The Purpose of Scrum

I came across a very rare piece of information. It is an article of Ken on “the purpose of Scrum“.

“Work is an ennobling experience, an affirmation of life. In teams, the experience transcends the individual, encompassing the shared experience, providing the basis for team heroics.

Scrum brings order, clarity, cohesion, stability, flexibility and –ultimately – success to projects. In organizations that are coping with how to organize and compete in today’s new economy, Scrum provides a civilized means of rapidly bringing new, complex, high-technology products to market.

Scrum enables people to work harmoniously for their mutual benefit while producing some of today’s must complex, sophisticated products. Scrum is the social engineering of today’s enterprise for the co-operative fulfillment of all involved.”

Questions and Comments during Training at Wipro

We discussed how our training session went at Wipro in our previous post on training in Wipro. Some of the questions that people asked us were:

• Who assigns the tasks in a Scrum framework?
• Why is collecting data on which task took what time not important?
• Is Scrum compatible with CMMi?
• How do we do testing in Scrum?
• How to balance teams in multiple locations within Scrum?
• What to do with various artifacts and analysis documents?

Most of these were answered satisfactorily within the constraints of time available. We will be exploring these further in future posts. Links to other sources for these answers are being provided for immediate reference in this post:

• Who assigns the tasks in a Scrum framework?

1. http://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/archive/2007/01/31/scrum-tasks-tasks-and-more-tasks.aspx
2. http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/22-scrum-delivers

• Why is collecting data on which task took what time not important?

1. http://www.technewsworld.com/story/56866.html
2. http://controlledagility.typepad.com/weblog/2005/11/better_time_tra.html
3. http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2007/10/why-time-sheets-are-lame.html

• Is Scrum compatible with CMMi?

1. http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2006/11/scrum-supports-cmmi-level-5.html
2. http://www.cesar.org.br/files/file/SCRUMxCMMMI_IEEE-final03.pdf

• How do we do testing in Scrum?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
2. http://www.agiledata.org/essays/tdd.html
3. http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/3622546

• How to balance teams in multiple locations within Scrum?

1. http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileOffshore.html
2. http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/c060703a.asp
3. http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,34978,00.html

• What to do with various artifacts and analysis documents

1. http://www.refactoring.com/
2. http://www.agilemodeling.com/

Training session for Wipro

Wow! what an eventful and exciting pre-training session we had. We were joined by Joe Arnold and over the course of few hours we discussed good presentation skills and how to be effective communicators. However, after we had a chance to demonstrate the training material and presentations - we discussed whether we were ready for the presentation in light of the view that it would comprise managers and senior managers. The whole course of Scrum implementation at Wipro would be affected by what we say and teach. We decided to discuss the same with organizers and Wipro and after our discussion we decided to go go ahead with the presentation.

We arrived in Hyderabad by a KingFisher flight [delayed by an hour] and checked into the hotel. I quickly organized the presentation again and was ready on the dot for the departure to Wipro office. Wipro office was about an hour from our hotel. Once we reached there we had to get routine check ups like laptop clearance etc. We thought this could have been organized better and someone could have been there to receive us. But so far so good. We were ready before 9:00 AM - the scheduled start time for the presentation. I started the session and keeping in mind what we discussed yesterday, literally cruised through the initial session till tea. Informal feedback at tea suggested we were doing well. Srinivas then explained mechanics of Scrum and we then broke for Lunch at Wipro canteen [massive canteen must say]. Post Lunch we did the role play and finally concluded an eventful day. We broke off sharp at 5:00 PM.

Some of the questions the audience had for us were easy to answer and some not so easy. The next post will discuss some of these.

Training at Wipro

I and Srinivas Chillara, are scheduled to conduct a one day introductory course in Scrum on behalf of GoodAgile at Wipro Hyderabad on December 20. Here is a brief context of the training - “The training is for managers and senior managers who work with the Microsoft ODC. Microsoft has been claiming that its moving towards Scrum and consequently the team at Wipro working on MSN websites and other projects need to understand Scrum. As per our initial conversation, they are also using Microsoft Solution Framework for Scrum.”

The first conversation with Wipro employees [before the training] leaves some questions in mind, which we hope to get more clarification on when we visit their campus:

• Why is the Scrum implementation tied to a tool that Microsoft has developed?
• How would the team react to rigorous restructuring of their role especially as the audience would comprise managers and senior managers?
• How would we structure our course for managers only and given the constraint of only one day?

We plan to organize the session with an introduction to background/ implementation/ success of Scrum followed by mechanics of Scrum and finally discussion on sprint retrospectives and reviews. Are we prepared? We have lots of material on hand. We also have a one day pre-training session with Pete Deemer a day before the training. At least I am excited more about the pre-training session rather than the session itself.

SCRUM for Marketing

Responding to someone named Dmitry Beransky on SCRUM Development Yahoo Group made me realize that you can use SCRUM pretty much for any of the field. His specific question was regarding how to use it for marketing. Here is what I wrote:

1. Identify the business goals marketing team would have to meet within a set period - say 06 months [remember the goal should be something like increase the leads inflow by 25%, increase brand awareness in Europe, reduce marketing overhead per dollar of profit by 4% etc etc and not attend 10 trade fairs and write 50 sales flyers]. Prioritize these goals. The Marketing VP/ Head can act as a Product Owner for this.
2. The second step would probably be very critical. You will need to break down the goals to achievable steps. You will not probably increase leads flow by 25% in one sprint of six weeks [ideal sprint length]. So you need to break it down to something like 4-5% depending on what you think is achievable. Similarly, do it for the rest of goals. Marketing teams generally need to be very responsive and hence, shorter sprint length would be advisable. However, the marketing results typically take longer to appear - hence, longer sprint length would be advisable from that perspective. Focusing on a suitable sprint length will help you focus on specific goals and allowing the team to aim for those uninterrupted.
3. Divided goals go into specific sprints and now you need to divide goals into activities/ tasks, which will help attain the goal [write flyers, attend fairs, make online presence and what all]. The only difference in getting these sprint tasks is that you might sometimes need to do a planning of 3-4 sprints in advance [fairs might need a stall booking 4 months in advance and getting microsites built might take about two sprints as well]. It is probable that the product owner who can be the marketing VP or similar person sits down with the team dividing the goals into specific activities. Whether or not he assists the team while maintaining their self functioning/ organizing skills, is something the SCRUM Master would need to see.
4. You might have many distributed marketing offices. You might want to check out “distributed SCRUM” thread for more ideas on that.
5. After 06 weeks or whatever your sprint length is, do a review and retrospective and start.
6. One of the key things you might want to see/ keep a check on is the Marketing / Sales is usually a fiercely individualistic and competitive domain. Devising appropriate performance feedback/ results achieved metrics might be useful.

Of course the final advise as is with all the teams I work with - above are just some pointers. These are supposed to help you in making a suitable start for discussing this internally.

However, the above outlines the fact that implementing SCRUM in a non-software environment can be a very engaging experience and would be a great place to be a team, Product Owner and a SCRUM Master.

Time available in a sprint

One of the themes which I get asked most often is, how to calculate how much time is available in a given sprint and to know if someone is overcommitted or undercommitted during a sprint. And its not Scrum Masters, but teams asking this question.

Well lets say the team comprises of four members - Anand, Lee, Sam and Pamela. In addition, there are two part time members - Rose and Kate. We assume there is a two week sprint. A 4 hour sprint planning and 4 hour sprint review/ retrospective means one day of the two week sprint goes in ceremonies. The first step is to ensure every one is available for these ceremonies. Once they are there, you can write down each of the coming working days and check for half day leaves/ full day leaves or other engagements for everyone. You can then note down effective hours everyone has available and do the total. Doing this every sprint can give a “very rough” mapping between hours available and story points burned. Why this approach works is because we are not mapping hours spent and story points burned. As hours available and story points burned are suitably high level abstractions of estimates and planning - this gives “rough insight” for a team to plan.

Another variant of this approach is to try checking how many quarter days each member has available. You don’t know how many hours in quarter days has one available, just how many quarter days are there [in all there are 4 quater days a day]. You can then map the quarter days with story points burned. Similarly, half day approach can be tried.

Both the above approaches are supposed to be used only if team members would want to use them as a rough insight into how much work to plan. This would be probably useful also if the team adds or removes members often, and some sort of rough guidance for the team on time available and story points to be picked up is helpful.

goodagile

goodagile is the most active organization imparting Scrum training, CSM courses and Scrum coaching through out Asia and particularly Asia. The firm has been founded by Pete Deemer.

You can view the upcoming courses on the website.

If you would like to discuss Scrum coaching/ training for your organization, you call email Pete directly at petedeemer@goodagile.com

P.S. I work with Pete assisting him for Scrum trainings across India.

CSM Course - Day 2 Review

Wow! what an exciting day. The CSM course at Bangalore [or Bengaluru] saw participation from employees of Siemens, Chordiant, Nokia and Accenture along with many others,. The group comprised mostly of senior managers and hence, we saw focus more on issues like metrics, measuring productivity and quality.

The day started with my session. I took exactly 35 minutes to wrap up my session. And it went really well. If first day was 5/10, next would be 9/10 easily. I felt confident and flowing. I narrated stories and situations rather than just some theory mumbo jumbo and when done felt ever so confident. Through out the day I helped conduct planning poker and other games. We shared a wonderful Lunch.

And at the end, got a number of Linked In contacts and business cards

Great going and excited to go back to Chandigarh to tell my colleagues about the course and the experience.

CSM Course - Day 1 Review

The day 1 of CSM [Certified Scrum Master] course has ended. The course was conducted at ISTA Hotel, Bangalore. I was to reach the venue at 8 AM and reached there only at 8:45 AM - thanks partly to Bangalore’s notorious traffic as well as no one in area knowing where the hotel was located. When I finally did reach there, I was almost terrified of facing Pete [well I did not have his phone number of hotels phone number handy - mental note, do it next time around]. However, he was genuinely concerned if I would make it or had I got stuck. After a cup of tea, he explained me my role.

We set up the course room well enough. Two wonderful hotel attendants helped us for that. I organized the training attendance and labels and waited for attendees to come. Once they were there, I explained them purpose of the course as well as showed them various things they could do before the course commenced - provide feedforward on what topics they would like covered in more detail, check out washrooms and whether there would be tea breaks etal. This helped me get a personal rapport with most attendees [but not all :p]. We started the course at 10 AM sharp. After I introduced myself, I immediately went to organize the first tea at 11:15 PM as well as help attendees who had not yet signed in. I pitched in on two occasions till Lunch and after Lunch almost entirely spent practising my session. My session started at 5 PM and till 5:45 PM, I covered potentially shippable code. I did a pretty lousy job of it with only some good things in between. And worse of all, I could not complete my section and Pete had to schedule part of it for tomorrow.

After the first day, I and Pete sat down for drinks and he explained me what I did well. And he had a pretty long list of things. He also told me things I could try tomorrow. Throught out I felt, he was not judging me but just helping me do better. This was very encouraging. I went back to my room and thought over things. I gave up all practice and just went ahead to get a good night sleep. Afterall, tomorrow is another day.

CSM Course Assistance at Bangalore

I will be assisting Pete Deemer with the conduct of CSM Course in Bangalore from December 19-20. I will do work like help manage attendance, breaks and organize hands on trainings. In addition I will conduct a small 1 hour module on potentially shippable code as well. Its going to be my first time in Bangalore and second time at a CSM course. Am I excited? Well yeah! However, anxiety is more the over-riding emotion at this stage. Pete is a tremendous presenter - thorough yet engaging, and there is never a dull moment in his course. It would be a good exposure and learning experience. Lets see how it goes.