I don’t believe this bullshit!

That’s what happen when you push! but let’s start from the beginning.

A great start

It was almost 8 years ago and I was asked to help an (existing) Scrum team that was struggling to consistently deliver value. In my very first day with the team, a few minutes before the daily stand up, I introduced my role as a new team member. We then started the meeting. The first thing I’ve sensed in the air was a general sense of dissatisfaction mixed to a “we’re just wasting time” mood. One team member specifically, when was his turn to speak, started off with: “Sorry man, I don’t believe this bullshit” with a smiley face! Wow, what a great start, I thought. I’ve tried to act (vs not to react) so I replied: “well, so I guess we have already some topics for the next retro”. The daily went on for about 30 minutes and was really more a status report meeting.

First Thoughts

I always try to understand how can I help the team at my best and there are two variables I use: product vision/clarity (I like to call this external indicator) and the team maturity level (internal indicator). My first thoughts were on the team maturity level which I like to classify in three levels:

1. SHU: The team is unable or insecure, has a very superficial Agile and Scrum knowledge and quite often they do not know the difference. In this phase, the scrum master is more a teacher and favour one-way communications’ type. The team in this phase need to gain confidence first of all.
2. HA: The team is fully aware of what Agile means and what scrum is. The team in this phase is still characterised in “doing agile” (vs being agile). Doing Agile means the team follow the process (e.g: Scrum) pretty accurately, get some good results. In this phase, the Scrum Master can balance teaching and mentoring moment.
3. RI: The team think in term of Agile values and Principles (“being agile”), Scrum is “just a delivery mechanism“, they have indeed adapted quite a few practices to meet their specific way of working which includes daily customer interactions, delivering slices of features tested and documented at each interaction and consistently. The Scrum Master is a coach in this phase. (S)he asks open-ended questions, challenges the team and invites introspection.

The first few days as Scrum Master or Agile Coach in a team I’m usually present in shadow mode, I observe, see dynamics, team members characters, current “way of working” etc. My conclusion was that the team was in the SHU phase.

A Fresh Start

After 10 days I thought the team retrospective meeting was the perfect chance for them for a fresh start. I’ve asked them if they were willing to run some experiments on alternative ways of working so we agreed on a “day 0” session.

1. The first thing I asked to the team was to create a team alliance. I asked them to write on the whiteboard all the things (concrete behaviours) they’d have liked to have in the team. There was a lot of stuff on that but we were able together to arrive at a 7 groups of behaviours. So we had our team alliance and in there, there was how to deal with conflicts, stand up time, opt-out options, and other things.
2. I’ve then mirrored, with a Gestalt coaching technique, the current situation by putting at the centre of the whiteboard the team major challenge: delivering value. I’ve asked them to write all the things (in terms of processes, activities, etc) they were currently doing to achieve that.

By just mirroring the way the team was working they were able to “see” themselves in a mirror, there was a lot of frustration at that moment, which was good, they realised that something must have changed!

The Experiment

The team was clearly in SHA phase and due to the lack of a deep Agile and Scrum knowledge I’ve proposed to design the first experiment. As the team was already using Scrum I’ve then put the following things in the experiment:

1. DoR (definition of ready) to apply to user stories
2. DoD (definition of done) to validate/establish if a user story is close or not.
3. 1-week sprint to have faster feedback.
4. Everyone attending a 1h Scrum and Agile training session
5. Estimation in Story Points
6. An Impediment backlog separate from the product backlog.

We decided to time-box the experiment for 2 months.

Conclusions

The team was not mature enough so they needed more a guidance in that phase and my style was more teacher/adviser role for most of the time. I had to coach individually some members but that experiment was pretty successful that gave them the confidence they needed.