Scrum – Challenges with self-organizing teams
December 26, 2011 at 10:02 am | Posted in Blogroll, Scrum and agile | Leave a commentRecently I presented a webinar on “Managing Self-organizing Scrum Teams”. I would like to share a few highlights.
Self-organizing teams are empowered, rather than being directed and controlled from top. They are encouraged to participate actively & collectively in all the Scrum practices. Naturally this leads to enhanced expectations of freedom, especially amongst those who come from non-Scrum backgrounds and enjoy the new found freedom. However, this creates a challenge for the leaders at all levels to balance this freedom with reliable & predictable outcomes.
The webinar explored in detail these challenges as they are faced at the time of assembling a new Scrum team as well as thereafter to sustain the self-organization. For full details of the challenges and possible solutions, you may like to visit http://www.impetus.com/archived_webinar?eventid=52
The presentation was followed by a lively Question & Answer session. These can be found at http://www.leadformix.com/ef1/files/812/Q&A_Managing_Self-organizing_Scrum_Teams.pdf
Talent plus passion with preparation equals excellence
December 19, 2011 at 4:59 pm | Posted in Blogroll, Out of my mind | 2 CommentsHaven’t we all come across cases where a person is put in a new role, may be because of his successful stint in another role, and slowly he starts struggling. It is assumed that a successful person would do well in any role. Even the person concerned himself never expected this outcome and feeling guilty struggles even harder. But alas!! Apparently he does not have what it takes to show results in his new assignment. Slowly his earlier successes are forgotten. Nobody wants to remember or care about a failure and he gets shunted out to the sidelines. The person himself feels isolated, especially if he does not have a support system either within the family or friends. He becomes an emotional wreck.
Should it be allowed to happen? Is it inevitable? I don’t think so. But why does it happen in the first place? At least I have seen enough cases to conclude that to be successful and maintain your success, the twin elements of talent and passion are essential. Talent is not skills or knowledge, though they help. Talents are what a person intrinsically possesses. We can endlessly debate whether a person is born with talents or he acquires them, without coming to a conclusion. What is more important is that either the person has the required talents or he does not. Some talents are easy to spot, others are not. But they no doubt matter.
Same is the case with passion. It is not just motivation or drive or enthusiasm. Without passion you can move forward under ordinary circumstances. But when the going gets tough, even the tough do not go far. It takes passion for what you are doing to really keep going without losing hope. Rather, when a person is passionate about something, he is not even aware of the obstacles. Some invisible force seems to keep driving him forward and he actually enjoys it. Here again, either a person has passion for something or he does not. You can’t fake it.
Only when we have both the talents and passion for what we do, can we ever think of or hope to move towards excellence. But excellence is not just flash in a pan. To continuously excel at anything, we need to be prepared. What does being prepared mean? Is it about being prepared or ready for certain specific situations? No, because life has such an endless variety that it is impossible to be prepared for all kinds of situations. And end result of any activity involves not just one or even few activities but a complex chain of interrelated actions & decisions. Any one of these steps can go wrong and take us in a wrong direction. We often talk of finding a weak link in the chain and working on it to make the whole chain stronger. It does work at a level. But reality is much more complex than that. I always remember of exits on a freeway in U.S., where you take one wrong exit and you had it. If you are lucky, you can come back on your original path soon enough. If you are not, you may go miles & miles before you are back on track. And God only can help if you were on your way to catch a flight back to India. So a small mistake or an error of judgment can have totally unexpected outcome. In short, it is impossible to be prepared for every single situation.
However, there is a way out. System thinking comes to our help here. At systems level, we are forced to look at a few fundamental concepts which are applicable to a wide variety of systems, and in turn to very large individual situations. At this level, being prepared really boils down to the four basic dimensions; namely information, communication, decision and action. There are a few basic principles in each of these dimensions. If we understand them and religiously put them in practice till they become a habit, then we can hope to achieve excellence.
We will go into each of these four dimensions in detail, in the future posts on this blog. For now, we can summarize the above, in a neat little mathematical formula,
(Talent + Passion) x preparation = Excellence
Every member of the team is important
December 12, 2011 at 4:12 pm | Posted in Blogroll, General | 2 CommentsWe were pained to hear about a tragedy in a Kolkata hospital where 89 persons died, most of them patients, due to a fire. We were even more shocked when we read a story in the Times of India that many of them could have been alive today only if the guards had responded more quickly and positively. From different stories narrated by relatives of the patients, the guards asked them not to raise an alarm and assured that it was a minor blaze. When one of the relatives pleaded to let him in, they were adamant and refused him even to go near the gate. When people from nearby slums scaled the boundary walls and were trying to get into the hospital, the lights were switched off.
We are not privy to the guards’ side of the story, but the utter callousness is so obvious. We can safely assume that if only the guards had thought & acted differently, the outcome may have been quite different. Under normal circumstances, the guards are supposed to be strict to protect the hospital and its property. However under such rare and abnormal situations as above, they need to think and add differently. In the absence of any senior person, they had to act swiftly and appropriately on their own.
After the initial shock and anguish had subsided, my thoughts turned to the wider significance of this incidence to different walks of our life. Whether at home or work and for people of all ages the main focus is on normal routine transactions. How often do we think of and prepare ourselves (and others) for the unusual, the exceptional. Isn’t the preparedness really critical for such rare incidences where absence of an appropriate response can have a huge cost?
As I was writing these lines, I saw a news flash on TV informing about two nurses working at the hospital who saved lives of half a dozen patients though in the process they sacrificed their own lives. This was in stark contrast to the attitude and actions of the guards. Obviously this depends on individual qualities & values. But there may be one possible lesson for us in this difference. The role for nurses is to care for the patients. Day in and day out they are their thoughts & actions are directed by this. So in case of danger to patients their instinctive action would be in line with caring for the patients. The guards’ case is different. While performing their normal duties, their thoughts & actions are on protecting the hospital and its interests. The patients are not their focus. At times some patients may come across to the guards as trouble-makers and in an adversarial role. This possible difference brings out the need for extra attention while preparing for unexpected eventualities, in cases where the demands in special circumstances are quite different from the behavior under normal circumstances.
What about the role of leaders at all levels; whether it is as parents & grand-parents at home, teachers & principals at schools & colleges or as managers & leaders in business organizations?
There are three possible approaches a leader can take towards those whom he leads.
- Believe that he knows what is best for those he is leading, and therefore take actions to ensure that they do what is told to them or expected from them
- Believe that he may or may not be the best person to decide what is good for those he leads, and therefore focus his attention on helping them to help themselves
- Believe that once he has told what is expected from those he leads, and therefore leave it to them to figure out how to go about delivering the results
Generally it is found that both the first and last alternatives have their flaws and can lead to clashes & confrontations; whereas the second alternative takes much greater maturity patience and tolerance but produces better results and greater harmony.
As more news about the hospital tragedy is pouring in, it is becoming apparent that there were problems with many parts of the overall operation. If and when more details are available publicly, it would help to take a systemic view which may provide additional learning from this incidence which we could use in other walks of life.
Scrum beyond Software
December 5, 2011 at 1:33 pm | Posted in Blogroll, Out of my mind, Scrum and agile | 1 CommentScrum is one of the most popular agile software development methods. It has some important concepts that can be useful even for other business organizations dealing in a wide variety of products or services. Some of the distinguishing features of Scrum are,
1) Continuous improvement of product features and / or quality through short jumps from one stable state to another
2) Clear-cut division of responsibilities between product management, product team and the team leadership
3) Importance of self-organization for the team which enables it to quickly respond to changes as also brings out full potential of its members
4) High level of visibility & transparency of operations which does away with need for elaborate measurements and control mechanisms
5) A light weight process with a handful of mandatory rules which appear non-intuitive at first but are very essential for success
Let us see why these basic concepts could have general applicability to a wide variety of business situations. But before we do this, it is important to mention that modern software development involves change for the better to either the features or quality of the software product when it is already in use. So it primarily addresses effective management of improvements to an existing stable product in use, though Scrum can be used to start a completely new product as well. Second, modern business software has to successfully work in rapidly changing market conditions and it can’t wait to start delivering till everything needed from it is known in advance. This requires an empirical rather than a rigorous approach. The rapidly changing market dynamics is relevant not only to software development but to most of the business operations.
Now let us see importance of each of the above concepts in this context.
1) Many improvement initiatives take too long to see light of the day because we want to be sure that every possible situation is covered before we offer it for use, even for trial use by a small group. Instead of trying to grab everything, it would certainly make sense to start small, choose a few features or few aspects of important features and deliver them to get a quick feedback.
2) It is also important to choose these features carefully and set the right expectations to all concerned so that they are prepared to wait for the short duration when it is in an unstable state and also to make sure that we quickly get it back to the next stable state so that those using it are not adversely affected. This calls for a clear prioritization of what comes next and it must be acceptable to all concerned. As Scrum suggests, it is good have a single person owning the product; similarly it would be good to have a single person named as owner of the improvement initiative who has both the accountability for success and the required authority without undue interference. Secondly, the team involved in the initiative should have a say in how much work it can do for a given increment and not be forced or pressurized to accept what they would not feel comfortable to commit to. Lastly, since the responsibilities for managing the product and those for managing the execution are clearly identified, it helps the team manager to shift into a facilitator role (a servant-leader as per Scrum) rather than using a command & control approach. This can be quite challenging for a person not used to it.
3) Too much time and efforts are spend by the managers in planning & execution details and allocating & closely monitoring the work of the team members, in the mistaken belief that the manager knows best. This hardly uses the immense human potential and diverse set of skills & talents the members bring to the table. Scrum has found helpful the approach of self-organization for the team where the members do all the planning & execution It is helpful both for the team productivity and moral. There is no reason why it can’t be tried in other business scenarios as well.
4) Scrum encourages high level of visibility & transparency to the operations. Everybody concerned has access to what is taken up for each increment and even for the exact state of each task on a daily basis. Team focuses on what is still remaining to be done and how long it will take rather than being busy with collecting lots of data about what has already happened and in any case is too late to change.
5) Clarity, focus, trust and commitment help the progress and there is little need for elaborate processes and control mechanisms. Scrum relies on a very light weight process which just focuses on the essentials needed for success. But it insists on the few “rules of the game” as it calls them. Many of them appear counter-intuitive at first glance especially for those who come from a different culture but if we use them faithfully, the benefits are soon apparent.
To summarize, there is a strong case for trying the Scrum concepts in other business contexts since there is a lot in common as regards the environment. In any case, if the leaders at all level from the software industry use a different approach for software development and a very different approach for all other business activities, there is a danger of their developing split personalities 
Have a look and try out where possible to see if this makes sense. It would be interesting to know what worked and what did not, so please share your experiences.
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