death by scrum meeting agile2010

Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC

Pete BehrensAgile Leadership Coach

@petebehrenstrailridgeconsulting.com

Death by Scrum Meeting @ Agile2010

Friday, August 13, 2010


Stories and pictures from around the US and more...Friday, August 13, 2010


What challenges are you facing?



Its about leadership

of people

and environments

P = (p,e)Derby, 2009

Its not about meetings...



The JourneyFocus Visualize Engage



FocusContext Matters



Why was Scrum created?



Teams & Timeboxes

Focus & Feedback



Scru

m M

eetin

gs

Sprint Planning

Sprint Review

Daily Scrum

Sprint Retrospective

Release Planning



Does Scrum have too many meetings?



Meetings are boring and ineffective

They drive the culture of an organization

Lencioni doesnt think there are too many meetings, but...



They lack contextor focus

Meetings are ineffective



StrategicQuarterly

TacticalBi-weekly

Daily

Focus/FrequencyLencionis

recommendation



Scru

m M

eetin

gs

Sprint Planning

Sprint Review

Daily Scrum


Release PlanningStrategicQuarterly

TacticalBi-weekly

Daily

Focus/Frequency Meeting

Looks alot like Scrum...



0

4

8

12

16

1 2 3 4

hour

s

Sprint Length (in weeks)

Planning

Review

Retrospective

Daily Scrum

Most complaints come from too much time...

10%

Keep meeting time under 10%



0

4

8

12

16

1 2 3 4

hour

s

Sprint Length (in weeks)

PlanningReviewRetrospectiveDaily Scrum

Sprint Meeting Time

10%

In order to reduce sprint meeting times and increase meeting effectiveness, a number of things need to be addressed - Strategy, Visualization and Engagement. Each of these will be addressed in this presentation.



Sprint Planning

Sprint Review

Daily Scrum


Release Planning

Scru

m M

eetin

gsStrategicQuarterly

TacticalBi-weekly

Daily 5-15 min

15-30 min

30-60 min

60-120 min

120-240 min

Meeting DurationFocus/Frequency



Sprint Planning

Sprint Review

Daily Scrum


Release Planning

Scru

m M

eetin

gs

5-15 min

15-30 min

30-60 min

60-120 min

120-240 min

Meeting Duration

30-60 min

60-120 min

60-120 min

240-960 min

0 minS*

*t fa

lls d

own

When we skip strategy, everything falls apart



Story: The 1 hour daily

With a two week release cycle, often teams are just focused on the immediate work. In this case, it turned every day into a 1 hour daily meeting. Create a quarterly release cycle to address strategy, which will focus each sprint more clearly. Use the sprint planning to address the tactical, and only the daily for immediate coordination issues.



Story: The stealth release

Even with a 3 year development release, as in the case of this medical device company, create quarterly release milestones for focus and feedback. Here they are engaging actual physicians, clinicians and IT administrators in a milestone internal release.



Story: Creating a rhythm

Create a daily, sprint and release rhythm to keep the flow, focus and feedback. In this case, Salesforce.com has created a seasonal release timeline with monthly corporate sprint cycles and 2 week team sprint cycles. They have met release deadlines for 3 straight years.



FocusConclusion: Meeting Context Matters

Meetings are critical to collaboration/coordination of teams focusing on work in short productive sprints

Spend more time on strategy every quarter

If Sprint and Daily meetings are long - typically indicates that strategy was not addressed properly



Why is strategy so hard and often left out?

Because its not hard-wired



VisualizeOur potential is just being realized



Prefrontal CortexMemorizing

UnderstandingDecidingRecalling

Inhibiting

PFC

Small

LimitedHungry

The PFC is a relatively new development in the brain. It is the primary thinking part of our brain. Unfortunately, it is very small and can only hold about 4 items at a time. To do more complex thinking, memory swapping and complex maps allow it to process more. However, this uses a lot of energy within the brain and degrades throughout the day of using it.



Visual Cortex

EfficientPowerfulEvolved

VCStore, recall, linkImages

We think in pictures

Helper

The VC is one of the most powerful elements of our brain and can help our PFC. The brain stores either visual or auditory maps - however the auditory maps are also relatively new to language development and therefore much less powerful. In order to help our thinking, we must do more to incorporate the visual cortex to help people see the space we are working in.



Problems vs. Solutions

Problems are hard-wired

Solutions are not



Thinking inside the

box

Known problems

Current solutions

Our brain only stores what we have seen and created. Therefore, when we think, we mostly think about things we have seen before or know about. This is what we call thinking inside the box. To create new solutions, it requires our PFC to form new ideas from existing ones.



New Solutions Must be

Envisioned

This depicts the eyes seeing a picture, using the VC to visualize it in the brain, then through the PFC, moving the pieces around to form new configurations. Doing this almost always engages the visual cortex. The more we can external engage the visual cortext in meetings will help our teams think outside the box.



Do you play planning poker?

Why? When?



Planning poker relies primarily on the auditory brain

While Planning Poker is an excellent way to engage team members in conversation around a story, they tend to limit the visual cortex. Not being able to see the stories in context of each other creates silod thinking. We will see other ways to visualize story points.



Do you use User Stories?

User Stories are another primarily auditory communication that can invoke the visual cortex.

However, the noise involved in all of the other words within the User Story tend to obscure the picture and it looks like static.

One technique is to highlight key words or phrases to separate the key points from the noise to help the brain visualize it more clearly.



Use titles and underline words in User Stories.



Categorize and Color Backlogs

To help the PFC process more easily, categorize the backlog in themes. Color coding themes also helps the brain visually distinguish work, especially when cards are moved around for sizing and prioritization. Here you see that only titles are used - no user stories. This is a quarterly strategy session output - a release backlog.



Stories

Roles

Areas

ReleaseGoal

Before the quarterly strategy release planning session...

Before their quarterly release strategy session, they had a release goal and some proposed User Stories for the roles and product areas.



Stories

AcceptanceCriteria

Roles

Spikes

After a quarterly strategy release planning session...

Working as a team, they discussed the known stories, created and split other stories, discussed acceptance criteria, and filled in all of the holes in their knowledge with spikes to go research. This was a strategy session for one quarter of their 3 year product release. In addition, roles and product areas are visualized in a grid to help isolate functionality and usability.



Visualize Size

A more effective visualization approach to estimating size is to use an affinity-based estimation technique. Just arrange backlog items smallest to largest, then bucket into story points. The team does this collaboratively moving them around a table or on a wall.



Visualize Time

This is a 6 month release cycle with multiple themes represented. Each story has been estimated and prioritized. The dates are only approximations, but will be validated and negotiated through actual velocity.



Visualize Time

Another time visualization with various themes represented. In this case, they have separated what their two quarter goals are and will track accordingly.



Visualize Assignments



Visualize Goals



Visualize Dependencies



Visualize Strategy

To support their seasonal release rhythm, Salesforce.com has a multi-team (30-60 teams) coordinate all of their strategy release sessions together. This helps identify shared goals, collaboration and dependencies across teams and product areas.



Visualize Dependencies

Here is a picture of evaluating some of the technical dependencies between teams.



VisualizeConclusion: In order to run effective meetings, visualize as much as possible to help people see new solutions



EngageUnleash the power of the organization



Organizational PatternsAll organizations have communication patterns based on their structures - roles, responsibilities, and environments. This chart shows communication of a development process - brighter red is more central in communication.

In this case, there are two patterns present which are limiting effectiveness - the number of roles is large and the manager roles are central in the communication path.

Through changing the structure of the organization, we can impact their effectiveness in productivity and meetings.



0

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Harrison, 2004

% C

omm

unic

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# Organization Roles

Roles and communication

Because there are so many roles in this organization, their communication saturation is very low - this measures the actual role-to-role communication versus their potential. To increase communication, and thus meeting effectiveness, they need to reduce their roles and re-locate their producer-type roles into the center of the communication.



Team StructureHere is another communication map from a different company. In this case the number of roles is much less and the developer is at the center of the communication, but there is still a very limited communication saturation.

In this case, team structure was central to their communication. As this team was modeled, each developer was responsible for a different product set. There was very little shared development, learning or growing within the organization.



0

20

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80

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Harrison, 2004

% C

omm

unic

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n Sa

tura

tion

# Organization Roles

Reducing roles increases communication

Through some team and product focus restructuring, the team was able to not only increase their communication saturation as shown in this picture, but also increase their productivity and quality. In this case, they were formed into two Scrum teams which funneled multiple product backlogs into their work queue.



0

21

42

63

84

105

35

79

11

13

15

Team Communication

Cut the team in half

Cut

com

m. b

y 5x

In order to increase effectiveness on a team, and therefore make meetings more effective, team size and the number of roles in an organization is critical. By reducing a team in half, you can reduce the number of communication paths by a factor of 5. Smaller teams are just more efficient, they are much more efficient.



Team Size and Distribution

Many companies leverage offshore development. However, one of the strongest at this is McKinsey & Company as presented through two reports at Agile 2009. In one case, they reduced onshore-offshore team size from 9 to an onshore team of 3 with improved productivity. In another case, they restructured their support and architecture organizations into a Scrum team to reduce support costs by a factor of 4.



Visual Sprint Planning

This team uses whiteboard walls to fully immerse into their sprint planning. After printing out their User Stories from Rally, they post them on the wall and then begin to discuss, diagram, split, share, write tasks, communicate, etc. After all of that is complete, they bring in their laptops and write the tasks back in Rally. Sprint planning in less than an hour.



Through using themes and stores represented on cards, the team is fully engaged in a visual release planning session. It is through this hands on approach that begins to transition the ownership of the release from management to the team members. The team will identify all stories within a theme, size and prioritize them visually.

Visual Release Planning



Viasually Engaged

Teams are more engaged when there is a visual representation of their work. When teams are engaged, they share more ownership and responsibility in the result. To transfer ownership from managers and ScrumMasters to team members, give the team something to hold do and own.



Team Immersion Visual & Engaged

Wireless Generation has one of the best team and meeting environments available. Their office space is a warehouse-like open shell with team pods throughout. Each team pod has their visual release and sprint backlogs, space for the team members to work, and space for the team members to hold ALL of their meetings. Environments help make or break meeting effectiveness.



EngageConclusion: Evaluate Organization and Team Patterns to

effect their performance and meeting effectiveness

In each of these cases, the organizational and team structures played a key role in a teams ability to be effective in delivering value. This is directly impacted by their meeting effectiveness. So when looking at meeting effectiveness, it is necessary to look beyond the meeting behaviors.



Summary

To run effective meetings which drive productive and effective teams, separate the strategic and tactical context and create a quarterly strategic planning session.Visualize the work as much as possible to help the team foster new thinking and new solutions. Visualization also helps speed up the meeting.Finally, evaluate the organizational patterns of roles and team structures to create effective teams which can communicate, collaborate and engage.



Thank you

Pete Behrens@petebehrens

[email protected]


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