Change Your Scrum Master now! Part 2

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).

I already wrote about the team in the Part 1.

What were the defects or anti-patterns in the team. To be fair there were a lot.

Maybe you will disagree, but one big thing that I spotted right away. Is that the team don’t really focused on the story, but tasks. So the story was splitted into 4 or 5 other stories.

At the end we had a lot of concept, implementation and test stories. So hello little waterfall. However this might be a practice, but here I would like to see that the people create subtasks and focus on the value to deliver. Instead they focused completely on their tasks. The estimations were made by the persons who at the end had to implement those tasks. That was really awkward to see such planning. We found a lot of internal dependencies would be a surprise if concept, implementation and test stories that were derived from one story would not have any dependency to each other, however we found non external.

So we had now the estimations for all our stories that should be done in the actual PI. We started with the planning. The day before I had a call with the PO and we discussed the way of working. It was clear that PO is doing a lot of micromanaging. We started to plan the sprints. We had a look on the presence of the developers. We then tried to fill up the developers instead of taking the most important issues. I tried to speak up here and tried to make clear that this is not a good practice not only for the “team” but also for the PO. As he was micromanaging people and this took a lot of time to plan the sprints. The answer was nice and clear, “We always do it this way”. Ok, whatever you are comfortable with, but this is horrible.

One more thing was the team overcommitted every sprint in the past. So I tried to land somewhere at around 100 story points. The average committed story points in the last sprints were 400, the delivered 100. So it was still a good win to get near to the delivered points. The planning continued and some developers from our team voted with a bad score. They were sceptical that our team will run the sprint successfully. I was impressed of that, because they didn’t really care about the last sprints, but now.

Even we had a better planning, it was not perfect and still had a lot of issues, but we were able to reduce the scope once more. I am pretty sure they were able to deliver the stories.

However I will continue to work with this 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.