Scrum Master Work Book 1

Scrum Master Workbook Part 1 15 weeks of accelerated learning Karen Greaves and Samantha Laing This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/ScrumMasterWorkbook1 This version was published on 2017-03-06

© 2016 - 2017 Growing Agile

Contents About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

i

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ii

How To Use This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 1: What Should Scrum Masters Do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Week 2: Impediments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4

Week 3: Meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 4: Proactive vs Reactive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 5: Retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 6: Learning From The Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 7: Scrum Master Record Keeping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 8: Interruptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 9: Ownership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 10: Retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 11: Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 12: Visualisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 13: Lean Coffee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 14: Bugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 15: Retrospective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Growing Agile Online Courses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Growing Agile Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CONTENTS

About Growing Agile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Authors

Sam Laing (left) and Karen Greaves (right)

We have worked in software our whole lives. With Type A personalities and a strong work ethic, we have both done our share of overtime on death march projects. Eventually we knew we had to find another way. Agile brought us together when we worked at a company trying to do Scrum for the first time. In 2012, we took the plunge and started our own business, Growing Agile. Since then we have been doing the work that we are passionate about: introducing people to agile and helping teams improve. Best of all we have a positive impact on other people’s lives. In the 15 years we’ve been doing agile, one thing has become clear: The Scrum Master role is one of the most misunderstood and badly implemented parts of Scrum. We’ve made it our personal mission to help change that. A great Scrum Master can make the difference between an okay team and an awesome team, and we think everyone in this role should be creating awesome teams! Enjoy!

Introduction Welcome to our Scrum Master Workbook! We hope it will be your companion on your journey as a Scrum Master for the next 15 weeks. The book is a hands on learning experience that will cover a range of topics we feel Scrum Masters need to master. We know that being a Scrum Master is not an easy job, and we are passionate about helping people on this journey. Through being Scrum Masters ourselves for many years, and coaching many people on the journey, we have a collection of lessons and skills we believe it is vital for Scrum Masters to learn. Our hope is that this book will be like having us as be your personal coach on your journey and fast track your learning by guiding you through these lessons each week. Just like each team is different, each Scrum Master’s journey is different, so what is most important about this book is that you try things out with your own team and in your environment. Some things we suggest might work great for you, others might be a complete disaster, that’s okay. That’s how you will learn. This book is for anyone who is looking to improve as a Scrum Master or agile coach. Because the book is filled with exercises for you to do, it will make most sense if you have a team (or more than one) that you can try things out on. The book is written so that it’s applicable if you are a brand new Scrum Master or someone with 5 years experience looking to revitalise your team. We will cover a lot of the basics, but as experienced coaches we know that often going back to basics is exactly what experts need. Good luck on your journey, feel free to send us a tweet or email to let us know how it’s going. Twitter: @GrowingAgile¹ Email: [email protected]² or [email protected]³ ¹https://twitter.com/GrowingAgile ²mailto:[email protected] ³mailto:[email protected]

How To Use This Book The first thing we’d like you to do is to print this book. Yes we mean on paper! We live in a digital world and yet we find that tactile tangible things are sometimes so much simpler and better. Don’t get us wrong, we aren’t technophobes. We love our fitbits, smart phones and apple tv, but for some things paper just works better. We hope having this on your desk will serve as a great reminder to continue your learning. We’ve left plenty of space for you to write in the book. This means it will be easy to reflect on what you’ve learned over several weeks. The book is intended to be printed in colour on A4 paper, but feel free to try something different if that works better for you. Next we recommend setting aside an hour a week in your calendar for the next 15 weeks. Go put it in your calendar now. Pick a time you aren’t generally distracted and when you will be able to focus and learn. You might even want to book a meeting room for yourself to get away from the interruptions that might happen at your desk. Each chapter is focused on a topic, and the intention is for you to focus on that topic for a week. If an hour once a week is more than you can commit to, feel free to go at your own pace. You can take a break at anytime (for example if you go on holiday), then pickup on the next chapter when you return. You can also skip around to chapters that are more relevant if you prefer. Each chapter/week is colour coded and structured as follows: • • • • •

An introduction to the topic One or two blog posts related to the topic An exercise for you to do A journal page for you to take notes for the week Some weeks also include cards you can cut out to use for the exercises

We know that everyone learns differently, so we have provided a variety of materials related to each topic. Feel free to use only what makes sense to you, and what you have the time for. Don’t worry if you can’t do every exercise, rather focus on what you can learn on the topic. We’ve learned through our other books that although there is a wealth of information and great ideas on the internet about agile, just providing links can be frustrating because links change and content gets deleted all the time. For this book we’ve decided to provide the text of the blog posts in a downloadable PDF. This means that you never need to visit a broken link and wonder what the article said. We’ve also kept the reading short, so it’s no more than five pages for any one chapter. Feel free to print the Reading PDF out, or to read the short articles on your computer or device. Download the Reading PDF here: www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF⁴ We recommend reading the introduction and blog posts and before doing the exercise. Some of the exercises will require you to schedule time with your team or other people to complete them. ⁴http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

How To Use This Book

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One of the best ways to learn as a Scrum Master is to keep notes on how things are going, what you do, and what you notice. Often it takes some time for the impact of our actions to be visible, so being able to reflect over a longer period is a valuable learning tool. For this reason, we’ve included a journal page each week for you to fill in. We’ll prompt you with some things to think about for the journal each week, but feel free to capture whatever you think might be important to look back on. When you start we recommend filling in your journal daily. Sometimes by the end of the week it is difficult to remember what we did earlier in the week. A great tip is to put a reminder in your calendar for 15 minutes each day to fill in your journal. Once you do this for a few weeks, it will become an easy habit to continue. As agile coaches our favourite meeting is the retrospective. Reflecting on how things have gone in the past is the best way to set ourselves up for success in the future. It’s also a great way to amplify your learning. Because of this, we’ve structured every fifth week to be a retrospective. This is a personal retrospective to do by yourself. The chapters for those weeks will be a little different because they don’t include any reading. They are all colour coded in yellow.

Week 1: What Should Scrum Masters Do?


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What Should Scrum Masters Do? The role of Scrum Master is misunderstood world wide. Many people believe that the Scrum Master is just a new name for a project manager, which is not the case. This can lead to misconceptions and uncertainty about what a Scrum Master should be doing. In our experience, even if you’ve been a Scrum Master for more than a year, explaining what you do all day is tricky. If you are a new Scrum Master, the role can be overwhelming. You might feel you need to do many of things that you really shouldn’t be doing, because they make the team dependent on you, like updating the team’s task board! Part of the problem is that the Scrum Master role is a completely new role to many of us, so comparisons to other roles are often not useful. The best analogy is to think of the Scrum Master as a team coach, helping the team get better. Much of what a team coach does is proactive, rather than reactive, to prevent problems before they occur. This unfortunately means no one can tell you what you need to do. You need to look for opportunities within your own team and environment. The image below can help you focus on the right things and avoid doing things the team should learn to do for themselves.

That is only part of the picture. As new Scrum Masters 50% of your time should be spent learning, reading and sharing what you have learned. I know that sounds daunting … 4 hours EVERY DAY! But learning can be fun especially if you have other people doing it with you and you apply everything you learn.


Reading For this week’s reading take a look at this list of 42 things a Scrum Master should be doing⁵. A copy of this article is included in Reading PDF⁶. For additional reading we recommend the book ScrumMastery by Geoff Watts.

Exercise If you haven’t already – please read How To Use This Book before continuing. This week we would like you to start using the Journal page in this book. Note down what you do everyday for this week. This could be a simple list or a more detailed paragraph. We’ll be asking you do this each week for the next few weeks, in preparation for an exercise in week 4. If you think you might forget to do this, then schedule a recurring meeting for 15 minutes before you leave the office, or the first 15 minutes when you get in. This way you will have set aside time to fill in your journal notes!

Journal Write some notes here on what you’ve done each day this week. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

⁵http://scrummasterchecklist.org/ ⁶http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

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Week 2: Impediments

5

Week 2: Impediments

Impediments Impediments. Those nasty things that stop you from getting stuff done. Nope. Impediments don’t just stop you from getting stuff done. Impediments are ANYTHING that prevent you from going as FAST as possible. Think about that carefully for a moment. That might be faster than you have even gone before. Some impediments are “just the way things work around here”. The question “Do you have any impediments?” during a daily scrum or standup rarely solicits any answers. Usually only blockers (things preventing work) get mentioned. Instead, listen to people’s language in the daily scrum. Any hint of uncertainty means there is potentially an impediment that can be resolved. We have created a list of “impediment words”. Listen for these words in your next daily scrum and see how many potential impediments you can spot. Ask clarifying questions to uncover whether it is a problem, or if someone is just using uncertain language out of habit. Start to notice how often you and those around you use uncertain language. There is a cutout of these words for you later in the chapter. Not every impediment needs solving right now. The big hairy ones will most likely take months or even years to fully solve. Your aim is to make them less painful for your team. Chip away at them one small step at a time. The best way to do this is to source multiple ideas from the team. Many heads thinking of potential solutions is always better than one. You could also seek help from outside the team, perhaps other teams have already faced and conquered a particular impediment. The problem solving tree is a great technique to help identify potential solutions for impediments. We have included this technique in this week’s reading.

Reading For this week’s reading take a look at two blog posts from our blog: What Should a New Scrummaster Be Doing⁷ and The Problem Solving Tree⁸. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF⁹. ⁷http://www.growingagile.co.za/2014/08/what-should-a-new-scrummaster-be-doing/ ⁸http://www.growingagile.co.za/2012/01/the-problem-solving-tree-a-free-exercise/ ⁹http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

Week 2: Impediments

Exercise Write down some of the impediments you have noticed in your daily scrum. Don’t worry about how you will solve these yet, just list them. For example: A team member is waiting for the Product Owner to get back to him before he can complete his work. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 2: Impediments

Exercise Pick one of the impediments you listed that you would like to resolve. Use the rest of this page to draw a problem solving tree for that impediment. Try to think of lots of small things you can do to make the impediment have less impact, if it is difficult to solve completely. Now get out there and try some of the things you’ve identified.

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Week 2: Impediments

Journal As with last week, use your journal to write down what you’ve done this week. Also write down which ideas you tried to solve the impediment, how it worked, and what the impact has been on your team. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 2: Impediments

For Your Toolbox Cut this out and add it to your toolbox to use with your team.

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Week 3: Meetings

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Week 3: Meetings

Meetings Time is money. We all know it. And yet the vast majority of organisations suffer from time waste when people sit in a meeting and don’t actually get any value. That is time from each of their days that they have lost. Eliminating this waste or even minimising it could save some companies millions. As a bonus – not wasting your time waiting for meetings to start or being bored during them, will leave you and your team much happier! Meetings are necessary. Face to face communication is proven to be vastly more effective than any other form of communication. We need to understand how to make meetings more productive. Luckily – with just a few tips – you can do this as a Scrum Master. What you will notice is that if you implement these tips, other people will start changing their behaviour too.

TIPS • • • • • • • • •

•

Always prepare for a meeting. Always have a purpose for the meeting and an intended outcome. If attendees need to bring or prepare something, tell them in advance. Always start meetings on time and close the door. Latecomers are welcome, but must open the door. Don’t catch them up on what has been discussed, they will learn to be on time if they don’t want to miss anything. Always end meetings on time. If the desired outcome has not been achieved then have a discussion as to when to address this before the end of the meeting Plan meetings to end at 5 minutes to the hour (e.g. 9:55am) to allow participants time to get to their next meeting on time. Ensure that you facilitate the meeting and keep it on topic. Don’t multitask in meetings by checking your phone, tablet or laptop. Pay attention to the person talking, and take notes on paper. Taking notes on a laptop can make people think you are checking email, even if you aren’t. If the desired outcome is achieved before the end of the meeting, end the meeting early.

The above tips allow people to have FOCUS. They demands RESPECT and require COMMITMENT, COURAGE and OPENNESS. Do these sound familiar?

Week 3: Meetings

Reading For this week’s reading take a look at this blog post on Meeting Addiction¹⁰. A copy of this article is included in Reading PDF¹¹. ¹⁰http://www.growingagile.co.za/2013/10/meetingism-addiction-to-meetings/ ¹¹http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

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Week 3: Meetings

Exercise The best way to improve your meetings is to reflect on what happened in the meeting as soon as possible afterwards. Think about things that worked well and why that was, as well as things that went badly and try to understand why and what you could do instead. For this week schedule 10 min in your calendar after every meeting to reflect. Answer the following questions for each meeting. 1) Was the meeting valuable? Why or why not? . . . . . 2) Did you pay attention all the time? Why or why not? . . . . . 3) Did everyone else pay attention all the time? Why or why not? . . . . . 4) Which parts felt great? Why? . . . . . 5) Which parts felt awkward or odd? Why? . . . . . 6) What one thing can you change to make the meeting more valuable? . . . . .

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Week 3: Meetings

Journal Write down in your journal, which of the tips you’ve tried in your meetings and what happened as a result. Also note down what you did this week as you’ve done for the past 2 weeks. We’ll be using this information next week. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 4: Proactive vs Reactive

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Proactive vs Reactive Think about your average day at the office. How would you rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, when 1 is calm and peaceful and 10 is hectic and crazy? If you are running around everyday doing what we call “the headless chicken dance” then you are likely mostly being reactive. This means you tackle problems as they arise, and they usually arise a lot. As explained in the first week, part of the challenge of being a ScrumMaster is that your job should be proactive, rather than reactive. Instead of constantly putting out fires, you should instead be preventing them from ever becoming fires.The hardest part of being proactive, is that it is not obvious what you need to do, and if you are doing it well, almost no one notices because everything just runs smoothly. If your environment is in a constant state of crisis, you need to consciously create space and time to be proactive. Continuing to be reactive only perpetuates the crisis state.

Let’s look at a story. Kate is a Scrum Master and her team is working well together. Kate feels she is proactive a lot of the time, but the times she feels crazy are just before a release. It seems she needs to be in 10 different places at once for the 2 weeks before a release. Some of the things happening during those two weeks are: Her PO needs all the critical bugs fixed Her team is working on bugs but as individuals so they can cover more ground Every release to the testing environment seems to bring new critical bugs The closer they get to release date the more stressed everyone gets The team works overtime to fix more bugs. Kate has noticed when she (and her team) are reactive and listed her observations. Now she can start working on these proactively. Perhaps she can investigate Agile Testing in order to prevent bugs. Perhaps her team can try releasing to production more frequently so that smaller pieces of work go in. Maybe the team can try fixing bugs as soon as they are found rather than leaving them to the end of the release. As you can see by the story above being proactive means slowing down and observing the chaos in order to make some some changes.

Reading For this week’s reading take a look at these three blog posts: Being Proactive vs Reactive¹², Customer Service¹³ and Proactive Reactive¹⁴. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF¹⁵. ¹²http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/01/being-proactive-vs-reactive/ ¹³http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/01/proactive-vs-reactive-customer-service/ ¹⁴http://proactivechange.com/mindset/proactive-reactive.htm ¹⁵http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF


Exercise Take a look at the journal entries you’ve been keeping for the past three weeks. Next to each thing that you did, mark whether it was proactive or reactive. 1) What % of the time were you proactive vs reactive? . . . . . 2) Now map these tasks onto the quadrants in the Toolbox section. Be sure to read the blog posts for more detailed instructions. What tasks could you get rid of or delegate to make more time to be proactive? . . . . .

Journal Write down some ideas of what you plan to do this week to be more proactive. At the end of the week, reflect on how it went. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 5: Retrospective

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Retrospective For this week, instead of covering a new topic we would like you to do a personal retrospective of the last 4 weeks (or since you started this book). You can choose the focus to be as broad or narrow as you like. It could be for everything in your life, or just your learning as a Scrum Master. Try to do this in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed and set aside about an hour. For each question try to spend 15-30 minutes on it. If you get stuck after 5 minutes don’t rush ahead, just sit and think, more will come. Feel free to browse through your journal entries to remind yourself of what you’ve done. What’s working? What did I do right? What am I proud of? . . . . . . . . . What’s not working? What could be improved? What are my biggest opportunities for growth? . . . . . . . . . How can I fix what’s not working for a better result? What specific things can I focus on next time? . . . . . . . .


Journal Use your journal this week to keep track of what you change because of your retrospective. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 6: Learning From The Community


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Learning From The Community When we think back to how we have learned the most, it usually involves the community around us. We attended a talk, got advice from someone more experienced or were pointed to a blog post that was just perfect. For you to learn and grow as a Scrum Master, you too need to connect with your local community and the international one.

Locally, you can look for user groups for Scrum, Kanban, Agile or Lean Coffees. Most of these are free events with the added bonus of meeting others who can advise and help you. Once you have attended some meetups and gotten value, consider sharing your experience by giving a talk. You will be amazed at how much you learn by telling your story. Find out which conferences are held locally around Scrum, agile, Kanban, or lean. Conferences are great for networking and learning a lot in a short amount of time. See if you can volunteer at the conference – this way you will meet the organisers, speakers and possibly get in free! Join twitter and start following some agile big names like Mike Cohn, Esther Derby, Ron Jeffries and of course, Growing Agile. Check in regularly and they will guide you towards great blog posts to read, and others to follow on twitter. Another idea is to see if there are coaching circles happening near you. (More on these in the reading section). Some communities run these for free, or there are paid ones to be found online. You could even start your own! There are also online communities where you can learn and share with others, like www.AgilePath.me¹⁶.

Reading Here is a blog post on how to get the most learning out of a conference or event¹⁷. This post explains what coaching circles are:¹⁸. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF¹⁹. A list of the top 50 Agile conferences in the world²⁰ ¹⁶http://www.AgilePath.me ¹⁷http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/03/top-tips-to-benefit-from-conferences/ ¹⁸http://www.growingagile.co.za/2012/06/understanding-coaching-circles/ ¹⁹http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF ²⁰http://softwaredevelopmenttoday.com/2015/01/the-top-50-agile-conferences-including-lean-kanba-scrum/


Exercise Create a list of local meetups near you and when they are happening in the next month. . . . . . . . . . . Now pick one to attend and write it down here: . . Create a list of any conferences you’d like to attend and when they are happening. . . . . . . . . . Plan to attend one of these conferences. This might be as simple as buying a ticket or more tricky like convincing your boss, or approaching the conference committee to become a volunteer. Write the conference name and what you are going to do to attend here: . . . . . . .

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Journal Write some notes here on what you’ve done each day this week. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 7: Scrum Master Record Keeping


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Scrum Master Record Keeping If the team owns the task board and the sprint burndown, and the Product Owner owns the backlog and the release burnup, does a Scrum Master need to keep any records of what happens each sprint?

We’ve seen everything from Scrum Masters who keep every sticky note from task boards and retrospectives, a complex excel spreadsheet, to those who track nothing at all. We think the best bet is somewhere in the middle. There is no point in keeping data if you are never going to use it. If you have a drawer full of sticky notes that no-one has read in 3 months - please recycle them now. Remember the role of a Scrum Master is to help a team improve. One of the first things it is important for a team to get right is predictability (being able to deliver what they say they can deliver). The second thing teams need to get right is continuous improvement (picking a retrospective action and implementing it each sprint). We suggest Scrum Masters focus on tracking how their team is doing on these things. Eventually you want your team to be deciding what metrics are important for them, and agreeing how to track them, but if they aren’t ready for that yet, we suggest keeping a short record of each sprint. We’ve included some sprint record cards in the Toolbox section for this week. These cards include the data we believe it is important for a Scrum Master to track.

Reading Another metric you might find useful²¹. A copy of this article is included in Reading PDF²². ²¹http://www.growingagile.co.za/2014/03/the-only-software-metric-you-need/ ²²http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

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Exercise Take a look at this fictional team’s data for 4 sprints.

————Sprint1

————Sprint2

————Sprint3

————Sprint4

Priority ————1 2 3 4 5 6 ————1 2 3 4 ————1 2 3 4 ————1 2 3 4 5

Name ——— StoryA StoryB StoryC StoryD StoryE StoryF ——— StoryB StoryF StoryG StoryH ——— StoryE StoryF1 StoryF2 StoryF3 ——— StoryF2 StoryF3 StoryH1 StoryH2 StoryH3

Size —— 8 8 5 5 5 13 —— 8 13 8 13 —— 5 3 5 8 —— 5 8 1 2 1

Status ——— Done Rolled Over Done Done Rolled Over Rolled Over ——— Done Rolled Over Done Rolled Over ——— Done Done Rolled Over Rolled Over ——— Done Done Done Done Done

Committed ————44

Actual —— 18

————42

—— 16

————21

—— 8

————13

—— 17

Looking at the data, answer the following questions for yourself: 1. What patterns do you notice? . . . . . . . 2. What factors do you think are influencing this? . . . . . .


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3. If the team had to make a commitment today, what assumptions could you make based on this data? How confident would you be in that commitment? . . . . . . . 4. What could you do as a Scrum Master to help this team become more predictable? . . . . . . .

Journal Take a look at your own team’s sprint records for the last few sprints. Write down anything interesting that you notice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



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Week 8: Interruptions

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Interruptions Interruptions. We all hate them, and yet they are a reality. Every Scrum team we have ever coached has had to deal with some level of interruption. It is often not possible to ignore them; they can represent real business demands on your team. Often new teams have a lot of interruptions because the rest of the organisation has not yet adapted to the cadence of their work. The business might be used to requesting something a day or two before they need it, rather than 2 weeks in advance. This can be addressed by helping people understand how the team would prefer work to flow to them, and how it will benefit them to follow the process. Some interruptions are urgent and unpredictable by their nature (like production outages). These can be addressed either by fixing the root cause of the issues (like quality problems), or by minimising the impact on the team (by having a single person on the team interrupted, rather than everyone).

Before trying to prevent interruptions, we recommend that you first try to understand them. Consider the following questions: • • • •

How many are there? Where do the interruptions come from? How do they impact what the team is able to commit to and deliver? How do they vary from sprint to sprint?


• How much time do they take away from sprint work? • How much do they impact the focus and quality of the work the team does? • How do they impact the mood of the team?

Reading The following two blog posts show different ways that teams can deal with interruptions in Scrum. Interruptions in Scrum²³ and Support Interruptions²⁴. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF²⁵. ²³http://www.growingagile.co.za/2012/09/interruptions-in-scrum/ ²⁴http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/08/interuptions-support-business-as-usual-how-do-these-work-in-scrum/ ²⁵http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

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Exercise Ask your team to track interruptions on their task board for the next week (if they don’t already do this). Once you have some data for your team answer the following questions. Which interruptions had the biggest impact on the sprint? . . . . . . What would need to change to make these interruptions not happen? . . . . . . Are there any interruptions that the team could have known about before the sprint and included in their planned work? . . . . . . Does the team have an agreement on how interruptions will be handled? Was that followed for all the interruptions? . . . . . . What type of interruption would be easiest to get rid of? How could you do that? . . . . . .

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Journal Write down in your journal, everything you have observed this week. Pay specific attention to how behaviour changes when an interruption comes into the team. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 9: Ownership

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Week 9: Ownership

Ownership How often do you wish that your team would take more ownership? If only they would update the taskboard and the sprint burndown themselves. If only they could be on time for meetings without you calling them. If only they would remember their retrospective actions and do them without you nagging. Think about this: “You do it, you own it”. For all those things you wish the team were doing it, are you currently doing it on their behalf? Are you writing down their retrospective actions? Are you taking the notes in backlog grooming? Are you updating the burndown chart? If you are, you are taking ownership of it. Stop.

You might argue that then it won’t get done. That’s okay. There needs to be a gap in ownership before someone new will step in and take ownership. You need to create that gap. Let’s look at the sprint burndown example since we see this with many Scrum teams. The Scrum Master knows the burndown is an important artifact, so they update it every day after the standup. The team therefore see this as the Scrum Master’s chart. That means if the team is not on track, they are expecting the Scrum Master to tell them. What happens if you stop updating it? Most teams will stop having a burndown chart for a while. That is okay. Maybe the team will miss their sprint commitment as a result. That is also okay. In the retrospective get the team to reflect on why that happened. Maybe they realise that they didn’t have a burndown showing them when they went off track. Their action is that they will create one. Now when they use the burndown and own it themselves, it will be much more powerful. But what if they don’t miss their commitment, or what if they find another way to figure out if they are on track, and never use a sprint burndown again? That’s also okay. The important learning is that they have taken accountability for their own commitment.

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Week 9: Ownership

Reading For this week’s reading take a look at these two blog posts: You do it, you own it²⁶ and Lego BurnDown Charts²⁷. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF²⁸.

Exercise For each of the items below write down who currently does this in your team in the Do’er column. Is it you, the Product Owner, a specific team member (like a team lead or analyst), any team member, or the whole team? Then think about who should really own that task. Write that in the owner column. In the last column highlight where there is a mismatch between to Do’er and the Owner.

Task ————————— Estimate work Update the task board Update the sprint burndown Take notes in the retrospective Take notes in backlog grooming and sprint planning Update the release burndown Take notes in the sprint review Start the daily scrum on time Facilitate the retrospective Update the product backlog ²⁶http://www.growingagile.co.za/2014/04/you-do-it-you-own-it/ ²⁷http://www.growingagile.co.za/2012/11/lego-burndown-charts-a-guest-post/ ²⁸http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

Do’er ————-

Owner ———

Mismatch? ————

Week 9: Ownership

Journal For this week, try to pay attention to when you do things for your team. For a few of them try ask the team to do them instead. Write down what happens when you do that. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Retrospective It’s time for you to retrospect on the last 4 weeks. The focus is going to be on your work as a Scrum Master. Try to do this in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed and set aside about an hour. Feel free to browse through your journal entries to remind yourself of what you’ve done. Recall the items you intended to change from the previous retrospective. Now answer the following 3 questions: Did you manage to do them? . . . . . . . . . . . Was it worthwhile? . . . . . . . . . . . What did you learn? . . . . . . . . . . .

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Look at your calendar for the last 4 weeks. For all the events that happening in the last 4 weeks, place them in either High (they made you happy) or Low (They made you sad). HIGH ——————————-

LOW ——————————-

Now spend 10 minutes brainstorming some insights you have based on this data. Don’t judge just write them down. . . . . . . . . . . Now we would like you to pick an intention for the following 4 weeks and fill it in below:

Think about how you will know if this intention is working. What is a way of measuring if your intention is having the desired affect? Test your thinking by asking “How will I know if my


intention is not working?”. Write down your measurement thoughts below. . . . . . . . . . .


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Week 11: Conflict

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Week 11: Conflict

Conflict To be a healthy team we need to live in a world of courage and respect, where we are able to have healthy conflict. Conflict is a tricky beast. The majority of people avoid conflict and talking about feelings at all costs. How would you deal with the following situations? Team Member: “Joe cuts his toenails at the desk, he cares about no-one but himself, I can’t stand being near him.” Team Member: “Sheila is constantly on the phone. She spends no time working. I know more about her family and their problems than I do about my own! I am not the only one – EVERYONE has had enough.”

As a Scrum Master, you might find that people naturally bring these issues to you, because they expect you to resolve the conflict for them. Beware of dealing with the issue on behalf of someone else. Rather follow the approach below from Lyssa Adkins which helps people resolve their own conflicts. 1. Ask the complainer: “Have you shared your concerns and feelings about this with ______?” If the complainer has not then encourage them to do so, if they are reluctant or unwilling move to step two. 2. “_________ should know of your concerns. Would it help if I went with you?” Make sure the complainer knows that you are there for moral support, not to be the bearer of the news. Plan for when and where this conversation will take place, if they are reluctant or unwilling move to step three. 3. “May I tell ___________ that you have these concerns?” If the complainer is still not willing, then cease to consider this a problem.

Week 11: Conflict

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Often complainers are just wanting to vent, some are just trying to add you to their gossip network and some are trying to enlist you for their personal war.

Reading Here is a blog post on helping others deal with conflict:²⁹. This is the full blog post from Lyssa Adkins:³⁰. A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF³¹.

When helping teams get started with agile we recommend that they create a set of working agreements. These are helpful because they define what behaviour is expected by the team from it’s members. Teams without working agreements often end up with members feeling dissatisfied with other people’s behaviour, but without any concrete way to explain why that behaviour is unacceptable. This is often the cause of complaints and conflict! For example, I might feel that working from home regularly is great as I can avoid traffic, but my team members might feel that when I do work from home I don’t contribute as much to helping the team. Unless we have a firm agreement on what is acceptable to everyone on the team for working from home, I might continue working from home, blissfully unaware that my team mates are getting more and more angry with me. When setting up agreements we recommend keeping the following in mind: 1. Make sure the agreement is something within the team’s control. For example if the team doesn’t have any say over budget, don’t include agreements about who can do external training courses. 2. Make sure the team agreements have a fair impact on everyone in the team. For example if you have team members in India, and team members in the US, don’t make standups at 9am US time, and have the Indian team members have to stay late every evening. 3. Make sure your agreements are a living document that gets updated over time. The agreements that work today, might not work in the future. It’s especially important to review your agreements when new team members join. 4. Make sure your agreements are short – maybe 4 or 5 points. Any more than that and people won’t remember what they are. If everyone on the team already does something automatically, don’t make it an agreement. Keep agreements for the areas or topics that might cause conflict. 5. Make sure your agreements are visible. We like a poster on the wall. This helps remind people what they are, and encourages them to call each other on the behaviour. (The team should create this poster, not the ScrumMaster.) We created some team agreement cards with suggested topics that we use to help team members decide what is important for them. They don’t need agreements on everything listed on these cards, but this might help them identify some areas of concern. We themed them under the ²⁹http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/07/helping-others-deal-with-conflict/ ³⁰https://www.agileconnection.com/article/handling-conflict-agile-teams-what-do-when-team-member-complains ³¹http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

Week 11: Conflict

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following: Be kind, Be available, Be on time, Be involved and Be proactive. They are included in the Toolbox section this week.

Exercise Your exercise is to facilitate a session with your team to create some team agreements. Remember the “You do it, you own it” lesson. Let the team write these up and own them! Answer the following questions to help you plan for the session. When will you have the session? . . . . . . How much time do you need? . . . . . What should you tell the team about the session? . . . . . What do you need to run the session? (materials, stationary etc) . . . . .

Week 11: Conflict

Journal Write some notes here on what happened this week. Did anything surprise you in the team agreements session? Have the agreements made a difference to how the team is working? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 11: Conflict


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Week 12: Visualisation

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Visualisation When something is visible and is seen daily it is very hard to ignore. This is one of the reasons we like to make things very visible in agile. For example: A task board in a team area can tell me in one glance if the team is on track or behind, where there are blockers, and if there is too much work in progress. f you notice a problem area as a Scrum Master, think about how you can make the problem more visible so that others might notice and solve it. Some ideas for Scrum Masters is to have an impediment board, or to add this to the teams task board. This way any impediments the team notice can be made visible and prioritised along with the other impediments. Often teams and managers complain that they don’t know what a Scrum Master does all day. This is a great opportunity for visualisation. Create a Scrum Master board for yourself and have it near your desk. If you have only one team you can do this at the bottom of the teams board. Place all your tasks, like meeting prep, learning, conversations on your board. Be sure to talk to this during the stand up (after the team).

Making things visible can also help surface where there are misunderstandings. If you notice that there is regularly a misunderstanding around something – try to make it visible. Above are two examples of this. On the left is a backlog grooming board, a visual indicator to the team and the Product Owner of which stories need grooming, have outstanding questions and are ready for the sprint. On the right is a mind map - a great tool for exploring a story and surfacing assumptions and questions.


Reading An example of the many different boards we use in our office at Growing Agile³². A copy of this article is included in Reading PDF³³. Here is another way to visualise your backlog:³⁴. A book we recommend with lots of inspiration is 96 Visualisation Examples by Jimmy Janlen.

Exercise We want you to create a big visible board for yourself to highlight what you do as a Scrum Master. As mentioned above, you can do this on your own board (recommended if you have more than one team) or you can create a lane at the bottom of your teams board. Be sure to be specific about tasks. “Plan for meeting” is not good enough, it should rather be “plan for retro- Team A”, “plan for grooming - Team B”, “chat to PO about story X”. If you have multiple teams perhaps use a different colour sticky for each team. This way you can also see how much time you spend on each team. Create tasks for your learning time and reading. Once you have created your board, answer these questions: What surprised you most about your board? . . . . . What do you think a passerby who sees your board might notice at a glance? . . . . . ³²http://www.growingagile.co.za/2013/06/the-agile-office-space/ ³³http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF ³⁴http://www.growingagile.co.za/2012/12/theme-release-backlog/

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Journal Now that you have a board up and are making your work visible, has anything changed? Notice what happens when you refer to your board, and when you add or move stickies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 13: Lean Coffee

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Lean Coffee Sometimes the life of a Scrum Master can be very lonely. It can feel like you are alone in the journey to helping your team and your company become agile. We highly recommend finding some friends and colleagues to help you on your way. Agile communities around the world are strong, because it is through sharing our learnings and inspiring each other that we get better. One of the simplest ways to start a community either within your company, or in your area is Lean Coffee. Lean Coffee is a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated. The format for a Lean Coffee is very simple. This is intentional. It is meant to be the least structure necessary for a coherent and productive meeting. No more, no less.

We’ve found the format to be effective for many things. Here are just a few of the ways we’ve used the format. • • • • • • • •

For questions and answer sessions in agile training To run community events For coaching calls with groups of Scrum Masters For status meetings with managers For retrospectives To help teams doing agile in a large company to share their stories with each other For Product Owner support groups, where they help each other with challenges For communities of practice to run their meetings


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Reading Take a look at this blog post to understand more about how to run a Lean Coffee³⁵ This blog post shares some visual notes from Lean Coffee sessions at a conference³⁶ A copy of these articles is included in Reading PDF³⁷. You can also see if there is a Lean Coffee in your city or start your own here: http://leancoffee.org³⁸

To run a Lean Coffee you need some sticky notes, markers and a timer. 1. Create a board with 3 columns: To do, In Progress, Done. 2. Ask everyone who attends to write down the topics they would like to discuss. One topic per sticky note. 3. Have each person briefly (30 seconds) read out their topic, and add a sentence of explanation if needed. 4. Now ask everyone to vote for the topics they most want to talk about. Prioritise the topic by the number of votes (most votes first). Put the sticky notes in the To do column on the board in order of priority. 5. Pick the first topic (highest priority) and move it into In Progress. Start a timer for an agreed amount of time (maybe 10 minutes), and start talking. 6. When the timer goes off, let the group decide if they would like to continue with this topic, or move on to the next topic. If they are ready to move on, move this topic to Done and move the next topic into In Progress.

Exercise For this week we’d like you to run a Lean Coffee session. You can decide who to invite and where to have it, within your organisation, team or wider community.

³⁵http://agilecoffee.com/leancoffee/ ³⁶http://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/11/lean-coffee-at-agiletd/ ³⁷http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF ³⁸http://leancoffee.org


Exercise Use this page to fill in your own notes from the Lean Coffee session. Try make the notes as visual as you can.

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Journal Write down in your journal what happens this week. See if you notice a difference in yourself or your team after running Lean Coffee. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 14: Bugs

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Week 14: Bugs

Bugs How do bugs fit into Scrum? Some teams add bugs to the product backlog and prioritise them along with the rest of the work, some fix them as soon as they are found, some postpone them to be fixed in a hardening sprint. Before discussing what the policy is for your team, consider the following: A bug represents something in the system that is broken. If it is not related to stories in the current sprint, it’s related to stories from a previous sprint. Assuming we work on features in priority order, that means a higher priority feature is broken or not working as needed. If the team postpone fixing bugs so they can ‘finish’ more stories they are skewing their velocity. If the Product Owner is using this velocity to plan, they will get an ugly surprise when they can’t get as much work done because there is a pile of bugs that need to be fixed at the end. If someone finds a bug today it is less costly and takes less time for us to fix it immediately. If we wait until the next sprint, someone has to write down exactly how to reproduce it. Then in the next sprint recreate it, so that it can be fixed, and then retest it. Because of this we’ve always favoured the following policy: A bug should be fixed as part of the story it is found on, even if it has nothing to do with that story. Just add an additional task on that story and only mark the story as done when all the bugs found are fixed. Don’t worry about sizing bugs. If that bug means the story won’t be completed this sprint, talk to the Product Owner. If the Product Owner insists the bug must be fixed before you release, the best time to fix it is now. If the Product Owner agrees you can ship the product without fixing the bug, then go ahead and ignore the bug. Close it as “Won’t fix” if it’s in your tracking system, so that everyone is clear on the decision. If the Product Owner wants it fixed later they need to add it to the backlog as a story for the next release to get it fixed. Wouldn’t it be nice if bugs were a non-issue?

Reading For this week’s reading take a look this blog post: Managing Bugs in Scrum and Agile Projects³⁹ A copy of this article is included in Reading PDF⁴⁰. ³⁹https://www.mitchlacey.com/blog/managing-bugs-in-scrum-and-agile-projects ⁴⁰http://www.growingagile.co.za/SMWorkbook/ReadingPDF

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Week 14: Bugs

Exercise Take a look at your bug queue or list of bugs. This might be in a defect tracking tool, in your product backlog, or in a spreadsheet somewhere. Now answer the following questions. You might want to do this with your team. What does your bug queue look like? Is it an ever growing list? Is it stagnant because people have stopped logging new ones? Is it nonexistent because you don’t have a process for bugs yet and you haven’t launched the product? . . . . . . . . How would your team like that queue to look? . . . . . . What would it take to change your queue from what it is now to how you would like it to look. Be creative and outlandish! Come up with at least 10 suggestions. Crazy ones like sabotaging the bug tracking tool are all allowed! . . . . . . . . . . Which of those ideas could you actually implement? What would it take to implement some of the others? What is holding you back? . . . . . . . . . .

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Week 14: Bugs

Journal Jot down any observation you make this week, pay particular attention to how bugs affect your team, Product Owner and anyone else. . . . . . . . . . . . . .


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Retrospective It is time to retrospect again. The focus is going to be on your work as a Scrum Master, over the last four weeks. Try to do this in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed and set aside about an hour. Feel free to browse through your journal entries to remind yourself of what you’ve done. Recall your intention from the previous retrospective. Now answer the following 3 questions: Did you manage to do your intention? . . . . . . . . . . . Was it worthwhile? . . . . . . . . . . . What did you learn? . . . . . . . . . . .


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Look at your journal entries for the last 4 weeks. For all the events that happened in the last 4 weeks, place them in one of the quadrants below.

Answer the following questions, look at the items in your quadrants for inspiration. How do you get your energy? . . . . . What could be scrapped without loss? . . . . . Where is courage needed? . .


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. . . What’s already working that you can build on? . . . . . What’s so important, you’d leave your comfort zone to make it happen? . . . . . What would a wise person whisper in your ear? . . . . . A small game is safe; a big game is meaningful, exciting. What’s your big game? . . . . . Questions from Deborah Hartmann Preuss. Now we would like you to pick an intention for the following 4 weeks and fill it in below:

Think about how you will know if this intention is working. What is a way of measuring if your intention is having the desired affect? Test your thinking by asking “How will I know if my


intention is not working?”. Write down your measurement thoughts below. . . . . . . . . . .


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Appendix

Growing Agile Online Courses We offer several online courses aimed at Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Agile Teams. If you are ready to get a taste of what our online courses are about sign up for our FREE five week Scrum Master⁴¹ or Product Owner⁴² email course. Our online courses are a little different to regular online video courses. We’ve applied the principles of Training From The Back of The Room to our online materials. That means each course comes with a workbook and exercises for you to do, as well as video’s to watch and techniques that you can use with your teams. Each activity is intended to deepen your knowledge of an area, so we suggest doing the course over a few weeks and taking the time to do all the exercises. Take a look at our offerings here http://www.growingagile.co.za/online-courses/⁴³. ⁴¹http://www.growingagile.co.za/new-sm-email-course/ ⁴²http://www.growingagile.co.za/new-po-email-course/ ⁴³http://www.growingagile.co.za/online-courses/

Growing Agile Books The Growing Agile Coach’s Guide Series This series provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, workbooks and activity instructions to run a number of workshops on each topic. The interactive workshops are all created using techniques from Training from the Back of the Room, to ensure participants are engaged and remember their learnings after the workshop. The series is available in a bundle on Leanpub⁴⁴, or you can purchase the books individually.

⁴⁴https://leanpub.com/b/coachsguide

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Growing Agile Books

Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum We have been training teams in Scrum for about three years. During this time we have spent many hours preparing training plans and creating workbooks, flipcharts and slides. This book will help you plan and deliver interactive, fun Scrum training for anything from a short workshop on a particular topic to a full two-day course. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum is available on Leanpub⁴⁵.

A Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements Our requirement workshops are aimed at different stakeholders ranging from business, to Product Owners and teams. This book is a collection of some of those workshop and can be used to help improve the way you think about and communicate agile requirements. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements is available on Leanpub⁴⁶.

Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Mastering Backlogs Often Product Owners can’t see the forest for the trees and there are so many items in their backlog and not enough hours in the day to groom it. We run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner’s actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Mastering Backlogs is available on Leanpub⁴⁷.

Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Release Planning We often hear people say “We’re agile, we don’t need a plan”! or even worse “We can’t plan”. This is just not true. We run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile release plans. We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and release burnups to help you explain to other’s how to use these methods effectively. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Release Planning is available on Leanpub⁴⁸.

A Coach’s Guide to Agile Testing If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally different to traditional testing.This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. It’s not just for testers. A key part of agile ⁴⁵https://leanpub.com/TrainingScrum ⁴⁶https://leanpub.com/AgileRequirements ⁴⁷https://leanpub.com/MasteringBacklogs ⁴⁸https://leanpub.com/ReleasePlanning

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Growing Agile Books

testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in the team. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Testing is available on Leanpub⁴⁹.

Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Facilitation It’s taken us several years to master the skill of facilitation, and it continues to amaze us how few people learn the skill, or even understand what it means. People spend much of their lives in meetings, and yet so many meetings lack facilitation. We hope the collection of tips and techniques in this book will inspire you to grow your own facilitation skills and improve the meetings in your organisation. Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Facilitation is available on Leanpub⁵⁰.

Other books by Growing Agile

Flow Do you have a never-ending to do list and not enough hours in the day? Imagine getting everything on your to do list done without stress or worrying. Imagine being twice as productive in half the time. We have over 30 proven tips and techniques to help you achieve a state of flow, where time stands still and productivity soars. With these tips you will deliver value to your customers sooner in practical and simple ways. You will also be happier and less stressed. Flow is available on Leanpub⁵¹. ⁴⁹https://leanpub.com/AgileTesting ⁵⁰https://leanpub.com/Facilitation ⁵¹https://leanpub.com/helpworktoflow

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Growing Agile Books

Collaboration Games Add an element of fun to your meetings or workshops using these 12 short games that teach principles of collaboration. Collaboration Games is available on Leanpub⁵².

Who is Agile in South Africa This book is based on the original Who Is Agile book, only this is a regional version for South Africa. It’s a collection of interviews with passionate South African agilists. Who is Agile in South Africa is available on Leanpub⁵³. ⁵²https://leanpub.com/CollaborationGamesToolbox ⁵³https://leanpub.com/WhoisagileSouthAfrica

About Growing Agile

At Growing Agile we help companies build great teams that create exceptional products. We are agile coaches passionate about helping you get the results you are looking for. We are based in Cape Town, South Africa, but work with clients from all over the world. We provide remote sessions for individuals or groups, as well as online courses for Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Teams. Find out more about us at www.growingagile.co.za. Our personal goal is to help influence a million people on their path to becoming agile coaches. Our books and videos are ways we can spread that influence further than what we can in person. We are also exploring new ways to do this. One of our latest projects is www.AgilePath.me. A community resource of links, courses, books, and ideas to help you find your own learning path as an agile coach. If you would like to stay in touch and hear about our new ventures, please sign up to our monthly newsletter⁵⁴.

⁵⁴http://eepurl.com/xVP6D

Scrum Master Work Book 1

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