If scrum only had a heart

Mar-4-2008

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

I’ve heard people say that scrum teams don’t have a heart. We plow through backlogs with our heads down. We finish a project. We start another and plow through the next backlog. Story, plan, task, sprint, demo, retrospect, repeat. Story, plan, task, sprint, demo, retrospect, repeat. Where’s the heart? When do scrum teams look beyond these super focused iteration based tasks and think about innovation. I agree with this assessment. I think that agile and scrum teams can get stuck in this rut. Well, we’ve all heard about the Google 20%…20% of time spent working on innovation. I like that, but can most organizations really afford 20% of our time to do free thinking? Probably not, we’re not all making billions of dollars like Google. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something about this dilemma. Personally, I like something like a hackfest or hackathon. Maybe after 6 weeks of focused development, your team gets a week to do some focused play. A one week iteration…tell us what you’re going to work on…be innovative, do something cool and commit to it. At the end of the week, same old same old…do a review. Everyone DEMONSTRATES their cool idea. Not a diagram, not a slideshow…demo something you can show us.

I think that unless you’re completely dominant in your market space, you need to be doing something like this to keep you innovative and on the competitive edge. It’s the old innovation curves again. You want to always be anticipating or defining what the next thing is. If you don’t, you slide down the laggard side of the innovation curve and risk becoming irrelevant. If you slide down that curve, it’s very difficult to get back up to that next innovation curve. So, give your teams time to innovate…it’s good for your organization’s future, it’s good for your customers, and it’s good for the professional growth and health of your development teams.