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Agile

Who is a Scrum Master?

A common question, who is a scrum master. It is always advisable to refer the scrum guide and understand about scrum master. A scrum master is one who –

  • Establishes scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide
  • Accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness
  • Serves the Scrum Team and the larger organization
  • Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality
  • Helping the Scrum Team focus on creating high-value Increments that meet the Definition of Done
  • Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team’s progress
  • Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.

Source – Scrum Guide 2020

Tip – If you are new to scrum and reading this, we encourage you to read the Scrum Guide thoroughly. This will give you a good understanding of Scrum.

As a servant leader, a scrum master serves the scrum team, product owner and the organization. Let’s understand a bit in detail the roles and responsibilities of a scrum master towards these teams –

For the Scrum Team:

● Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality;

● Helping the Scrum Team focus on creating high-value Increments that meet the Definition of Done;

● Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team’s progress

● Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.

For the Product Team:

● Helping find techniques for effective Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management;

● Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items;

● Helping establish empirical product planning for a complex environment;

● Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.

For the Organization:

● Leading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;

● Planning and advising Scrum implementations within the organization;

● Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact an empirical approach for complex work;

● Removing barriers between stakeholders and Scrum Teams

Summary

A Scrum Master plays a key role as this person ensures the right implementation of scrum framework, coaches the team, remove impediments for improving team’s effectiveness.

Agile , scrum

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a framework built with a purpose to generate value to the people, teams and organizations following it. It is not prescriptive which gives the liberty to the users to introduce various processes, techniques and methods within the framework.

History of Scrum

In the year 2010, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland created the scrum guide. A revised version was published in 2017. In the year 2020, another version of scrum guide was published.

What is Scrum Theory?

Foundation of Scrum stands on 2 concepts – (1) Empiricism and (2) Lean Thinking. Empiricism states that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is observed. Lean thinking reduces waste and focuses on the essentials.

Refer – Scrum Guide 2020, Page 3

Scrum Events

There are 5 Scrum events –

  • The Sprint – It is the heartbeat of Scrum. Fixed length event – Can range from a week to a month. The Sprint is a container for all other events. Each event in Scrum is a formal opportunity to inspect and adapt Scrum artifacts. These events are specifically designed to enable the transparency required.
  • Sprint Planning – Backlog prioritization and identifying what is of value
  • Daily Scrum – Time boxed meeting of team members to focus on the goal. 
  • Sprint Review – Demonstration of the work completed by the team to the stakeholders
  • Sprint Retrospective – Reflecting on the sprint – what went well, what can continue and what can be improved.

Scrum combines four formal events for inspection and adaptation within a containing event, the Sprint.

Scrum Artifacts

There are three formal artifacts in scrum –

  • Product back log – List of items required for the overall product
  • Sprint backlog – List of items specific for the sprint
  • Product increment -It contains all the backlog items completed in the current sprint and prior sprints.

Scrum Team

The Scrum Team consists of –

  • Scrum Master – The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. They do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, both within the Scrum Team and the organization.
  • Product Owner – The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.
  • Developers – Developers are the people in the Scrum Team that are committed to creating any aspect of a usable Increment each Sprint.

Conclusion

Overall, Scrum is an extremely popular framework of agile. Do note that Scrum is one of the framework in agile and falls under the agile umbrella. Scrum has 5 events, 3 artifacts and scrum team. Scrum is easy to understand and difficult to master, this is a common phrase and one will realize and understand scrum better as they move on the scrum journey.

Learn about agile scaling frameworks- What are the agile scaling frameworks?

Agile

What is agile coaching

Agile coaching is coaching on agile by an agile coach usually for a certain period. Normally for every coaching you need a coach and a coachee, coach provide the training and coachee receives the training. You would have heard of various coaches i.e life coaches and football coaches. Coaching is working with people. Agile coaching can be done for people, team or organization.

To understand about agile coaching, it’s important to know who is an agile coach and what does an agile coach do?

Agile Coaching comprises of 2 words – Agile and Coaching. According to Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley in their book “Agile Coaching”, Agile coaching is understanding the situation, the values underlying Agile software development, and how the two can combine. There is no ready-made prescription for agile coaching as scenarios vary and coaching is done according to the situation. The Agile Coach can be  internal, external individuals who can play this role.

Agile

What is Kanban in agile?

Closely connected to Lean, Kanban is the lightest of the Agile frameworks. It is an incremental, evolutionary change for technology development/operations organizations. Kanban is all about visualizing the work, limiting work in progress, and maximizing flow.

Origin of Kanban

Kanban is not a new concept; it has been used by the manufacturing units since 1940. Toyota, the famous car company in Japan developed Kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency. It is a scheduling system built for Just in Time manufacturing.

Based on this concept, Kanban was adopted by the knowledge work organizations. In 2011, David J. Anderson framed the Kanban method as a method to incremental, evolutionary process.

4 principles of Kanban –

  • Start with what you do now
  • Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
  • Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles
  • Encourage acts of leadership at all levels in your organization

6 practices of Kanban –

  1. Visualize (the work, workflow and business risks)
  2. Limit WIP
  3. Manage Flow
  4. Make Process Explicit
  5. Implement Feedback Loops
  6. Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally (using models & the scientific method)

PMO

Is PMO really required?

The term “PMO” has a wider usage, I ‘ll be more specific here, the context of PMO is related to (Project/Program Management) Office. It’s a difficult question to read when I was working as a PMO. I was asked by business analysts/project managers, why do we need a PMO? What job you actually do? It was definitely frustrating and the answer I used to tell them was the word “value”. A PMO adds value to the project/program driven organization. It’s not easy to explain individuals the value a PMO brings, hence in this article will attempt to add the list of values, a PMO offers. The list may vary from organization to organization based on how the PMO function was set-up.

Before we move to the value/benefits, let’s understand about the PMO definition and objectives

Definition of a PMO –

A PMO is a function is an organization to drive the standardization of tools & processes for project/program delivery.

Objective of a PMO –

To provide transparency and visibility of projects/program by implementing Tools & Standards. PMO shares the single source of truth by sharing this information with senior management for them to take required action.

List of values/benefits of PMO

Divided the values/benefits into two categories – Strategic & Tactical

Strategic benefits of a PMO

  1. Standardization of tools and processes
  2. Transparency and Visibility
  3. Improved probability of successful outcomes
  4. Build confidence of Senior Management

Tactical benefits of a PMO

  1. Ad-hoc support to Senior Management
  2. Data collection and consolidation exercise
  3. Ensuring internal deadlines are met (part of the organization requirement)

Summarize –

At times, many fails to understand the strategic benefits offered by a PMO function. The reason is the role description is not clear and focus on tactical scope of work. If you are working as a PMO or aspiring to move towards a PMO journey, do understand the strategic benefits and analyze the strategic benefits which you/team has been offering. In case, you are more focused on tactical work, start thinking of being strategic and identify opportunities/initiatives in your organization for this purpose. If a PMO function exists in an organization, the foundation behind the set-up is to add value to the overall organization. You as an PMO are adding value on this journey. Next time, if anyone ask you this question “ Is PMO really required” – you know what to answer.