Sanjay Saini

People may have talked about these things earlier and I would like to share my experience around it. This story is long dated back when I was working on a software product for a manufacturing domain client.

Flashback to 1995, Jeff and Ken had presented their paper at OOPSLA on Scrum. People recognizes it as one of the new ways of working. Fast forward to Feb 2001, no ski resort gathering and no Agile manifesto. People are trying different methods, frameworks and practices for improving the state of software industry. There is nothing called as Agile values and principles but people knows Scrum. In 2017, Scrum has become the de-facto standard of the Software development and has spread beyond the IT industry. It has become the way of working, the way of living life for professionals. I am a strong believer of Agile manifesto and has a high respect for the authors of it and for people who are practicing it in their day to day life. I have heard people using the Agile and Scrum word interchangeably such that whenever they are referring to Agile they are talking about Scrum and the vice versa. Recently I read a report which states that approx. 60% of the software organizations/projects claiming to be Agile were actually following Scrum. How about if we review the Agile values and principles and try to map them with Scrum framework, is there anything which Scrum doesn’t cover? Do you think that by following the rules of the game of Scrum we are complying with values and principles of Agile? Whenever Agile talks about ‘Working Software’ Scrum has ‘Increment’, ‘Business and Development team members should work together’ is referring to Scrum Team, a business representative (Product Owner) works closely with the Development Team, the stakeholders are invited in the regular Sprint Review. I am sure that I won’t have answer to all of them but there are people who are living it day in day out and will be happy to help us. Once you are done with Agile, start the same exercise with Lean principles. Read the Scrum guide a few times, close your eyes, take a deep breath and think about yourself, your team, your organization, the world and the working environment around you, can Scrum help you in improving it? Can Scrum help you in becoming a better professional, a better human being, creating a better world for future generations. The point I am trying to emphasize is that with the eleven essentials elements of Scrum, its five values and other foundation blocks, imagine a world where Scrum has become the reference way of working, other methods, frameworks, philosophies is a subset of it. People have never heard about those four values and twelve principles but are religiously following Scrum, will they be able to delight their customers with creative products, always ahead of their competitors, will have happy and productive work force? With Scrum, will we be able to achieve what those seventeen great minds were thinking about the IT world at the ski resort at Utah in Feb’ 2001?

Yes, you read it right, it was really challenging for me, and may be other PSTs have the same or different experience. A couple of times I thought about quitting it but because of some or the other reasons I continued. This article is an attempt of sharing my journey, may be useful to you before you embark on it. It all started in 2009-2010 when I was working in a manufacturing domain project for a US based client. The project was to migrate the entire shop-floor system built into FoxPro, PowerBuilder, Sybase etc. into .NET and SQL Server. The system was consisting of multiple small applications. We started migrating them one-by-one and none (or mostly) of the delivery was more than one calendar month. During that time, I experienced the Iterative and Incremental delivery without knowing anything about Agile, Scrum etc. We were mixing up a lot of traditional approach and practices within this new approach. I can still remember that our organization was going for CMMi assessment and how frustrating it was justifying our approach to the auditors. In 2011, I joined another organization, they were launching a new product where the teams were distributed across multiple locations and were religiously following Scrum. Some of the strongest member of Scrum.org community were working along with the teams. I can remember – Rich Visotcky, Eric Weber, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy, Gary Pedretti, Andrew Saeman to name a few. All our team members in India went through the Scrum training – Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) conducted by Adam Cogan. I still think it as one of the best training so far, I have ever had, thanks to Adam Cogan and his team. Later on, I moved to Scrum Master role and attended the two days Professional Scrum Master (PSM) course conducted by Phani Bhushan. I worked as a Scrum Master for 4+ years and later on was asked to take up the role of Product Owner. I started looking for a Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) training but didn’t find any in India. I was really enjoying the new ways of working but with the change in leadership we started moving away from the Agile/Scrum way towards the more plan driven approach. I didn’t like it so I resigned from the organization. I noticed that Agile coach, consultant and trainers were in demand as compared to the traditional management position. Some of my friends who were really good Scrum Masters had already been moved to the new role so I started exploring it. Since I was already a regular member of Scrum.org Forums so I started looking at how to become a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST). There was a Train the Trainer class coming up in Bangalore, taught by Steve Porter. I applied for it and went through the review process with Daphne Harris. I read Scrum guide so many times that every single line was on the tip of my tongue. After getting the go-ahead from her, I attended the class. Since we were already doing a lot of it in our day-to-day work, the class went well. I met with some like-minded people – Benjamin Seidler, Jacob Creech, Nagesh Sharma to name a few of them. The evaluation process on third day went well and Steve gave me go ahead for the next step. The next challenge was PSM III with a score of 95%. I made the attempt and was quite sure that I will be able to pass but may or may not get the required 95%. I scored 88%, not bad but not good enough to move to the next level. I received some really good feedback from Steve especially around using the Scrum framework terminology and the self-organization concepts. It was an “Inspection” and “Adaption” opportunity for me. I took time (2-3 months) to read all recommended books from Scrum.org. It was a difficult time, while in office or at home, the only thing which was going in my mind was about PSM III. I used to read everything related to Scrum especially the case studies and real-life scenarios. I used to correct people on the Scrum terminology being used by them in their project and the general response was “Does it really matter?” It does, without the new terminology you may not be able to feel the change Scrum is trying to bring to you. Sometimes I felt that I am on a mission to make Scrum the way of living life. Daphne was kind enough to give me another free attempt. I made the second attempt and was lucky enough to pass with 95%. Now the biggest challenge, the peer review. I went ahead for the peer review immediately without much preparation. There were too many technical issues – my laptop didn’t work, I started using my phone, it fell down during the very first minutes. The audio and video quality were not so great. And my response to most of the questions was not good enough, as expected I didn’t get the go ahead. Again, it was an “Inspection” and “Adaption” opportunity for me, I reviewed the peer review recording and listened the feedback given by the review panel. It helped me in acknowledging that I have to understand the difference between coaching and training. I did really good as a coach but needed improvement in my teaching style. Daphne recommended me the book “Training from the Back of the Room” by Sharon L Bowman. I met with Hiren Doshi, Nagesh Sharma, Naveen Kumar Singh, they gave me some tips and confidence. Looking at my past peer review experience, Steve recommended to do the next peer review in-person during the Agile India. I travelled to Bangalore and had the in-person session. It went well, I answered very well, at-least I thought so. Although it was better, it was not quite good enough yet and was recommend to do co-teaching with existing PSTs. There were not many courses happening in India so I was ready to go outside for co-teaching. Naveen and Nagesh came to rescue and I did co-teaching with them in their classes. It helped me in improving my teaching style, how to keep the students engaged, be concise while answering and most importantly understanding the Professionalism required to be a Scrum.org trainer. Based upon their feedback to Scrum.org, finally the much-awaited email from Daphne came, I was inducted in the PST community. The journey has been started and I am enjoying it. I am really thankful to everyone who helped and supported me during this journey, I may have missed some names but your contribution cannot be forgotten. I am happy to support people who would like to join the PST community.

People in the Agile community must have heard or have came across this white paper multiple times. We have been preaching about it in our training classes but I am not sure how many of Agile community members have actually read it thoroughly. The paper was published in Jan 1986 issue of HBR and is very much valid even today. The approach published in the paper focus on six characteristics which fits together as a jigsaw puzzle. The concept was to move away from the “relay race” approach and move towards the “rugby” approach. In a traditional approach a product development moves like a “relay-race” where one group passing the baton to the next group. However, in a “rugby”, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field. One of the most often used Agile framework i.e. Scrum is inspired by this paper. This article is an attempt to provide a refresher to people who are still struggling with understanding the Scrum framework foundation blocks. Built-in instability – In a traditional approach people are very possessive about the work plan, monitoring and controlling the day to day activities for others. The new approach talks about providing a broad challenging goal or a strategic direction to the team while allowing them to find out their approach themselves. In Scrum, a Sprint is an agreement between the management and the Development Team. Product Owner along with management and stakeholders decides what next the Scrum team should work while giving them the flexibility of how they work. Once the Sprint Goal has been agreed upon then it’s up to the Development Team to find out how they are going to achieve it by planning their work in the Sprint Backlog. Self-organizing project teams – A group possesses a self-organizing capability when it exhibits three conditions – Autonomy - It is very well proven that people take commitments made by them more seriously than someone else making it on behalf of them. Scrum talks about the self-organizing Development Team so that they are making their decision themselves and no one outside the team is directing them for their day to day work. Self-organization happens with a boundary and there are different levels of it. A self-organized Development Team is not allowed to change the banking business to an e-commerce. The Sprint creates a boundary and the Sprint goal allows the Development Team to self-organize. Self-transcendence – As per wiki “it is a personality trait associated with spiritual ideas such as considering oneself as an integral part of the universe”. The five Scrum values i.e. Commitment, Focus, Respect, Courage and Openness are a way to spirituality of professionalism, to be a better human being. This includes following a path of regular Inspection and Adaption while keeping an eye on the bigger goal. Scrum is based upon the empirical process theory and it has five events for inspection and adaption with utmost transparency. Cross-fertilization – As per the original paper “A project team consisting of members with varying functional specializations, thought processes, and behaviour patterns carries out new product development”. Scrum recommends the cross functional Development Team so that they have all the skills required for delivering a Done Increment every Sprint. There are no sub-teams or roles, all of them are called Developers. Respecting to the Scrum values the team members are Open for learning new skills. Overlapping Development Phases – In the traditional “relay-race” approach a bottleneck in one phase can slow or even halt the entire development process. While under the “rugby” approach the phases overlap considerably, which enables the group to absorb the vibration or noise generated throughout the development process. Scrum teams follow the overlapping approach wherein team members working on Product Backlog Items, each at a different lifecycle stage overlapping with each other. It enables shared responsibilities and cooperation, sharpens a problem-solving focus, encourages initiative taking and develops diversified skills. Working in an overlapping development phases environment requires cross functional team and it does away with traditional notions about division of labour. Multilearning – The two-dimensional learning (1) multiple levels i.e. individual, group and corporate and (b) across multiple functions is referred as Multilearning. Are we building the right product? Is it aligned with the vision? Are our customers going to buy it? Every Sprint in Scrum is a learning opportunity where-in the individual, team, and groups get together and learn about the market, users and the product they are developing. Sprint Retrospective is a good opportunity for learning about the improvements required in people, processes, working agreement, engineering practices etc. for delivering better and faster value to customer and organization. Subtle Control – The emphasis is on “self-control” and “control through peer pressure” which collective is called as “subtle control”. Scrum teams are self-organized but they are not un-controlled. Scrum provides enough checkpoints to prevent instability, ambiguity and chaos while maintaining the creativity and productivity. All events in the Scrum framework works as a checkpoint for its players e.g. Daily Scrum is an event where the Development Team inspect their progress towards the Sprint goal and adapts their Sprint Backlog accordingly. Similarly, Sprint Review is for inspecting the Increment and based upon the feedback from the stakeholders adapting the Product Backlog. Organizational transfer of learning - The drive to accumulate knowledge across levels and functions is only one aspect of learning, other part is project members transferring their learning to others outside the group. Daily Scrum and Sprint Retrospective are the event where Scrum team members share their knowledge and learning with each other. During the Sprint Review the Scrum team share their knowledge, learning and challenges faced with stakeholders outside their group. The source and inspiration for this article is https://scrumguides.org and the HBR paper.