We are following Scrum however...

Scrum implementation is far more complex than what we learn and anticipate during our certification process. I have learnt through experience that implementing agile and scrum by the book is usually not possible in most scenarios for many organizations. Even if we somehow manage to implement Scrum, it will turn into a blend of various implementation methodologies over time. Cherry picking from various processes such as SAFe, PMP, LeSS or Waterfall is very common these days and in fact it has become a trend. I started reading articles and insights from other professionals/practitioners across the internet to understand “what agile is and what it’s not”, the general difficulties with scrum and agile, and what we need to avoid when implementing the scrum framework. It is assuring to know that I am not alone in facing the issues which scrum masters and agile coaches are going through on a daily basis. The scrum masters and agile coaches have a role in ensuring that the teams follow the processes as per the Scrum guidelines along with an agile mindset. In the following paras, I have attempted to highlight some common problems and beliefs organizations have and their potential solutions, which can help organizations keep a check on the deviations happening every now and then in the scrum framework.?

Anyone can be a Scrum Master...

Organizations usually hire scrum masters with a belief that any newly graduated person with an experience of years or so can be a scrum master. Once they are hired, they are expected to facilitate, lead, coach and mentor teams like Mike Cohn or Ken Schwaber. Yes, we can hire scrum masters with less experience but then companies also need to ensure that these scrum masters should be mentored, trained and coached by other experienced scrum masters in the organization. In this way, the unnecessary changes to the Scrum Framework by the newly hired scrum masters can be avoided and real value of implementing scrum framework can be reinforced up to some extent. Setting up an Agile Center of Excellence with a strong Agile foundation within the organization is also a viable solution. ACE assists in achieving organizational goals and objectives effectively along with teams and leadership trust, and support. It also helps in coaching and mentoring newly hired scrum masters which will in return aid in scaling agile across the entire organization.

The above is true for organizations planning to undergo agile transformation. The born agile organizations use agile ways of working from the start and their acceptance for change is plausible and for them, hiring a scrum master with less experience won’t be an issue because their organization culture would mold a person with qualities that made them stand out from the crowd. Those qualities include, prior knowledge and passion for agile, people skill and a desire to change the organization for the better.?

Team dynamics are not well understood?

Organizations are hiring individuals from different belief systems, values and cultures all around the world. Working with a multicultural organization is an excellent opportunity. However, distributed team structure along with the multicultural nature of the teams has increased certain challenges which should be addressed early in the scrum team's formation process. These challenges usually lead to deviations in the implemented scrum framework and occur when scrum masters and agile coaches are focused more on team output and less on team dynamics. If the team formation process is not properly managed, chances are that team would start implementing their own ways of working.?

In order to address this problem, I found Geert Hofstede’s research on employee attitude at IBM really helpful, where Hofstede identified five cultural dimensions, exhibiting problems that are shared across cultures but handled differently; Power distance , Uncertainty avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculine/Feminine, Long-term/short-term orientation. These characteristics are a part of our belief system and define our core values. Scrum masters of a multicultural team should understand core values of their team members and define forming, norming, storming and performing team strategies accordingly. Ideally, these strategies should incorporate relevant cultural dimensions analysis along with emphasis on scrum values during each phase of Tuckman model group development.

Not paying attention to team habits...

“In this sprint we have so much to complete, we don’t have time for retrospective, let’s postpone retrospective” or “ we don’t have anything to share, everything is going great so far, do we need a retrospective?”

As scrum masters, we have heard the above mentioned lines many times during our daily interactions with teams. No matter how many times we have emphasised on the importance of having regular retrospectives and other scrum events, teams still spend time on addressing issues which they believe are more important than their continuous improvement.?

In my experience, emphasizing on doing something won’t help the team in adapting a certain practice and in order to address this issue, I did research on reinforcing positive attitudes and habits in a team and found a very interesting? concept of “Habit Stacking”,? the concept of “habit stacking” was coined by author S J Scott in his book Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes Or Less. The book states that one of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit we already do each day and then stack our new behavior on top. Same concept can be applied to reinforce positive attitude and habit among the scrum team members, for example, making retrospective a recurring meeting or defining a ground rule that sprint planning cannot be done until and unless retrospective is done can help the team to commit to one task and stack it automatically with something else. Moreover, digging down on reasons for not doing a certain event is equally important. Once we have identified the reasons, addressing those issues through retrospective sessions will help us in keeping on track our scrum framework.

The issue management system itself becomes a process….?

Creating stories, tasks and bugs on Jira, Trello or Basecamp help us in visualizing our work. However, when the whole visualization process turns into a micro management tactic then it means that we have lost the core value of implementing scrum in the first place. I have seen teams turning from updating statuses on issue tracking apps daily to updating statuses on the last day of the sprint. I was not micromanaging them but figured that out through their burn-down charts. A burndown chart on issue tracking app will help us in understanding exactly when each ticket was marked in progress and done later on vs when all tickets were marked done at once. Those teams who are updating tickets all at onces at the end of the sprint either have picked up work more than their capacity in the sprint or the issue workflow defined on a issue tracking app is an overhead for them i.e. too many statues are required to be updated before a story could be marked as done. For me, that is a perfect definition of micromanagement in a scrum framework where teams are updating statues 20 times a day inorder to mark a story done. Scrum guidelines do not state that having a fancy issue tracking app is mandatory. Issue tracking apps are not scrum, they should support our scrum framework instead of itself becoming a process. Keeping a simplified issue workflow on the issue tracking apps help teams concentrate on their development tasks more effectively rather than spending the entire sprint on updating statuses.

Conclusion

These issues are not new to us and have been addressed many times before. The reason for highlighting them again is the severity and recurrent nature of these issues. There is nothing wrong with cherry picking from various processes like PMP, SAFe,or LeSS to fit our needs but then we will end up with lots of cherries and no vegetables, which will eventually cause indigestion. I agree there is hardly a process that would be 100 percent perfect for all of our teams. So if we implement only some part of the scrum and leave the rest then the result won’t be scrum. Let’s assume the result does not have to be scrum and it works for you and your organization is still agile and delivering the most value, chances are there but extremely low. What we need to realise is the reason behind implementing the Scrum Framework which is nothing more than adapting the agile mindset along with its values and principles. The collection of values and principles which are associated with the agile mindset eventually provides us a freedom to explore what would fit our needs without restricting our creativity.?