Change Your Scrum Master now! Part 1

No, not forever of course.

Hello, my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct,

Recently I supported a team that was part of an Agile Release Train (ART). ART is a construct from SAFe. So there was a need for support during the PI Planning. My first post was about the SAFe implementation of my former project. I agreed and just were excited to see another implementation of SAFe.

Ok, see there, nothing new. The agenda we already knew from our PI Plannings. Welcome Words, Business Updates, and then the breakouts. The breakouts are used within the PI Planning to come up with a plan, identify risks and dependencies to other teams in the ART. So far so good the breakouts started and I joined the team I was supporting. Introduction round from my side and what I expect from the planning session.

Of course, I had some calls before to get to know the PO and see how the way of working goes. During the calls, I already identified one big anti-pattern. Let’s see whether you can identify it, it’s a pretty simple one. So the planning session started, some people take part, the others did not, and you directly get the dynamics in the team. Who is more motivated, who is an introvert, who is an extrovert? So as the planning progress the team and PO talk about the items and estimate them. We thought about anything we had stories for concepts, we were prepared for the implementation stories and evaluation stories were also planned. The tasks were estimated by the people that were assigned to the task afterward. For example, the colleague who can do the implementation estimated his tasks. And the others their tasks. We identified the dependencies between those. However, we only found a few external dependencies. So far so good.

As we estimated all the stories that were part of planned Epics in this PI, we started to plan our sprints. During the estimation we assigned each task to the person that will work on that, so we can plan efficiently for every member of the team. In the end, we went through filters on the board to see that each and everyone has something to do in each of the 4 sprints.

We used two days to plan and discuss the needed Epics and Stories. So far so good I was impressed that we were able to stay slightly above our velocity. The impression comes from the fact that this team always overcommitted with nearly x4 on work to do during the last PIs. The average of delivered points was somewhere about 100 points per sprint. The average of committed points in the last PI was somewhere about 400 points per sprint. First win for today I thought! We continued with this plan. As we thought to not overcommitting ourselves is the first adjustment we could do directly.

Every team presented their plan and we proceeded to the confidence vote. During the confidence vote, our team had 2 voices for “likely to fail” and 4 voices for “not sure”. At this point I was skeptical. As this was a 10th PI Planning. Overcommitting was not an issue in the last plannings, how come that they think now differently? Additionally, we have to say, that the overcommitting before also were in the pipeline with 140 points left. So the first sprint would start with somewhere 240 points. And this pile will be shifted until the end. Nevertheless, in total, we would have around 400 points and we still had reserved two unplanned sprints for buffer. We still have a better situation than the last PI Plannings. I’m very proud of the two people who stood up and said they weren’t convinced we could do it. Replanning has to be done so it was, this time without me. I am sure that those people replanned and reduced the scope to get a realistic plan. Second win for today!

Anyway besides these two wins of the day the team still has issues with the planning and their way of working. If you can find them in the description above then share them in the comments. I will describe the defects in the way of working in another post. I will continue to work with this PO and the team.

I think we as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should have an understanding of the tools we use. Frameworks might be helpful, but by knowing why we are doing some events like Review, Daily Standup, or the most hated by all ”Retrospectives”, we can achieve much more. I will continue writing about the so-called tools and why they exist and what problems do they solve.

Hello, my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct.