Coach’s Corner

How long has it been since you’ve worked with the management team at your company? If it’s been a while, perhaps it’s time to host an activity that will not only generate some revealing discussions but can also help create a list of impediments for you and the management team to focus on. Here’s what you can do:

1. Gather the management team into a large room that has plenty of space on the walls. Label one area of a wall “Why Scrum?”

2. Ask each participant to write their answer to the following question on a sticky note: “Why are we adopting Scrum?”

3. After everyone has written down their answer, have each person read their answer out loud (one at a time), and then post their answer in the “Why Scrum?” space.

4. Once every answer is posted, ask everyone to work together to group the answers into common themes. While every organization is different, there are some common patterns that will likely appear. For example, you’ll probably see a grouping of sticky notes related to either predictability or delivery.

5. Review the groupings and select the sticky that best relates to delivery. For example, you might see a sticky note about code quality, improving development skills, understanding what your customers want, getting software to customers faster, or saving money.

6. Place this sticky note in a new area of the wall labeled “Delivery” and then ask, “Why is delivery hard?”

7. Give the participants a minute to write down as many ideas as possible on sticky notes, one answer per sticky.

8. Ask the participants to find a partner and, for two minutes, compare their lists and continue to expand upon them. You want them to come up with as many ideas as possible on separate stickies. They should also eliminate any duplicates.

9. Ask each pair of people to find another pair to work with, then have these groups of four spend four minutes comparing and adding to their lists of ideas. Have them write each new idea they come up with on a new sticky note. Again, have them eliminate any duplicates.

10. Have each group read their ideas out loud as they place them in the “Delivery” area that you created. If another group hears an idea they also wrote down, ask them to crumple up their note to eliminate duplicates.

11. Congratulate the group on creating a list of impediments to delivery.

At this point you have quite a few options. For example, you could have the group sort the sticky notes by internal teams or divisions. You could also invite the Scrum team(s) to review the list of impediments and add their own. In any case, this list should become the highest priority for the management team if they truly want to improve the Scrum teams’ ability to deliver high-quality products. Help them order this list, and collaborate with them on solutions.

In the next chapter we’ll discuss the sprint, which is the container event that holds all other Scrum events. It’s a powerful constraint that helps Scrum teams deliver a product increment in a four weeks or less. We’ll show you how to leverage sprints to best benefit your team.