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Coach & Scrum Master (Scrum Master (Schedule (Situation: Team…
Coach & Scrum Master
Scrum Master
Schedule
Situation: Team struggling with availability for Sprint Planning (Mondays) and Sprint Reviews, resulting in making too many assumptions about user stories entering the sprint. Sprint reviews not well attended and not getting feedback and engagement from the business.
Actions: Suggested revision to the calendar/schedule - move to Wed - Tuesday
Results: More team available for Sprint Planning resulting in a wider shared understanding of the purpose of the sprint - goals and user story clarification
Sprint review: development team morale went up as more people took an active interest in the outcome of the sprint. Company as a whole were able to provide feedback and answers to "are we building the right thing?"
Sprint Length
Situation: Early in Scrum adoption stories weren't being broken down sufficiently so sprints never completed goals.
Actions: Talked about increasing the sprint to allow for better testing and more time for development.
Results: While the issues of story sizing, testing and deployment strategy were still evident, longer sprint allowed for more deliverable and (through retrospectives) improved the morale of the team.
No Retrospectives
Situation: Joined Repositive where there were no opportunities for process improvement / learning.
Actions: Talked with the team about the power of a retrospective following a sprint. Scheduled in and conducted retrospectives in lightweight format for introduction.
Results: Feedback from the team that they were really happy with the format that they were scheduled in permanently.
Learning: Downside was the it introduced overhead into process so we discussed changing the length of the sprint
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Stand-ups
Situation: Technical discussions in stand ups - people getting frustrated.
Actions: Talked with the team about the format of the stand ups. Talked about the purpose of the stand up and that it was not a management or PO check in. Team agreement about the format so we change the three questions to a minute to talk about things of value (including blockers & dependencies). Introduced "nominate the next person" to keep focus while people were talking.
Results: Stand ups were shorter. People felt like they had more time to work. Less meeting apathy. Felt like less of a status update for the team. Understanding all round that the stand up is for the benefit of the development team only (to get work done).
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Coaching
Estimation
Griffin Flight Sim
Challenge: Asked to help coach a team in Burgess Hill having issues with estimation. They were using hours which they said wasn't effective. Talked about 'unknown' work - hours difficult to achieve.
Actions: Talked about the benefits of estimation - not just a number but the value of a common understanding. They wanted to try story points so I ran a couple of planning poker workshops with their requirements
Results: Team established a more consistent velocity. Estimation became fun and removed from commitments to granular values. Feedback was that relative estimation enabled more effective way in breaking down large stories
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Setting up a team
Situation Following our success I was put in contact with an avionics team lead in Germany who wanted to set up a Scrum team and wanted my advice on how and what kind of people
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Actions Fact finding - his approach to setting up the team and the types of people he had available. Discussed self-selecting but he didn't think it would work. Asked what kind of dynamics would make a good team. He thought a team of experts. I asked whether he'd considered a really dynamic mix of experiences and background. Curiosity, enthusiasm and open to experimentation.
Results After a follow up meeting his feedback was that the first team had worked so well that he used the same approach in setting up another team. Less experienced people were up-skilling and asking obvious but important questions about engineering approaches
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The primary goal for Agile Coaches is to help individuals and organisations to achieve better results. The primary goal for Agile Coaches is to help individuals and organisations to achieve better results.
- Rockwell - business and development working together (PO proxy in the UK) + timed sync meetings
- One week sprints - the overhead
- PO and solutions
- Visibility of work (physical whiteboard)
- Requirement definition
- Work off sprint: clarification of team commitment. Context switching. FedEx. Capacity for innovation.
- Format of daily stand up
- Griffin project estimation - hours not working. Helped facilitate story points which evolved into WSJF
- Back end Vs front end silos
- Size of team & types of work. Orienting around products
- Demo format: boring and too long
- Terminology: workshops and Confluence
- Morale low due to not delivering (days/hours estimation & PO leading stand up)