Episode 5 - Do It Yourself

There was this company I was trying to get some business from, let call them Boom Incorporated for legal reasons. Their development manager, Albert (name changed) was in a world of pain with many challenging projects and massive project overruns. Their CTO, Gary was putting major pressure on Albert as most projects where challenged, over budget and never on time. 

Albert, in desperation, sought advice and was moved to agile and introduced to Scrum. Albert chose to “try” Scrum and decided he needed a Scrum Master. Albert did a little research and wanted to send three of his staff on a PSM course so they could be the Scrum Masters. The three attend one of my public PSM course. 

On the course, they told me they were starting Scrum, and they were going to be the part-time Scrum Masters. During the course, they quickly realised that there is a lot more to Scrum Master than a 2-day course but were upbeat and excited about their new roles. 

I asked them to introduce me to Albert, and we had a coffee meeting. I spoke openly with Albert about the journey they are about to embark. I advised him that this was a big decision and not something to simply jump in. He was adamant that the teams nor management needed training as that it was good enough. I also tried to offer him some consulting to help his new Scrum Masters, but he said they had no budget for that as they were completely over budget on all the projects. Although I tried several angles to guide him, he did not want to hear any of it. Our meeting ended, and we walked our ways.

I touched base with the three that attended my course a few weeks later. They said they were struggling, I gave them a few tips and asked them to reach out to Albert. Albert did not contact me, nor did he return my emails and calls. 

A few months later, I bumped into one of the course participants. She was working at a new company. She unloaded the world of pain that happened at Boom Incorporated. She quit because of how bad it had become. The Scrum Masters were seen as mini Project Managers and there to execute Albert’s commands. They were then being blamed and held accountable to the delivery delays but had no power to change anything.

Debrief

Let us put this into perspective; Boom had three teams of twenty people, that is a cost-to-company $160,000 for a two-week sprint; or $4,160,000 per annum. That’s not a trivial amount of money.

Albert had decided to make a major change to their practices and processes and move to “do agile”. Albert and Gary were not prepared to bring in expertise to help them transition to being agile. Instead, they asked for three volunteers to be the “Scrum Masters” and send them on a 2-day course at the cost of $3,200. Nor did they want to send teams, themselves (management) or anyone else on training as they did not have the budget. Ironically, the lack of budget is because of bad practices and lack of knowledge.

I don’t know about you, but this does my head in, and I just don’t understand the logic. It is making massive operational processes changes in on a significant budget with virtually no training. The worst part of the story is that Albert made many decisions on the new way of working without knowing what it the new way of working is. That’s just gross negligence and unprofessional behaviour and putting the organisation at risk. Sadly, in this case, Gary the CTO also did not take ownership of the problem and was pushing responsibility to Albert.

The next issue with Do-It-Yourself is that you don’t know what you don’t know. The choices and options are limited to your existing experiences. There is no new blood, new ideas or energy brought into the system. The frame of reference is on past experiences, and decisions will be made based on previous knowledge. One must question Alberts the decision in putting in a “volunteer” and existing staff member to do an organisational change with little experience and knowledge.

This approach is also a double-edged sword; the novice Scrum Masters did not have the experience and knowledge to change the company and Albert did not know either as he only heard about “doing agile”. A case of the blind leading the blind. When these novice Scrum Masters, run into issues and escalate to Albert and Gary; they solve the issues with their traditional thinking as that is all they know how to do – bless them. The result is not moving to agile, but dysfunctional implementing agile with old knowledge. Albert nor Gary had no idea on how to lead, support and assist with the change.

Gary and Albert!?!?! Seriously mates! You asked three technical people with zero agile experience to change the way you work for your $4.1 million-dollar development with only two days of training. What were you thinking? Nor did you want to spend any money on training yourselves on what you should do. Did you even think about how that would work out?

Let’s crunch some numbers. Waste and dysfunction are major issues in many organisations and on average, we see between 60% of waste (another story one day). My observation of Boom would indicate at least a 70% waste due to bad management practices. However, let be ridiculously low and say a conservative 25%. That is 25% of $4,160,000 which totals $1,040,000.  That is a lot of waste, but from experience, it's much higher. Sadly, many people resist these waste numbers, and we have built data over the years.

I ballpark the training and consulting costs to Zoom Incorporated may have around $60,000. That is 1% of the current costs. The amusing thing is that they would get a Return On Investment if they only made a 1.5% productivity improvement. 

Conclusion

Before embarking on transitioning to agile, look at your cost-to-company of teams and their throughput. Understand that if approach this the wrong way, you are going to introduce more waste which slows you down, i.e. you are getting less value than you currently get. 

However, if you do it correctly, you will radically improve your current situation. The cost of learning to do it correctly will pay itself back massively. I will let you do the numbers as if I but them here you will think it’s a joke. I urge you to do the math even with conservative numbers.

The choice is more about getting the right level of knowledge so you can do it right; versus, not getting the knowledge and wasting lots of valuable time and money and doing it badly.

It is a matter of getting the right help, the right level of training and the right level of support to help you. The most important training is that leadership get the right training. Agile Leadership training is more important than team training before starting an agile journey. The right training and mentoring will allow leaders to make the right decisions and put the right structures in place to support their teams. If you want a guaranteed failure or challenged agile implementation, don’t have planning, training and an agile strategy. 

Failing to plan is planning to fail - Winston Churchill

I see this Do-It-Yourself with little training and low experienced Scrum Masters all the time. Making long-lasting changes in your organisation means you need to have Elite Scrum Coaches an Elite Agile Leaders. These skills can be learned, but not in a 2-day course.

Previous episodes

• The Scrumming Dead
• Episode 1 - O Captain! My Captain
• Episode 2 - Will the real PO please stand up
• Episode 3 - Patient Zero
• Episode 4 - No experience required

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