agile manifesto

7 reasons your Scrum Master may be underperforming

Posted on by will

What do you need to have a great and effective scrum master on a team?

The Scrum Master is, I think, one of the most misunderstood roles on the scrum team. It’s a critical role to ensure your team will perform at their best.

An effective Scrum Master is not just anyone who wears the Scrum Master hat for a few hours per week. I think an effective Scrum Master should have (at least) these three things:

  1. An understanding of what it means to be a Scrum Master (it sounds obvious, but evidently sometimes it’s not). A Scrum Master course is the minimum here, I think. It also includes understanding the agile manifesto, understanding lean principles and the mechanics of software development.
  2. An innate, natural desire to learn, improve and be better.
  3. The support of colleagues, the team and the organisation to be able to do the job.

I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of scrum teams, and some common themes appear when thinking about under-performing Scrum Masters. Here are some sings that you might not have the most effective Scrum Master:

  1. Your Scrum Master is responsible for 7 different teams.
  2. Your Scrum Master is just one of the developers who has the responsibility to send the calendar invites to the standups and take notes in the retrospective.
  3. Your Scrum Master is just someone from your QA team who puts cards for bugs on the story wall.
  4. Your Scrum Master cannot describe the Agile Manifesto.
  5. The only contact your Scrum Master has had with scrum or agile is the two-day CSM course (or worse, none at all).
  6. Your Scrum Master is not able to realistically change the process within which your team works in order to respond to feedback in retrospectives or improve the way of working for the team.
  7. The Product Owner or business owners ultimately responsible for the team and the product are the kind who want all the benefits, such as predictability, increased output and accountability, without changing any of their entrenched, old-school, waterfall processes.

I’m sure there are others, but if you see any of these in your scrum team, you might want to take a look at your setup. Note that these things are not always a problem with the person acting in the role, per se – many of these issues stem from organisational misunderstanding of the role as well.

Driving innovation with agile: a short case study

Posted on by will

A prototype of the first mouse

We all know the story – but it’s still remarkably easy to forget that some of the most influential innovations in the field of personal computing, including the mouse, the laser printer, computer generated bitmap graphics and the graphical user interface, were not invented by Microsoft or Apple, but by a small research centre in the Valley called the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Of course, part of the reason we all forget is that PARC are equally famous for fumbling the future, as was written in 1988, and not managing to capitalise on these innovations. For the next 20 years PARC was largely ridiculed and mostly forgotten.

Flash forward to today, and PARC, now spun off as an independent subsidiary of Xerox, is back in the big leagues and delivering a huge amount of innovations to tech startups, corporations and even the U.S. Government. Harvard Business Review have posted an interesting article on the HBR Blog about the secret to their reinventing themselves. One point stood out to me like a beacon:

Part of the magic lies in the current business model which, as Lawrence Lee, director of strategy, explained to us, relies on partnering closely with customers, inventing a minimally viable product, and collaboratively iterating from there, based on market feedback.

This is what agile, and continuous delivery, is all about: get your innovations into the hands of the customer as soon as possible, and iterate based on real feedback. It’s about “inventing a minimally viable product”, and using real feedback, real customers, real interactions, to make the next decisions that impact what your product ends up like and in what direction it goes.

Interestingly, the other ingredients to their success were People, Collaboration and Communication.

Now consider the Agile Manifesto:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

The basic principles that helped PARC reinvent themselves once again into a successful innovation house are the same principles that drive agile software projects. Even if they didn’t use the word ‘agile’, the engineers at PARC are living the Agile Manifesto every day.