams, create backlogs, build the capabilities to release often and our hypothesis on how we get there.