Is Scrum of Scrums a Flight Level 2?
I get the question quite often if Scrum of Scrums is a Flight Level 2. Well, yes, if you've implemented the 5 Flight Levels Activities:
- Visualise the situation. You need to see blockers, dependencies, the flow of work ACROSS your Scrum teams, the work of the POs, etc. In short, you have an end-2-end board where the Scrum teams see what's going on BETWEEN the teams.
- Create focus. You need to create focus across all Scrum teams, not on an individual, per team level. You need to run into the challenge that you have cross-team priorities, where people have to collaborate across team borders to prevent local sub-optimisation.
- Establish agile interactions. You need to coordinate across teams, e.g. stand-up meetings, planning meetings, etc.
- Measure progress. You need to have a common understanding across the Scrum teams of what you want to improve. You've established measurements and countermeasures which act as a feedback loop to tell you if you're making progress towards your desired outcomes.
- Improve. You established cross-team learning loops like, e.g. retrospectives.
Most often, Scrum of Scrums is having a stand-up meeting across Scrum teams. There's for sure a lot of value in it but I wouldn't call that a Flight Level 2. You can make much more out of your Scrum of Scrums by implementing the 5 Flight Levels Activities across the Scrum teams - a Flight Level 2!
What is your experience?
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3 年I see FLs more as an analogy, that is, a simple and inclusive way of passing on knowledge to non-specialists. It is something completely different from a model or framwork.
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3 年Thanks Klaus, this is really insightful. I think one reason why the Scrum Of Scrum (SOS) doesn't become a Flight Level 2 is lack of time & the right attendance. I have seen most organisations do this only once a week or maybe two which is not enough to solve all the five areas covered by you. And it has (understandably) only Scrum Masters and not other stakeholders attending which also becomes a limiting factor.
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3 年Totally with you on that. Flight levels go way beyond this as well as do scaling frameworks. And all of them have their pros and cons ??
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3 年Klaus, thanks for clarification (and I totally agree). I think in order to make the focus part work, you need according vision, mission/strategy on level 3. I.e., Flight Levels make it obvious that Scrum in a team needs actually high level alignment at the top. But many times c level does not understand this dependency/necessity and also have little understanding what that really means and how to do it actually. Any thoughts from your side on this?