There’s a tool in the Scrum toolbelt that is so utterly critical to success yet so fundamentally misunderstood by far too many development teams, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners. I’m talking, of course, about the Sprint Retrospective. I’ve seen it time and again, teams that are able to hit all the right notes in their standups, reviews, and planning sessions — but who wind up botching their Retrospectives in such a horrible fashion that they miss out on the single most important part of agile product development, continuous improvement. Certainly, it’s never fun to take time out of our day to look back and discuss what went wrong in the past two weeks — much less try to come up with new things to try on a sprint-by-sprint basis. But it’s the single most important part of the culture that we’re trying to build — the culture of agility, of adjusting, of improving…of change.
What is the Value of Agility?
One of the many challenges that Product Managers face in trying to move organizations toward a more agile approach to product development is that some stakeholders simply don’t see the value in the shift. They believe that, since their way has worked for them for so long that there’s no need to change — after all, it can’t be broken if it works, right? But the simple fact is, the bad old ways of product development are dying, as markets and customers move faster and have more options available to them to solve their problems every single day. There’s not a single industry that isn’t facing high-investment newcomers who are able to move fast and adjust — and leave they’re slow-moving, waterfall-based competition in the dust.
Story Points are a Signalling Tool
I was called into a meeting with a team here in the office a couple weeks ago because they told me they had a “question” about the estimations that they were doing. As we started talking, it became immediately apparent what the problem was, they were getting into arguments about whether their estimates were “too big!” Apparently, someone had told them that they “couldn’t” have any stories that were above a certain value, or at least that’s how they took the directions they were given. I stopped them for a minute and had a quick discussion about the reasons why we estimate stories, and why it’s incredibly important for the story points to reflect the size the team thinks the work is, regardless of what other people “want” them to do. I walked away to leave them to their work, and was entirely unsurprised when I saw some 20-pointers land on the backlog. Far too many teams suffer from some malady similar to that of this team — they forget why we’re asking them to estimate, so they start to engage in anti-patterns that undercut the very purpose for which estimation exists. In a follow-up conversation with another member of our Product Team, I started to think about how to describe Story Points as something other than “estimates” — and I came up with the idea of them as a “signalling tool”…
Are You Doing Your Standups Wrong?
During this year’s ProductCamp Seattle, I sat in on a great presentation by Dave Manningsmith where he discussed several dysfunctions of the daily standup ceremony (or “ritual” as he referred to it) that so many of us participate in on a daily basis. And it really made me think a lot about just how badly so many of us actually do in our standups — whether it’s because we’re used to status reporting in authoritarian cultures, because we’re really just teams in name only but still executing as individuals, or (most likely) because the organization has never really taken the time to understand why we do standups, so they don’t even understand that they might be doing them wrong. Here are some common anti-patterns and resolutions that will help you ensure that you’re at least closer to doing a standup “right” in the future…
The Importance of Scrum Ceremonies
I recently had a really great conversation with a fellow co-worker about how and why companies struggle with the adoption of agile methodologies like Scrum. It just so happened that he had come from a very large company where someone had undertaken something unheard of — they attempted to objectively measure the effect that Scrum participation had on a variety of employee metrics, including productivity, job satisfaction, and overall output. The interesting finding was that for teams who skipped any one of the five key Scrum ceremonies, their overall scores were literally no better than teams who maintained an old-school, waterfall approach — while every team that performed all five of the key ceremonies on a regular basis has scored vastly greater than their peers, across the board. Seeing this data in tangible, objective numbers really stuck with me, and I think it’s important to discuss just why these ceremonies are so important to successful adoption of agile processes.
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Agile Transitions – Managing Expectations
We live in a day and age where there’s a ton of information and mis-information out there about pretty much every topic imaginable, and Agile development is certainly not immune to this phenomenon. In fact, anyone who looks for help in pushing through an Agile transformation in their organization is immediately confronted with a vast array of presumptions and preconceptions about what Agile is, why it matters, and most importantly what it delivers. The simple truth is that the reality of an Agile transformation — both in process and in outcome — is often so very far removed from the myth that we as Product Managers need to be ready, willing, and able to step in and manage the expectations that our stakeholders have about what’s going to happen and what they’re going to get from it. Here are three very common preconceptions that simply must be squashed for us to lead a successful cultural transformation.
Why Does Agility Matter?
We tend to take the fact that agility is important as a given, when the reality is that not everyone in the business world has reached the same conclusion. Thus, it’s important sometimes to take a step back and examine why agility actually matters, so that when we’re faced with people who aren’t as convinced as we are, we have salient points that we can raise to help them understand the value that agility brings with it. Here are a few important things to remember when thinking about why agility is important in our jobs…