The first part of this series can be found here: Scrum Shock Therapy, Part 1.

The Management Recipe

The checklist above is only a part of what it takes to go through Shock Therapy. I often find myself at new companies and need to work with a bigger picture than focusing solely on the team. As is evident from the polls and surveys above, we need to address management as well. The word shock is perhaps more applicable here. If it has learnt anything from the past it is that you have to "drive" development - delegate, follow up, check, adjust, hand out, recheck...
Telling them to trust the very group that has not delivered before is asking for a leap of faith.

Setting up a recipe for this group is tricky. You have to adapt to management style, the corporate culture and so forth and the things you ask for are softer. These can be very hard indeed to change! In plain English; The management has to take some more real tough decisions for a Scrum to work efficiently. If you need to kill a document standard or process step then do so! If this is impossible (for now) then go for "barely enough".

The Management

• Attend the Scrum training session with everyone else
• Hands off during 3 iterations
• Attend:
• Some Daily Scrums - be quiet
• All Sprint Reviews
• Start to work on waste - now!
• Management by walking, asking and listening, i.e. practice facilitation.
• Make the first step easy for the team
• ...

When learning something new you have to do it several times just to make sure you are not totally confused. I have found that three times a charm. Try your best to get management to abide by this "rule". After the three iterations everyone has better picture to judge the value of the effort and Scrum.
Eliminating waste is vital on any type of project or endeavor. In a transition it makes even more sense, you have to make space to learn something new.

Finally, management has to ask the people that will perform these miracles what they need to do just this. Have they? Have you?

The Management Exit

• One successful team
• Removed impediments and studied results
• Change in perception at "ground level"
• A good agile reason to change the rule

Having one successful team is sort of self-evident. This takes patience when the ride is anything but smooth. Being a part of this process is important. Management will have the best ability to change ambition level, removing impediments etc. Get cracking and be that good example.

If there is a change at ground level on how they perceive management, then you're probably on to something.

Is this recipe the final version - probably not? Your mileage will vary, adapt to your management.

The Organization Recipe

Many of our customers are just starting out doing Scrum. Therefore we typically come into play as an external effect. It is important for us to understand how the agile effort has started and its nature within our client's organization. We can basically divide this efforts into to two major types - "bottom-up" and "top-down". The typical traits for a bottom-up style is one where the programmers et al have decided to go agile. The management might be aware of this and even letting it run. Then again this might be a stealth and an under the cover job.

I have found the bottom-up approach to be the most common case. Programmers usually like to work in an agile way. In these type of setups my work usually revolves around questions like "How do we fit this to a waterfall context?" etcetera. This can be tough work, but I find it to be the more easy of the two - the people who do the day to day grinding are already on board.

The top-down effort of introducing Scrum comes with its own set of problems. Any methodology or decision that involves change tend to meet resistance from the organization. We need both experience and sideways effort to the transition.

The Top-Down Scrum Organization

• Get a Scrum Sensei
• Inject a Agile Senior Programmer into the teams
• Make sure there is organizational transparency

The Scrum Sensei is an experienced Scrum Master who's been there before. Much in agile and Scrum is common sense, but there is no need in making the simple mistakes. With a battle-trained mentor the whole organization get a sounding board (Swedish: bollplank) helping out to implement Scrum. This part is important to the Shock Therapy where he or she will be the contract owner enforcing the startup and approving exit. In some sense this person could act as a "bad cop" in a good-bad ScrumMaster setup.

Or in the words of Nanny McPhee - a children's movie where a nanny answers the seven ne'er-do-well children on how long she will stay:
- When you need me, but do not want me, then I will stay. When you want me, but do not need me, then I have to go.
The Scrum Sensei needs to work in similar way to bootstrap the team and management.

A top-down effort always risks resistance from the organization. My experience tells me that a side way force is needed for translation on the factory floor. Moreover, such a person has the experience on a technical level to do the hands on tools and practices that is a vital part of any agile projects. A seasoned programmer with agile experience knows what works and how to translate the management vision into bits and bytes.

"Self-evident" sometimes reads "evident to myself and no one else". If we want to affect the organization we also have to make sure that practices, experiences and results are easy to come by. Walking down a corridor should yield interesting information about ongoing projects. If there is a pilot project doing Scrum then visibility is high on the wish list. Not only does it mean commitment for the Scrum team, but also a pull factor for other teams to get on board. Organizational transparency comes in many flavors. Apply liberally!

Summing it up

There is no denying that projects have problems getting started with Scrum. But more often than not I believe that we can do something about it. Why not try some nice Shock Therapy?
It might be the sweetest hard deal around!

/Björn Granvik, Jayway

MySpace Therapy:
http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2008/09/shock-therapy-bootstrapping.html

Scrum Poll on Nokia Test Practice:
http://tinyurl.com/68vapj

VersionOne Report: State of Agile Development Survey:
http://www.versionone.com/agilesurvey/

Situational Leadership:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_leadership_theory

Nanny McPhee:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0396752/

I'd love to get your feedback. See you in the halls and the Way Group booth.
Or you can just give your comments about the session here on this blog.

Developer's conference in Malmö, Sweden

Scrum and Agile development has started to rock the world within IT in various ways. A simple, but powerful process that seems to deliver. Developers and customer alike are happy. What's not to like about it? Still, there are signs of problems. Projects that claim to use Scrum do not reap the benefits, management looses patience with this new method and team members struggle to adapt an agile approach to their everyday work life. Why is this? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

The Therapy: Get off to a good start by directing the team with a careful set of good practices and a strict agreement that leaves little or no choice. The team can then, over a couple of iterations, gradually take command themselves.

Easy, but still so hard

Why then is Scrum so hard? Well, first of all it is fail-fast, meaning that any problems will be quickly apparent. There are no artifacts or process steps to hide behind. This is never easy. To this list we can add even more pitfalls that are just plain hard to deal with whatever method we are using.

Still, it does not explain why there seems to be so many simple mistakes with such a simple framework. One of the best examples is the failure to keep backlog that is prioritized and up to date.
- We're doing Scrum, but we're too busy to work on the product backlog!

That one has always short-circuited my brain. What can be more important than to decide what is important? This pattern of falling short and missing basic parts of Scrum even has a name - "ScrumButt". If you look in the sentence above you see why.

Nokia created a test to make sure the projects are "Scrum enough". These plain questions form a lithmus test that can be used to analyze most agile projects.

The Nokia Test
Iterative Development?

• Iterations - time boxed, less than 4 weeks.
• Software features - tested and working at the end of each iteration.
• Iteration must start before specification is complete.

Scrum (in Nokia's opinion)?

• You know who the product owner is.
• There is a product backlog prioritized by business value.
• The product backlog has estimates created by the team.
• The team generates burndown charts and knows their velocity.
• No project managers (or anyone else) disrupting the work of the team.

The questions seem to be on the easy side. It turns out that this might not be the case.
One online poll, Nokia Test by Practice , about the ability to achieve the Nokia Test level gave some interesting answers. In essence, only one out of four give themselves a full mark. Half of the groups report that management interferes, not directs but interferes.

Informal queries by Jeff Sutherland among his audiences around the world give an even worse number - something like 1 out of 10 pass the Nokia Test. Hand on your heart: Does your project live up to this?

A survey by VersionOne tries to dig deeper into the current state of the Agile affairs. Under the headline "Top barriers to adopting Agile" we read the top four answers:

1. Organisational culture, 45%
2. General resistance to change, 44%
3. Lack of people with experience, 42%
4. Lack of management support, 32%

Take a long look at these barriers. No technical stuff. Nothing specific to agile. Just people.

What do we know?

Learn to walk before you run. Greek Proverb.

We could be a bit closer to today's reality than these ancient words of wisdom. The Situational Leadership offers an approach to management that has been around since the 60's. These theories say that there is no single leadership style that is optimal for all people in every situation. Situational leadership talks about four different leadership styles that need to be matched with the follower. Basically, when leading someone who is passionate, but have no experience, you should adapt and give clear directives. As the follower evolves his or her ability to execute, so should the leader using less directives and more encouragement. In the end the follower is able to perform with only a stated goal and little or no directives.

If this holds true for people, could it not be true for teams as well?

The Shock

So we have problems making Scrum and Agile efforts to run. What is the conclusion? Could it be that we adapt our leadership style to the group? Make them walk before running?

This is counter intuitive, at least to me: To go agile, we first need to control. We should not let our teams and managements start off without some kind of directives. Give them a good deal, some practices that make Scrum work. Otherwise, we are just repeating the same old mistakes as the next-door agile project. Set up an agreement with both management and team so that they can evolve and experience Scrum for real. Just reading a book (or article) or listening to some good speaker alone does not help you out there in real life. You have to experience it.

Shocking as it may feel: We need to exercise some control over the Scrum project start so that it can evolve and self organize! But, and this is a big but, this has to be done with compassion and genuine involvement, otherwise we stand the risk of destroying what we are trying to build.

The Therapy

So what can we do? We need to work the team, management and often the whole organization.

The Team Recipe

So how do we get started? Here's a recipe for the team as it used at MySpace:
The Team

• Scrum training session for everyone
• Sprint 1 week long
• Definition of Done:
• Feature Complete
• Code Complete
• No known defects
• Approved by the Product Owner
• Production Ready
• Story Points
• Physical Task Board
• All-in-one Sprint planning meeting.
• No Multi-tasking, work in priority order.

Scott Downey, Agile Coach at MySpace

The idea of this recipe is to set a good practice right from the start. Instead of debating the details on how to work in an agile way, we can focus on getting going.

Everyone has to have a common Scrum understanding to start from, hence the training session. One-week iteration sounds really tight for any reasonably sized projects. The thinking behind this is to get as quick iterations as possible - the faster that the group gets going the better. Short sprints help in this aspect. We learn faster with more turnarounds.
This in turn affects the meetings where MySpace has elected to combine them all, except the morning meeting, into one single occasion. The time is just too short to in a weekly sprint.

MySpace's definition of done is a good and basic list. However, as a programmer I lack for instance continuous integration, pair programming and so on. These are not mandatory to have, but I see them as enablers for Scrum and supporting your agile initiative.

The next two on the list - Story Points and Physical Task Board - are really effective. If you haven't tried them out then please do. They work. Finally we have something that is a no-brainer to me even though I have great problems avoiding it, "No Multi-tasking, work in priority order". Context-switching is expensive, just avoid it. The priorities are in order, you just have to follow them. In the Reference box you find a link to Scott Downey's description of their therapy.

When the team matures, they should evolve and handle things more on their own and no longer need directives. At MySpace the group can "prove" that they are ready for prime time by reaching the following goals.

The Team Exit

• Hyper-Productive (>240%)
• Three successful Sprints consecutively
• Good business reason to change the rule

The Result?

So how does this work out? At MySpace all groups achieved exit. All, but one, improved after that. One group even achieved a whopping 1,650% improvement after just four months (16 sprints). At Jayway one of the teams used such a bootstrap technique, primarily on the technical side, and reached 800% after 3 months.

The second part of this blog can be found here: Scrum Shock Therapy, Part 2 where I will look into how to handle management and organisation with some recipes.

/Björn Granvik, Jayway