I’d have to admit that I have been in a slump lately. Work was getting me down. The Scrum Team in our local office has been doing great. However, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle to bring agile practices to the rest of our organization which is heavily entrenched in waterfall and traditional thinking. Things were seeming stale. I needed something to pick me up and get me back on track as a Scrum evangelist.
One of the things I love about Scrum is that it treats team members like adults. Teams, not managers, decide what work they do in each Sprint and how to estimate it. Teams decide how to adapt their processes to maximize their efforts. Teams decide who the best person is to accept a task. Teams decide what the common goal is and they stay focused on it until it is achieved. We all get to act like grown-ups again. We all have a stake in the outcome of our process and we all have input into how we achieve our goals. However, along with this flexibility comes responsibility; responsibility to the Team and to the Product Owner to deliver value and quality. For all of this to occur, an organization must have a culture that not only supports this kind of thinking, but also thrives on it. The organization must foster a culture that respects individuals as intelligent adults who have a valuable set of skills.
We’ve all been there before, The Useless Meeting. They come in many shapes and forms but share one common element: the unproductive waste of time. Nothing can be more damaging to an agile team than being interrupted from their valuable work to attend one of these sucking voids.
Recently, our Scrum Team had an otherwise productive Sprint interrupted by just such a meeting. We were halfway through our Sprint when we received a Friday afternoon email about a mandatory all-hands offsite meeting of our entire group. Our V.P. had decided that the next Wednesday, we would all gather in Denver to discuss business strategy for the upcoming year. Yes…our development team was ecstatic to attend, knowing full well it was going to be chock-full of endless PowerPoints with lots of charts and numbers.
I am the ScrumMaster on our current project, and this morning I had to miss our Daily Scrum meeting. Our lead architect and I were invited to participate in a local Technology Incubator meeting that we felt was very important to our office’s growth and development. When we returned to the office, the Team was hard at work diligently tackling the tasks on our current Sprint Backlog. I visited each Team member and asked “Did you guys do a Scrum today?” After some foot shifting, the general answer was “Um…no.” I think they knew what was coming next. “So why didn’t you Scrum?” “Well, you and Dave weren’t here.” So…what’s wrong with this picture?
