Six Marcus Aurelius Quotes for Better Scrum

The universe is change, life is an opinion

The agile manifesto talks about embracing change for the customer's competitive advantage but doesn't give much advice on how to embrace change; the Scrum Guide does though. In the sprint review the Scrum team and stakeholders review what has changed in their environment and consider how that is going to affect them. Based on these changes they may choose to alter the Product Backlog so that they can take advantage of new opportunities. It is this preparation at the end of one sprint that has the Scrum Team ready in the next.

Everything good in life comes from change. You don't need to fear any change that occurs because you know that by the end of the sprint you will have come together to consider and discuss those changes, and turn them into positive opportunities. Your process is prepared for change to happen, and therefore you can handle anything that life throws at you.

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject

At the start of the sprint you've set a sprint goal so that when something is brought to the team during the sprint everyone has a clear understanding of what it is the team is currently trying to achieve. Sure, in the grand scheme of things you're trying to build that thing, but this sprint you need to build a really important widget that without you won't be able to sell anything at Christmas. Dave would like you to look at that toggle on the front, but missing your widget deadline would put the schedule in jeopardy. Your team has made a commitment to do their best to make sure that doesn't happen.

The stuff that doesn't move you closer to the sprint goal either needs to go into the product backlog to be thought about some more at an appropriate moment, expedited (and that should be a rare occurrence), or scheduled so that it doesn't distract from what is important during the sprint.

The autonomy that a Scrum Team needs means that their opinion is final. Everyone else can have an opinion, but no one understands the team's work and responsibilities better than the team.

No random actions, none not based on underlying principles

It can be really hard during an agile transformation to stay true to the Scrum Guide, agile manifesto, or whichever other framework you / your organisation has decided to go with. People fall back into old patterns of behaviour and old habits so easily (which is why good coaches can make or break a transformation). When faced with someone placing pressure on you to not worry about how we're meant to be doing things these days, it can be difficult to stand up for the new ways of working. That's where remembering the values and principles that we try to adhere to can be invaluable. Use them as a tool to explore how this request fits into the new ways of working. It may be a great learning experience for both of you. How can we fulfil this need without compromising on our underlying assumptions about agile ways of working?

Stop being jerked like a puppet

Teams need to be in control of their sprint right from the start. For a team to be in control of the work that is coming into them is the best way to ensure that the team is being as efficient and effective as possible.

Don't make teams you work with start their sprint from behind. Make sure that the PO is working closely with the team to talk about upcoming work. The refinement process is so important to making sure that when the sprint starts the team knows exactly what is expected of them and how they're going to go about starting each and every piece of work that they have in their sprint backlog. The development team and the PO should be setting aside some time multiple times a week to do some refinement of the product backlog. I like to see teams spending just 30 minutes a day discussing a couple of upcoming pieces of work. I don't expect all details to be finalised in one sitting; by having these conversations everyone is going to discover questions that need to be answered away from a refinement meeting. By having short and frequent refinement meetings, everyone gets a chance to go away and ask those questions and report back in a timely manner.

For the team to be in control of the sprint they need to start it off right. Don't let unknowns coming in determine the quality of your sprint.

It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given

Its an old cliché to hear a manager ask to be brought solutions not problems, but that's exactly what agile leaders should be asking for. The manager should be there to facilitate the execution of that solution when it is outside of the team's ability to complete the solution for themselves, by themselves.

Be careful of becoming a micro manager. I once worked with an executive director who knew almost exactly what each of his 100 reports was doing at any given time. He had no time to help his teams improve because he had no space of his own to think how he could improve. His teams didn't want to be creative because whenever they deviated slightly from his plan, his vision, he would swoop in and get them back on course. The untapped potential of 101 minds was heart-breaking to watch.

We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own

How to judge yourself can only be determined by you. A team is the only unit that can judge how far along their journey they are. They should create their standards and their metrics of how they want to be, where they want to go. We talk about giving teams autonomy and letting them be self-managing, but if they are not in control of how their team is being measured, how can they be managing themselves? If someone else comes along and tells them, "This is the change we want to see from you, and this is how we're going to measure your success," then how can we possibly consider that team as anything but managed by an outside force? Perhaps what we need to do is stop giving people the job title of manager, and start calling them facilitator.