In This Chapter

Capitalizing on lessons from successful implementations

Planning for success

Throughout this book, I highlight the fact that scrum is very different from traditional project management. Moving an organization from waterfall to scrum is a significant change. Through my experience guiding all types of companies through this kind of change, I’ve identified the following important steps to take in order to become a more agile organization and successfully implement scrum.

Step 1: Conduct an Audit

Before you plan where you want to go, you first need to know where you currently stand. A third-party audit of your current processes, methods, practices, and structures will not only tell you some things you don’t know about how you currently operate, but it will also validate some things that you already know, with added insights you may not have considered.

Step 2: Identify and Recruit Talent

Author of the best-selling book Good to Great (published by HarperBusiness), Jim Collins teaches:

“You are a bus driver. The bus, your company, is at a standstill, and it’s your job to get it going. You have to decide where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and who’s going with you.

“Most people assume that great bus drivers (read: business leaders) immediately start the journey by announcing to the people on the bus where they’re going — by setting a new direction or by articulating a fresh corporate vision.

“In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

Scrum roles, although unique, are becoming more and more common, but not all recruiters know how to find people who can fill them. Getting people who really know what they are doing requires working with recruiters to understand the scrum knowledge necessary to separate the fabulous from the fakers.

Cross-functional developers continue to learn new skills and are starting to recognize the need to expand their skill sets rather than restrict their knowledge to a single area. The talent is there. For your transition to scrum to be effective, you need to get the right people in the seats.

Step 3: Ensure Proper Training

Training is a critical step when adopting scrum. The combination of face-to-face communication with a scrum expert and the ability to work through exercises actually using scrum is the best way to help people to absorb and retain the skills needed to successfully run a scrum project.

Training works best when the members of the project team can train and learn together. As a scrum trainer and mentor, I’ve had the opportunity to overhear conversations between project team members that start with, “Remember when Mark showed us how to . . . ? That worked when we did it in class. Let’s try that and see what happens.” If the development team, product owner, scrum master, and project stakeholders can attend the same class, they can apply lessons to their work as a team.

Yes, even stakeholders will benefit from training. See Chapter 12 on portfolio management to understand how crucial senior management priority decisions are in making scrum successful. Some of my clients have seen the value of this training with their scrum masters, product owners, and developers to the point of sending their entire executive team and creative, sales, marketing, finance, and HR personnel so that the entire company could be on the same page and speak the same language.

As a result, in follow up, I’ve heard executives speak to product owners in terms of “. . . at the next sprint review . . .” and “. . . do we have a user story in the backlog for that idea . . .” and “. . . so, with current velocity I could expect . . .”

Step 4: Mobilize a Transition Team

Identify a team of decision makers within your company that can be responsible for the scrum transformation at the organization level (the “transition team”). This team is made up of company executives who have the ability and clout to systematically improve processes and report requirements and performance measurements across the organization.

The transition team will create changes by running their transition efforts using scrum, just like the development team creates product features within sprints. The implementation strategy from the audit is the transition team’s road map and outlines what needs to be done for a successful transformation. The transformation team will focus on the highest-priority changes in each sprint and will demonstrate its implementation, when possible, during a sprint review.

Figure 18-1 illustrates how a transition team’s sprints align in cadence with the pilot scrum team’s sprints (see the following Step 5), and how the impediments identified in the sprint retrospective of the pilot team become backlog items for the transition team to resolve as process improvements for the pilot team.

Step 5: Identify Pilot Project

Starting your transition to scrum with just one pilot project is a great idea. Having one initial project allows you to figure out how to work with scrum with little disruption to your organization’s overall business. Concentrating on one project to start also lets you work out some of the kinks that inevitably follow change.

When selecting your first scrum project, look for an endeavor that has these qualities:

• Appropriately important: Make sure that the project you choose is important enough to merit interest within your company. However, avoid the most important project coming up; you want to have room to make and learn from mistakes. See the note on the “blame game” in Chapter 19.
• Sufficiently visible: Your pilot project should be visible to your organization’s key influencers, but don’t make it the most high-profile item on their agenda. You will need the freedom to adjust to new processes; critical projects may not allow for that freedom.
• Clear and containable: Look for a product with clear requirements and a business group that can commit to defining and prioritizing those requirements. Try to pick a project that has a distinct end point, rather than one that can expand indefinitely.
• Not too large: Select a project that you can complete with no more than two scrum teams working simultaneously to prevent too many moving parts at once.
• Tangibly measurable: Pick a project that you know can show measurable value within sprints.

People need time to adjust to organizational changes of any type, not just scrum transitions. Studies have found that with large changes, companies and teams will see dips in performance before they see improvements. Satir’s Curve, shown in Figure 18-2, illustrates the process of teams’ excitement, chaos, and finally adjustment to new processes.

After you’ve successfully run one scrum project, you’ll have a foundation for future successes, expanding to more and more projects and teams.

Step 6: Maximize Environment Efficiency

Having identified a pilot project, make sure that the work environment is one that will set it up for success. Your implementation strategy from your audit will likely outline the things to address, which may include

• Colocation: If you’re putting together a new team, put one together that is colocated, including the product owner and scrum master. Even if your organization typically has dislocated teams, this is an opportunity to step back and evaluate whether that is the optimal solution.
• Workspaces: Make sure that the pilot team has a workspace that promotes collaboration and face-to-face communication. Team members will need an area that not only allows them to focus uninterrupted on tasks, but also makes collaboration and swarming convenient and effective. Cubicle walls may not be ideal. Tables with shared monitors or other shared workspaces may be better. Whiteboards and plenty of tools like sticky notes, 3x5 cards, pens, and markers facilitate collaboration very effectively.
• Technology: For improved collaboration with any stakeholder or other project team member not colocated with the scrum team, technology exists to minimize the productivity loss due to communication that is not face-to-face. Videoconferencing, recording, screen sharing, and virtual whiteboard equipment will be key factors in supporting a pilot scrum team to develop a quality product with the efficiency needed to demonstrate success. Consider investments in the technology that suits your team’s needs, which may include monitors, cameras, virtual meeting room software, microphones, headsets, and so on.

Step 7: Reduce Single Points of Failure

Your pilot scrum team will need to be as cross-functional as possible to be successful. Identify skill gaps with each team member where a single point of failure exists on any given skill. Make immediate plans for training so that everyone on the team can do more than one thing, and no required skill is possessed by only one team member.

Training may include formal training or may simply require pairing or shadowing with another developer for a certain amount of time. This can be done during the first sprint(s) and doesn’t need to delay the pilot team kickoff (see the following Step 9).

You won’t have a completely cross-functional team on day one. But the goal should be to get started on day one, and inspect and adapt along the way.

Step 8: Establish Definition of Done

No doubt, you’ll be excited to get the project team started right away. But before diving in head first, make sure that the team’s definition of done is, well, defined. It won’t be perfect at first. The team will revise it often at first until they find what makes sense. It will be important to make this a topic of conversation at each sprint retrospective.

Make sure that the team is clear about what “done” means for each requirement at the sprint and release levels. Make sure that it’s always visible and referred to by all team members for every requirement. Having this step in order will avoid many problems down the road.

Step 9: Kick Off Pilot Project

When you’ve chosen your pilot project, don’t fall into the trap of using a plan from an old methodology. Instead, use scrum and other common practices from the road map to value that I introduce in Chapter 1. These include

• Project planning
• Vision

• Road map with estimations

  Although you’ll have a long-range view of the product through the product road map, you don’t need to define all the product or project scope up front to get started. Don’t worry about gathering exhaustive requirements at the beginning of your project; just add the features that the project team currently knows. You can always add more requirements later.

• Release planning.
• Identify major minimum viable product (MVP) releases.
• Plan first release.
• Sprint planning: Plan the first sprint and go to work.

You cannot plan away uncertainty. Don’t fall victim to analysis paralysis; set a direction and go!

Throughout the first sprint, be sure to consciously stick with scrum events. Think about the following during your first sprint:

• Have your daily scrum every day, even if you feel like you didn’t make any progress. Remember to identify roadblocks and communicate them promptly to the transition team.
• The development team may need to remember to manage itself and not look to the product owner, the scrum master, or anywhere besides the sprint backlog for task assignments.
• The scrum master may have to remember to protect the development team from outside work and distractions, especially while other members of the organization get used to having a dedicated scrum team.
• The product owner may have to become accustomed to working directly with the development team, being available for questions, and reviewing and accepting completed requirements immediately.

In the first sprint, expect the road to be a little bumpy. That’s okay; empiricism is about learning and adapting.

See Chapter 5 for planning releases and sprints.

Step 10: Inspect, Adapt, Mature, and Scale

This step is really about moving forward, taking what you’ve learned to new heights. If you follow the previous steps, you’ll start out right with a solid foundation. Beyond that, empiricism will drive your continued adoption of scrum and transformation to scrum using the implementation strategy that you establish at the beginning.