6. Helping Scrum Teams Develop and Improve

Improving planning is important, but it is only one small aspect of the ways in which Scrum Teams can improve how they work together to deliver value. The need for these improvements is often revealed in the Sprint Retrospective, but it can also be revealed through feedback obtained in Sprint Reviews and through impediments surfaced throughout the Sprint.

Who helps the Scrum Team improve? The Scrum Master, most certainly, but not exclusively. In many cases, team members help each other to improve, and ideally the rest of the organization helps the team to improve. Leaders in the organization can play a big role in helping the team. But ultimately, the Scrum Team itself is responsible for improving itself and asking for help when needed.

Using the Sprint Retrospective to Uncover Areas for Improvement

When the Scrum Team fails to deliver a “Done” Product Increment, the focus in the Sprint Retrospective needs to be how the team can get to “Done” in the next Sprint. A team that is able to effectively self-organize should be able to step back and understand what happened to prevent them from getting to “Done,” but the very fact that the team did not suggests that they may not be effective—at least, not yet.

Similarly, if customers or other stakeholders are unhappy with the value being delivered (this assumes, of course, the Scrum Team is getting to “Done”), that would also be a focus for a Sprint Retrospective. How effectively is the Product Owner working with the Development Team to create a shared understanding of value? How effectively is the Scrum Team working with stakeholders to better understand and deliver value?

The Scrum Master plays a critical role in how effective the Scrum Team is in diagnosing both problems and other impediments. The team may need help to push through self-created boundaries. We have seen teams impede their ability to deliver by assuming constraints and limitations on what they are allowed to do. The Scrum Master needs to clarify to the team what is in its scope to challenge, what is fixed, and what it should constantly and firmly push against.

In Practice: Use “Force Field” Analysis to Understand Motivation to Change

One way to discover the team’s motivation to change is to do a simple force field analysis with your group. This process will outline the factors influencing the change.1 After listing the factors that are affecting the proposed change, weight the factors based on their influence. Figure 6-1 describes the factors affecting a focus on “Done.”

Factors affecting a focus on "done."
Figure 6-1 Force field analysis of “Done.”

1. For more information about force field analysis, see www.mindtools.com.

Making the process of working visible and bringing transparency to any impediment that slows the Scrum Team down is a good start. This may begin from the moment a feature is requested, and span all the way through implementation into the production environment. Teams and organizations tend to embrace change only when the cost of not changing exceeds the cost of changing. Force field analysis can help you have a discussion, as a team, about whether the change effort will be worth the cost.

In our experience, Scrum Teams struggle most with the Sprint Retrospective. Few people are comfortable with self-reflection and actively seeking areas where they need to improve. It’s so much easier to focus on how to make the product more robust (“We should enhance that feature to support other business areas”) or to complain about other teams (“It’s always so difficult to work with them”). True self-reflection means being vulnerable, confronting limitations, and stretching to see other perspectives; most people find that very discomforting.

In Practice: Tips for Facilitating Sprint Retrospectives (and Any Other Collaborative Meeting)

Facilitation is an important skill when it comes to creating space for everyone’s ideas and perspectives to be heard, as well as unlocking the creativity of a group’s diverse experiences and areas of expertise, knowledge, and skills. The goal is to create productive conflict in a way that involves everyone in positive and creative collaboration, while getting to consensus-based decisions and clear outcomes.2

2. Facilitation is an entire profession, and we encourage you to explore the many resources available. For a deeper perspective on how to design and facilitate effective retrospectives, see Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006).

Here are some tips to improve your Sprint Retrospectives, which can be applied to any collaborative session:

  • Use silence. Generally, silent facilitation techniques make space for people with personality preferences that may lead them to take time to think before speaking or to be hesitant to interrupt others during a lively conversation with strong voices. They can also be helpful when strong emotions are in play and you want to lower the level of conflict or, conversely, when artificial harmony is present and you need to create some conflict.

  • Use different group configurations. Many challenges can arise with group discussions, especially as the size of the group increases. One or two people may dominate the conversation. While listening to others speak, people may form questions and new ideas but end up waiting until they see an opportunity to talk. At this point, their comments may not seem relevant or may even be forgotten. Furthermore, some people are more comfortable speaking one-on-one or in smaller groups.

  • Get people moving and taking action. This immediately engages and involves everyone. People are less likely to get distracted or bored. For example, if people are switching partners or groups, they are physically moving. Another example is to have people make their conversations and results visible using flip charts.

  • Shake things up. What we mean is to shock people’s brains a bit, to challenge them to think differently and create some new perspectives. Changing up facilitation formats and techniques helps prevent people from just “going through the motions” or losing interest.

  • Come in with an agenda but be flexible. Generally, you are seeking to (1) review transparent information to (2) generate new insights and then (3) decide on what actions will be taken for improvement. Have a plan for accomplishing each of those things, including the time expected to be spent on each. But be flexible and respond to the needs of the team while upholding the purpose of the event and the time-box.

Identifying and Removing Impediments

For a Scrum Team to have a powerful Sprint Retrospective, its members must be able to identify impediments, ideally throughout the Sprint, that prevent them from creating a releasable Increment that meets the Sprint Goal. An impediment is anything that blocks or slows the Scrum Team’s ability to deliver a valuable releasable product. The Development Team and Product Owner can and should resolve some impediments on their own (e.g., how they do their work to meet their accountability), perhaps with coaching and facilitation support from the Scrum Master. Impediments that Scrum Team members cannot resolve on their own are taken up by the Scrum Master.

By understanding the system that the team is working in as a whole, you will be able to identify what is impeding or holding the team back. Sometimes you can get more movement by releasing a brake than you can by pulling harder.

Scrum Teams maximize flow when they move items through the process as quickly as possible, without any risk to quality and customer satisfaction. Removing waste enables them to maximize flow—and by “waste,” we mean anything that doesn’t add value to a customer. To maximize flow you should look beyond just blocking impediments, by also focusing on things that slow the team down and prevent them from delivering the most value; don’t wait until impediments become full-blown barriers.

Teams improve by creating more transparency into the things that may be slowing them down in their process so that they can identify the impediment and then figure out how best to tackle it. Scrum Boards are a common practice to visualize the progress of work. Visualizing the work helps the Development Team see when work is blocked or moving slowly, and there are many details to visualize beyond just using a Scrum Board.

In Practice: Create Transparency with a “Waste Snake”

Figure 6-2 visualizes waste in a team’s work activities. You can create a snake-like chain of sticky notes, each summarizing something the team has to do that the team members consider to be wasteful. Prep the team by discussing sources of waste and what information to capture on each sticky note, such as the initials of the person, a short statement of the wasteful activity, the category of waste, and how much time was spent on the activity. This exercise provides a simple way for team members to capture the waste as they work during the Sprint. You can use it during the Sprint Retrospective to get a bigger picture of the trends and the costs and then discuss actions to reduce the wasteful activities.

A snake-like chain containing sticky notes is created from the tail to the head, to visualize a team's wasteful work activities.
Figure 6-2 A “waste snake” visualizes a team’s wasteful activities.

Common wasteful activities include the following:

  • Manual regression testing

  • Environments not available when needed, including crashes and restarts

  • Starting work on a PBI and then discovering it has a dependency on another team and cannot be resolved during the Sprint

  • Filling out requests for other teams to perform activities and encountering delays in their response (e.g., access to logs, changing a network setting, restarting a system)

  • Filling out a security review form that has many irrelevant or unclear questions, which takes a lot of time and often requires additional follow-ups for clarification

  • A team member being interrupted constantly and having to spend time reorienting himself or herself back to the work

  • A poorly documented aspect of the system, which causes team members to have to relearn by asking other team members and researching every time they need to work in that area

  • Detailing too much of the “how” for all PBIs during Sprint Planning and having to rework many of the tasks in the Sprint Backlog as the work unfolds

Tracking Impediments and Quantifying Impacts

Given the many impediments teams face when doing complex work, it is likely that not all impediments will be immediately addressed when they are identified in a Sprint. Make this data visible and look for trends, indicating which impediments are within the Scrum Team’s control, which are within the Scrum Team’s influence, and which are external to the Scrum Team (see Figure 6-3).

A table lists the different impediments with their corresponding impact and action.
Figure 6-3 Impediments chart example.

Here are some useful questions to gain a better understanding of the impacts:

  • How much time are we spending dealing with an impediment?

  • How frequently is this impediment occurring?

  • How is the impact affecting quality? Is the number of defects discovered in production increasing or decreasing? What is the cost of fixing a defect in production versus fixing a defect found during development?

  • How is the impediment affecting morale? Are people leaving because they are unhappy with the impediment? What is the cost of hiring someone new?

In Practice: Tracking Interruptions Over Time

Tracking interruptions as an explicit type of impediment helps to quantify the impact of loss of focus. It doesn’t matter whether the team actually takes on the work; merely being interrupted causes team members to lose productive time while they seek to regain their concentration.

You can track this data in a very simple way. Draw a timeline in the team’s room, with a space for each day of the Sprint. Then, whenever a Development Team member is interrupted with unplanned work not aligned to the current Sprint Goal, he or she can write what it was on a sticky note and place it on the timeline. It can be helpful to include the source of the request (e.g., another team, a manager, a user, production issue) and how much time was spent dealing with the interruption. This information can be reviewed in the Sprint Retrospective to help the Scrum Team inspect the impacts and help guide actionable commitments for improvement.

Examples of interruptions include the following events:

  • Bugs, incidents, and production support questions

  • Additional work assigned by a team’s manager

  • Requests for time with team subject-matter experts

  • A “drive-by” from a stakeholder wanting to chat with a developer about a new idea

  • Requests to estimate potential future work

  • Getting kicked out of a conference room and having to move somewhere else to finish a collaboration session

Not all interruptions are bad, but increasing transparency into interruptions and their impacts helps the Scrum Team determine how to make the necessary interruptions more valuable and eff ective (e.g., schedule specific time for a certain type of activity) and how to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary interruptions.

Tackling Impediments

Once you have transparency into impediments, you can build a case for investing time and money to resolve those impediments. Of course, you will need to prioritize what you take on first. Some questions can help you decide where to start:

  1. What goal do we need to achieve? What is our desired outcome?

  2. What will happen if we don’t tackle this impediment now?

  3. What would we do if we could do anything we want to solve this problem? What constraints limit our options? Are they really constraints, or are we making assumptions?

  4. If an organizational policy or standard stands in our way, can we change it, suspend it, or work around it?

  5. How will we know if we are improving the situation (related to our desired outcome)?

  6. Whose knowledge, support, or influence do we need?

In Practice: Engaging Stakeholders to Remove Impediments

Don’t be afraid to talk about some impediments in the Sprint Review. Some things are best handled within the Scrum Team during the Sprint Retrospective, but it may make sense to bring up organizational impediments or impediments that require investing in the Scrum Team in the context of the Sprint Review. A wide range of stakeholders are in attendance in those sessions, and they may have influence (or money) to assist with these impediments.

Scrum Masters are responsible for resolving impediments that the Scrum Team cannot resolve themselves. However, Scrum Masters should not feel they have to tackle these impediments on their own. Often, managers or other roles in the organization (e.g., project managers) have great knowledge of how the organization works and its history. Scrum Masters should seek to partner with people who can provide additional knowledge, insights, and influence to tackle organizational impediments. And sometimes a Scrum Master just needs to ask for someone to provide a little “cover.”

In Practice: Don’t Focus on Velocity

Many organizations seek agility to improve their “speed,” which causes them to focus on improving velocity. Velocity is empirical evidence, a historical fact, that is useful only for the Scrum Team. Usually, when a manager wants to know how to “improve velocity,” the person is really just asking, “How can we deliver greater value more frequently?” In our experience, the best thing to do is to focus on removing impediments and waste. Focusing on velocity can lead to cutting corners and reducing quality in the rush to “go faster.” Focusing on removing waste and impediments, by contrast, actually increases quality and leaves more time for doing the job right in the first place, while at the same time improving delivery speed.

Velocity going higher or lower is meaningless without context. A Development Team may deliver greater value, more frequently, and with higher quality, without any change in its velocity by simply taking into account improvements in its ways of working when it estimates.

Focus on removing the things that are holding the Scrum Team back, instead. Let the Scrum Team own its “delivery metrics,” and focus stakeholders on “value metrics.”3

3. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-focus-velocity-inhibits-agility

Growing Individual and Team Capabilities

Scrum itself doesn’t solve problems. Instead, people are the ones who have to solve the problems that the Scrum Framework exposes, creating high-value solutions with an agile mindset and teamwork. To do this, they need to be given the space and the support to grow their capabilities. Every member of a Scrum Team must hone his or her “technical craft.”

By “technical craft,” we don’t mean just engineering or software development skills. Product Owners need to develop a broad range of product management skills, while Development Teams need a wide range of skills related to creating a releasable Increment of value. Everyone needs to inspect and adapt their skills, knowledge, and capabilities and look at where the Scrum Team needs to grow so that it can meet new challenges and business needs.

Make Time for Continuous Learning and Growth

Product development is complex and constantly evolving. New technologies and new insights into customer problems create new opportunities. Scrum Teams don’t just inspect and adapt their product based on new information; they also inspect and adapt their own skills based on their experiences and the challenges they foresee. Learning and development is an aspect of self-organization. It is best to let the individuals and team own it, with support and guidance.

Continuous learning can take many shapes and forms: spending time on independent study, using online forums, attending webinars and meetups, attending or speaking at conferences, and reading books, articles, and case studies. It may include online training or an in-depth classroom experience, possibly including earning certifications (i.e., validation of learning). It may include having coaches or mentors, whether through formal or informal relationships. It may simply be people collaborating on their work, learning from each other, and getting real-time input and feedback.

In Practice: Pairing Beyond Programming

You may have heard of pair programming, in which two development team members collaborate on the same programming activity. They work together at one workstation. One person, deemed the “driver,” writes code; the other, known as the “observer,” reviews each line of code as it is written. The partners switch roles frequently. Throughout this process, they assist each other’s work, discuss the design decisions, and provide immediate code review feedback.

You can extend this idea of pairing to create even more opportunities and benefits for a team. For example, two Development Team members might work as a pair, where one has stronger programming skills and the other has stronger testing skills (or database skills, or some other skills). Two Development Team members might also pair up for testing activities (e.g., designing tests, writing tests, executing tests).

Pairing helps provide two sets of eyes, brings diff erent perspectives from people with varied skills and experiences, and grows the overall knowledge and skills of the team. Qualitative evidence suggests that pairing results in better design, fewer mistakes, an increase in learning, faster problem solving, and more accountability.4

4. This conference talk by Professional Scrum Trainer Pradeepa Narayanaswamy illuminates the benefits of pair testing as a means to grow skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJBKWUjw01w.

In Practice: Respect People by Training Everyone Who Needs It

We often encounter situations where organizations have sent Scrum Masters to Professional Scrum training but did not send the rest of the Scrum Team. The organization expected the Scrum Master to be able to give everyone a mini-training session after attending class.

This situation can have several negative impacts. First, Scrum Team members may feel that the organization doesn’t respect them or the work they do enough to invest in their learning. Second, Scrum Team members often don’t have a solid understanding of the Scrum Framework and the intent of Scrum when they start their Sprints because they didn’t get the full experience from a professional trainer. This does not set people up for success.

Leverage Knowledge and Experience in the Organization

Whether it’s Scrum, facilitation, Java, data analytics, user experience, or any other area, there is likely a wide array of knowledge and experience just waiting to be tapped into within an organization. Generally, people are eager to share and to support others. Teaching and mentoring others also help people hone their craft, as well as provide a greater sense of purpose.

In Practice: Communities of Practice Enable Sharing and Improvement

A Community of Practice (CoP) is a group of people with a common interest. They share their experiences with each other and have a common desire to improve. In addition to supporting the growth of the participants, a CoP can graduate to helping reveal organizational impediments and guiding the organization.

A CoP is quite open in terms of what it looks like and how events and activities are facilitated. Its activities may include community presentations, presenters from outside the community, Lean Coff ee, problem-solving sessions, workshops, and social events.

In terms of structure, CoPs may form based on a variety of factors: roles (e.g., Scrum Master), disciplines (e.g., Product Management, Testing), skills (e.g., Java, Architecture), or anything else your heart desires. It’s okay if there is overlap; people may want to join multiple CoPs.

Here are some tips for creating effective CoPs:

  • Managers need to support communities by providing meeting spaces (physical, virtual, or both), time for people to participate in and contribute to their communities, and funding to support community activities.

  • Let people join communities voluntarily; coercing membership usually dilutes the benefits of the CoP.

  • Let people self-organize. CoP members should define how it will work, how it will evolve, and who will run the CoP activities.

  • Pick a good location for events, one that enables the collaboration you are seeking to create. It helps to periodically meet in person, but also provide virtual ways of meeting when physical meetings are not possible.5

    5. Watch this short video by Professional Scrum Trainers Stacy Martin and Ty Crockett on their experiences with how to start CoPs, fund CoPs, get greater participation, and much more: https://www.scrum.org/resources/overview-communities-practice.

Being an Accountable Scrum Master

A Scrum Master is accountable for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted, thereby helping Scrum Teams and the organization to maximize the benefits of Scrum. Often this gets interpreted as simply making sure the Scrum Team is following the “rules” of the Scrum Framework and removing organizational impediments that are perhaps getting in the way of the Scrum Team following that framework. While that is true, the role of Scrum Master is so much bigger than that.

The Scrum Guide describes the Scrum Master as a servant-leader. With this style of leadership, a Scrum Master’s success is measured by the growth and success of others. This happens through a Scrum Master’s ability to influence individuals and teams to take greater responsibility for their actions and outcomes, inspiring people to higher greatness.

While a Scrum Master does have authority over the Scrum process and may need to reinforce the basic rules of the framework with new teams, his or her intention of helping others improve fosters trust and inspires team members to follow by choice, not simply because of force. An effective Scrum Master exhibits the following qualities:

  • Leads by example. The Scrum Master embodies the Scrum values and collaborative teamwork. She is open to change and trusts in empiricism to deal with ambiguity and unpredictability. By modeling this positive mindset and adaptive approach, she shows the way for others.

  • Enables and empowers others. The Scrum Master doesn’t solve people’s problems but instead seeks to reveal opportunities for improvement through transparent information and open discussion. She knows that she doesn’t have the “best answers” and values the collective intelligence of the Scrum Team.

  • Creates an environment of safety and is comfortable with failure. When people are learning and doing complex work, they need to feel safe entering into conflict, challenging each other, and trying new things.

  • Listens first and learns to “read the room.” The Scrum Master seeks to facilitate consensus, ensuring people feel heard and are open to hearing other perspectives.

  • Cares deeply for people and is also willing to challenge when they are capable of more. The Scrum Master assumes positive intent and doesn’t judge people. She meets people where they are and helps them find their next step, inspiring them to hold themselves to even higher standards.

  • Operates with integrity and stays calm under pressure. The Scrum Master’s leadership provides consistency and stability for others to hold onto when they are feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the uncertainty around them.

  • Shows low tolerance for organizational impediments. The Scrum Master is willing to speak truth to power, challenging the status quo and advocating for the team.

To whom is the Scrum Master accountable? Both the Scrum Team and, ultimately, the organization. The Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team in maximizing the benefits of Scrum. The Scrum Team serves the organization in delivering valuable products. However, there are many paradoxes a Scrum Master must navigate to be successful.

Measuring the Success of a Scrum Master

The success of a Scrum Master is based on the success of the Scrum Team. However, a Scrum Master must not be short-sighted and take actions that will undermine the longer-term success of a Scrum Team. Similar to how you want to analyze the trends of multiple types of data to understand product value, so you need multiple types of data and an examination of the trends to determine how well a Scrum Master is doing. Here are some questions to consider:

  • Is the Scrum Team reliably creating a releasable Increment during every Sprint?

  • Is the value of the Increment acceptable? Is it improving?

  • Is quality of the Increment acceptable? Is it improving?

  • Do team members enjoy their work, and are they continuously learning and growing? Or does the team seem to be stagnating and experiencing declining morale?

  • Is the Scrum Team committed to continuously improving every Sprint?

  • Do the Scrum Team members have a solid understanding of the Scrum Framework, and do they apply it consistently and purposefully? Or are they just “following the rules” because the Scrum Master tells them to?

A Scrum Master’s success can be measured on a continuum, as depicted in Figure 6-4. On this continuum, trends (getting better/getting worse) are more important than point-in-time measures.

Measuring the success of a scrum master.
Figure 6-4 Success is demonstrated through the growth and success of others across multiple areas.

In Practice: Signs That a Scrum Master May Be Sacrificing Long-Term Success

Scrum Masters are often under pressure to “show improvement quickly.” This challenging environment can lead to some behaviors that actually undermine the success of a Scrum Team:

  • The Scrum Master facilitates the Daily Scrum or updates the Scrum Board to help “keep everything on track.” A self-organizing team is capable of managing their own progress and updating their own plan. Early on, a Scrum Master may need to teach facilitation techniques and ask questions to help create focus and ensure consensus. Over time, however, the Scrum Master’s direct involvement should increasingly diminish. In fact, if things go “off track,” that failure may be the most powerful learning experience for the Scrum Team.

  • The Scrum Master becomes a go-between when conflict arises between team members. People are better served when they learn to resolve their own conflicts directly with each other.

  • When a Scrum Master is out of the office, the Scrum Team skips Scrum events. This can indicate either a lack of understanding of the purpose (i.e., not yet embracing empiricism) or a lack of skills (e.g., nobody feels comfortable facilitating a Sprint Retrospective).

Each of these behaviors demonstrates a dependency on the Scrum Master. In reality, Scrum Masters should aim to work themselves out of a job. While that will never actually happen, because teams will always face new challenges and have opportunities to improve, the Scrum Master should always seek better ways for the Scrum Team to be more self-supporting.

A Scrum Master is accountable to the organization, yet will often be in the position of challenging the organization when it stands in the way of the Scrum Team’s success. The Scrum Master must show both courage and compassion to directly challenge people in leadership positions; learning how to deliver a difficult message with respect is crucial. Approaching people with openness and curiosity helps. In all that they do, Scrum Masters create shared understanding and involve people in developing collaborative solutions.

Effective Scrum Masters Vary Their Approach Based on Context

A Scrum Master relies on observation to understand where people are today and where they most need to grow. With experience, they develop an intuitive grasp of what to do in any given situation. They also continuously seek new information and recognize when it is time to change their approach (see Figure 6-5).

A hexagonal chart illustrates various possible approaches that can be made on how helping others grow and succeed guides oneself. The possible approaches are as follows, point north, coach, facilitate, take action, actively do nothing, uphold scrum, and teach.
Figure 6-5 A Scrum Master must choose the best approach(es) based on context.

Scrum Masters will respond differently depending on the situation. Among their options are the following:

  • Uphold Scrum. A new Scrum Team may not fully understand and embrace the empirical nature of the Scrum Framework. Team members may feel that they can skip an event, overrun a time-box, or lose sight of the accountability of their role without consequence. This may be because they are still struggling to build a strong team foundation, due to pressure from the organization to cut corners or because they have become complacent and started to let things slide. Upholding Scrum means guiding the Scrum Team back to the “why” behind the framework, reinforcing the benefits that being true to Scrum’s principles provides.

  • Teach. When a Scrum Team needs to improve its understanding of the foundations, core principles, and complementary practices of the Scrum Framework, a Scrum Master will need to help team members improve their understanding and apply that understanding to deliver value more effectively. They do this best by creating a space where people learn experientially through guided discovery.6

    6. Tastycupcakes.org is a great crowdsourced repository of teaching activities for common agile concepts.

  • Point north. In the context of Scrum, pointing north means creating and fostering an empirical culture of inspection and adaptation, with the intention to make better decisions by delivering value, gathering feedback, and changing course based on that feedback.

  • Coach. When Scrum Masters coach, they embody the belief that the person or team has the capability of finding their own answers, and they help them find those answers. They focus on helping team members build an understanding of their situation and what they want to do next. This is usually done by asking questions to help them gain better understanding, identifying actions that they will take, and helping them be accountable for the actions.7 Coaching helps people grow their ability to demonstrate responsibility, accountability, self-organization, and comfort with change and unpredictability.8

    7. We encourage Scrum Masters and others who would like to improve their coaching skills to consider training from an organization accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF). Organizations with which we have personal experiences with training include the Coach Training Institute (CTI) and Agile Coaching Institute (ACI).

    8. For an example of how to combine coaching using the Scrum values, check out this blog post: https://www.agilesocks.com/4-ways-to-coach-with-the-scrum-values/.

In Practice: Effective Scrum Masters (and Leaders) Coach Individuals for Better Team Results

In our experience, it is helpful to set aside regular time for coaching conversations with individuals on the Scrum Team (and even individuals outside the Scrum Team). Regular coaching conversations help people learn to understand themselves better. Coaching helps people tap into their purpose and clarify their values and vision. It also helps people understand their own preferences, motivations, and behaviors so that they can better manage their interactions with others.

Here are a few tips to get the most out of regular coaching conversations:

  • Try to get out of the regular work environment. Perhaps take a walk around the building, go to a local coffee shop, or sit in a nearby park. A simple change in scenery, physical movement, or fresh air can bring about more perspective and creativity.

  • Don’t always have an agenda. While sometimes you may want to address specific observations or situations, let the person you are coaching drive the conversation. Coaching is about the other person, not about you. Simply start the conversation by asking, “What’s on your mind?”9

    9. “What’s on your mind?” is one of the seven essential questions in the book The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (Box of Crayons Press, 2016). This is a great book that provides some easy-to-apply basics for coaching.

  • Celebrate successes and growth. While we do believe in continuous improvement, that can be sustained only by celebrating successes and growth along the way.

  • Make time to process observations and uncover learning. If people are always in “action,” they may not gain as many insights about themselves and their environment.

  • Facilitate. Scrum Masters may facilitate Scrum events, additional working sessions, or even the flow of impromptu collaborations throughout the Sprint. Effective facilitation requires awareness (reading the room), constructive conflict, and maintaining a focus on shared goals and outcomes. Facilitating provides more structure for teams to self-organize and creates an environment in which team members can enter into productive conflict, explore multiple perspectives, commit to team decisions, and tap into their creativity.

  • Take action. In some circumstances, a Scrum Master will need to take action, sometimes decisively and immediately. In taking action, the Scrum Master acts as a protector of the team, its empirical process, and the interests of the broader organization. Taking action means that the Scrum Master must strike a delicate balance, guided by safety concerns. If the Scrum Master steps in too much or too frequently, they will damage the Scrum Team’s ability to self-organize—but where the team’s safety or integrity are threatened, the Scrum Master may have no alternative.

  • Actively do nothing. Doing something for individuals when they could do it for themselves disempowers them. The heart of empiricism and a learning culture is experimentation, learning by doing. For the team members to learn, they need to act on their own. This is a conscious decision, and it is always in service of the learning and growth of others. The “active” part means you continue to actively observe while the team learns and explores. Then, based on what happens, you can continue this approach or choose something else.

In Practice: Where Scrum Master Intervention Is Appropriate

The Scrum Guide provides a simple example of an appropriate intervention by a Scrum Master: removing impediments, usually with input from the Scrum Team on the desired outcome that needs to be achieved. A Scrum Master in this situation will engage with others in the organization to help implement a solution, which often requires teaching, facilitation, and coaching.

When the safety of any person, the team, or the framework is in jeopardy, the Scrum Master must act. The extreme case is an instance of bullying or harassment. Not only is such conduct not aligned with the Scrum values and the core tenets of the framework, but it is also illegal. When something like this happens, the Scrum Master must act immediately to protect the team’s safety.

A less extreme example is stepping in to actively manage a conflict that is escalating in an unhealthy way. Sometimes it is reasonable to let the team learn by exploring and doing; however, at other times, an intervention will help the team make a step change. This is particularly common with teams starting out, as they are not sure of how to work in this new way together. By more actively guiding the team, the Scrum Master can help improve the pace of learning.

Summary

Scrum Teams need help and support to improve. They will likely identify many of the areas in which they need to improve in their Sprint Retrospectives, but they shouldn’t overlook the power and immediacy of the Daily Scrum as a lens for improvements. Rapidly removing impediments as soon as Scrum Teams encounter them is perhaps the greatest thing you can do to help them.

Transparency helps everyone understand the things that are holding a team back, and keeping track of recurrent problems can help to make those challenges more visible. Visualizing various forms of waste and communicating them to people who can help remove them is a good habit to adopt.

Scrum Teams also need to invest in their own improvement and be given the space to do so by those outside the team. They need to account for personal and team development investments when planning Sprints, and they need to make their needs for development support transparent to people outside the team who may need to provide money, time, or the help of other people to develop their capabilities.

Scrum Masters play an important role both on their teams and beyond their teams. They help their teams learn and develop their skills, embrace empiricism and an agile mindset, challenge them to improve, and help them hone their capabilities. Being an effective Scrum Master requires a wide range of skills, along with the wisdom and expertise to know when and how to apply different techniques. Beyond the team, Scrum Masters help their teams by influencing the organization at large to help their Scrum Teams become more effective over time.

Call to Action

Consider these questions with your team:

  • How much meaningful reflection happens in Sprint Retrospectives?

  • In what ways could Sprint Retrospectives be more engaging, creative, and collaborative?

  • What data do you have that could bring transparency into the frequency and the impacts of impediments?

  • What actions have been taken to tackle impediments in the past few Sprints?

  • What major impediments are being tolerated?

  • In what areas do team members most need to and want to grow?

  • In what areas is the Scrum Team improving, and how has the Scrum Master been influencing this growth?

  • Is there anything a Scrum Master may need to stop doing?

  • What do you need from leaders in the organization to support team improvement?

  • What challenges are hurting the most right now? Identify one or two experiments to help improve. For each experiment, be sure to identify the desired impacts and how you will measure them.

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