Posted on Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Scrum Team and Standard of Work

Standardized work is a collection and implementation of the best practices known at that moment. We discussed Standard of Work for Product Owner and Scrum Master in earlier articles. I also gave you a template of the checklist with activities for these two important players of Scrum.

Third leg of Scrum stool

As we all know, Scrum is often referred to as three-legged stool. The three legs being the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Team. The third leg, the Scrum Team, is charged with the responsibility to build and deliver the product functionality. Everyone on the Scrum team must be rowing in one direction to deliver this in a timely fashion to the customers.

Rowing Team – every effort in one direction

Let’s look at the typical activities that the team must carry out.

[tabby title=”Daily”]

Attend the daily Scrum, on time and in person.
Come prepared at the daily scrum with your updates.
Provide you updates at the daily scrum and listen to others’ updates.
All team members should answer “the three questions”.
If, for some reason, you can not attend the daily scrum, please reach out to a ‘buddy’ and ask her to take your updates to the team. [Do not send you updates in an email, that should be the last resort! ]
Adhere to the Office Hours agreed upon as a Team. Let the team know if you are unavailable during those office hours for any reason.
Work (swarm) on the highest priority stories.
Show all work on the Scrum board.
Update tasks with hours remaining.
Seek out opportunities to help your team members and/or swarm on driving the Stories to completion.
Ensure development standards are followed.
As soon as a Story is Done, demonstrate it to Product Owner to get her Acceptance and mark it as ‘DONE’.
Adhere to DoD before marking a Story as Done.
Learn to say ‘No’. Use the ‘No’ repertoire.
Ensure that the WIP limits are followed.
Make it Fun 🙂

[tabby title=”Weekly”]

Identify ways to get better. Collect ideas for Sprint Retrospective or create improvement stories. Seek out opportunities to get that 1% improvement [ The Rich Employee by James Altucher ]
If required, represent your team at the Scrum of Scrum event, bringing team’s updates and challenges to the community.

[tabby title=”Each Sprint”]

Participate in Sprint Planning. Push back if the Story is not READY; not allowing it to get into a Sprint.
Get into sprint. Participate in Backlog Refinement.
Avoid the group thinking and provide your honest, unbiased estimate based on your knowledge and experience. Be comfortable with confrontation and agree to disagree.
In the daily standup. Participate in the Demo and Retrospective.
Identify opportunities for improving how work is done. Less with more done.
Create stories for improvements to be undertaken by the team.
Communicate improvements to Agile Coach or Process Owner for improvements beyond the control of the team.
Ensure all stories & tasks have a good description and validation.
Ensure all stories/features/epics have sizes.
Make a sprint commitment that you believe in. Work to achieve the commitment.

[tabby title=”Each Release”]

Participate in the Release planning activities
Identify enabling work.
Provide estimates for all work
Identify dependencies and risks.
Collaborate on the “Definition of Done” for the team.

[tabbyending]

[bctt tweet=” Standardized work answers the 5W+1H of a process – the who, what, when, where, why, and how”]

Is your scrum team following this checklist? What is your team doing differently, that is working for them? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Get your FREE copy of Standard Work Today!

In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery
Click here to Download your FREE copy

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2016

Scrum Master Standard Work

We talked about the Standard Work for Product Owner in my earlier post. Now, let’s look at the other important role in Scrum: The Scrum Master (SM).

Scrum Master wears many different hats while working with the Team. I like to say that Scrum Master has many faces. He is a Facilitator and ensures the Scrum framework is followed; as well as he is the Protector of the Team. He is a partner with Product Owner and other players in the organization, as well as he is the ‘Terminator’, eliminating Impediments so that team can continue making progress. I can go on and on.. but let’s keep that for a separate post.

Standard Work: Scrum Master
Let’s start identifying the activities that the Scrum Master is carrying out to ensure the team continues to create and deliver Value for customers. Here is my recommended list of activities, categorized into Daily, Weekly, by Sprint, by Release, and so on. I also have listed activities that Scrum Master has to do to ensure a successful launch of a new Scrum Team.

[tabby title=”Standing up a new Team”]

Ensure the team has gone through Agile training
Working with the team, collectively, come up with a ‘Scrum Calendar’ to ensure that all the events are discussed, time and locations are agreed upon. Use this activity ‘Scrum Calendar’ to facilitate this discussion.
Ensure the team has a good understanding of the roles. Use this activity ‘Start with Y’ to bring everyone on the same page and have a common understanding, expectation about each role.
Ensure that PO has shared and discussed the Vision and Roadmap with the team
Use ‘Agile Bingo’ to Ensure that the team has worked on and collectively agreed upon: [Download Agile Bingo here http://bit.ly/agileBingo
- Working Agreements
- Office Hours
- Definition of READY
- Definition of DONE (for User Story, for Release)
- Dependencies and Risks has been discussed and identified/acknowledged
- Make it Fun! Ask the team to create their own identity; come up with a name that reflects their collective identity and purpose
Ensure all the events have been scheduled and show up on appropriate stakeholders’ calendar. Send out the invites for next two to three months
Get more details on Agile Bingo and other activities mentioned here at http://bit.ly/improveScrum

[tabby title=”Daily”]

Attend and facilitate the daily Scrum event.
Rigorously ensure the rules of Scrum are followed.
Provide updates on impediments and dependencies reported by the team.
Update and post the task burndown and story completion charts.
Update the Scrum board and other information radiators to make work and progress visible
Be the ‘Sherlock Holmes’: Look for unidentified impediments and work towards removing them, even before they have a chance to distract the team
Work to remove the impediments identified by the team and escalate them to stakeholders as required.
Represent the team to outside parties.
Protect the team from distractions.

[tabby title=”Each Sprint”]

Information Radiator

Ensure that the team is ready for next sprint
- The User Stories have been identified and are READY
- The Dependencies have been identified and ‘separated’ from User Stories slotted for the sprint
Facilitate sprint planning
Facilitate Daily Scrum, and ensure that it finishes within the allotted 15 minutes (use the Productivity Hacks we discussed earlier such as Parking Lot, Yellow Card, After Party, ..)
Ensure that team is adhering to their Working Agreements as well as the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done
Ensure that the team follows their WIP limits. Challenge team to finish the work, before starting new work (user stories)
Ensure that various tracking charts are updated and posted in the area where they are visible.
Ensure the Team conducts ‘Backlog Refinement (Grooming) event while in the sprint, focused on getting stories READY for the future sprints. The team should have a pipeline of READY stories that will keep them busy for at least n+2 sprints.
Own the impediments, track progress on resolving them, and provide regular updates to the Team on each one of them. Ensure that team has worked around to continue making progress until the impediment is resolved.
During the Sprint, ensure that Story Burn up chart and Task burndown charts are updated daily
Pay attention to the Story burn up chart, and work with team to avoid the Hockey Stick
At the end of the sprint update:
- Release Burnup chart – This chart should show the “top line” scope, actual velocity for completed sprints, predicted velocity for future sprints (Trend line using 3 sprint average), and the planned release date. Identify the gaps (between the predicted points and the desired “top line” points) and start having conversations around it with Product Owner and the team.
- Feature completion – This chart should show the progress toward all features as well as the priority/sequence order that features are to be built. Highest priority features should be on the left side. Ensure that there is activity on the feature at Left.
- Identify and keep a running list of ‘Features at risk’. Lowest priority features are “at risk” if the predicted velocity doesn’t intersect the “top line” by the planned release date.
- Continue to have a discussion around them with Product Owner.
- Business value completion – Work with the Product Owner to produce the desired graphs (e.g. business value points per story point, story point burn-up, the breakdown of business stories vs. enabling stories, etc.).
- Update the Team velocity chart and Say: Do ratio based on the completed sprint.
Facilitate Sprint Demo (Showcase) and Sprint Retrospective events.
While team is focused on the current sprint, spend some time and energy on getting things lined up for and ready for next sprint
- Update Team Calendar, incorporating vacation times and holidays. This will help in predicting team’s capacity for the upcoming sprint.
- ensure that various events are planned, scheduled and on the calendar. Various events such as Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Backlog refinement, Sprint Retrospective.
- Work with Product Owner to ensure backlog items are identified and READY for next sprint
Communicate sprint/release progress to stakeholders
Communicate Impediments to stakeholders

[tabby title=”Each Release”]

Facilitate Agile Planning / Release Planning
Collaborate with Product Owner to ensure that:
- Backlog Items are identified and prioritized for the Release cycle
- Highest priority backlog items have gone through ‘Backlog Refinement (Grooming)’ activity and are READY
- Dependencies have been identified

[tabbyending]

Would it help to have your standard work documented? Can it help you – the Scrum Master, your team improve the productivity and deliver more VALUE for your customer?

Go ahead and document your Standard of Work. Start with this list, update it, refine it, and put your team on the “hyper Productivity” lane!

Get your FREE copy of Standard Work Today!

In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery
Click here to Download your FREE copy

Posted on Monday, January 11, 2016

Check List: Importance of Product Owner and Standard Work

Product Owner (PO) role is a very important role in Agile. She often wears many hats! She is working with Stakeholders on creating and maintaining the Value Backlog and identifying the right priorities. She is also working with the Development Team on creating Work Backlog that creates the Value that is being sought. She is essentially working as a bridge between Stakeholders and the Team, between Value Backlog and the Work Backlog. And she is acting as a bridge between the Business and the IT.

The Product Owner also sets the direction of the Initiative (or Project, if you want to call it that). She sets the direction by identifying the priorities; and she is one of the big factors, if not the only factor, that has huge influence on success or failure of the initiative.

Many faces of Product Owner

Benefits of Standard Work
Product Owner role being such a critical role in the success of your initiative, would it help to document the work she has to do? Does it add value to having documented this Standard Work?

Standardized work is one of the most powerful but least used Lean tools. By documenting the current practices, standardized work forms the baseline for continuous improvement.

Let’s review some of the benefits quickly:

Creating standard / Standardizes the work across different teams, different people; ensuring consistency across the organization
Set expectations, certain level of expectations, branding as to what’s ‘given’ when the team/individual says a certain task is done
Sets up a common platform against which the effectiveness of the individuals can be measured
Ensure certain level of quality
Ensure that certain routine, mundane tasks get done (and don’t get overlooked due to them being ‘boring’)

Standard Work: Product Owner
Let’s start identifying the activities for the Product Owner now that we are clear on the importance of the role and the benefits of Standard Work. We can start listing out the Daily and Weekly activities, as well as the activities that need to happen when a specific event is happening, for example, Release Planning.

[tabby title=”Daily”]

Attend the Daily Scrum meeting
Did I answer (if any) questions raised by the Team members, within a few hours?
Did I resolve / remove / find work around for business impediments?
Do I need to provide Story-level CAT (client acceptance testing)?
Do I need to connect with business Subject Matter Experts / business community for any open or upcoming item?
Story Burnup
- Did I update and review Story Burn up chart?
- Is the team working on highest priority stories?

[tabby title=”Weekly”]

Product Backlog planning / Backlog grooming with Business stakeholders
Break Epics to Features, assign Business Value
Break features to potential User Stories
Ensure that each Story has “Who, What, Why” identified
Ensure all Features and User Stories have Acceptance Criteria (AC)

[tabby title=”For Each Sprint”]

Review charts
- Release Burn up / story completion
  Examine the “top line” scope, the current and projected velocity, and the anticipated date the velocity line intersects the “top line” scope. Make adjustments to scope or release date as necessary
- Feature completion
  Is the team working on right things in the right sequence? Is effort being applied to future features that should be applied to near-term features?
- Business value completion
  Examine the trend of business value per story point (RoI) being delivered. Can we sequence higher ROI features earlier in the release schedule? If only lower ROI features remain, can we end the project early? Can we remove high-cost / low return stories from features to improve the feature ROI?
- Maintain Product Backlog
  - Re-sequence features
    Examine the planned features for each release and adjust as team velocity, capacity, ROI, risk, dependencies, etc. are better understood
  - Create/Update/Delete Epics, Features and User Stories
    As we get smarter, update the backlog with the current understanding of the epics/features/stories
  - Backlog Grooming with Team
    Work with the Team to add sizes to any epics/features/stories that don’t have a size assigned
    Ensure information dashboards are updated and visible (topline, velocity, release burnup)
    Assess risks and dependencies among epics/features/stories
- Get Ready for next Sprint Planning meeting
  - Collect highest-priority stories that represent approximately 125% of the teams average sprint velocity.
  - Ensure user stories are detailed enough with validations for team commitment.
  - Work with the technical Product Owner (tPO) to identify and prioritize the highest-priority/predecessor enabling (technical) stories
  - Develop and communicate Sprint Goal(s)
- Sprint Review
  Facilitate part of the review, explaining Business Scenario and Goals, and then hand-over to Team member to showcase/demo the functionality
- Participate in the Sprint Retrospective with the Team
- Sprint Planning
  discuss the sprint commitment with the team. Hold the team responsible for meeting that commitment.
- Update Vision (if necessary)
- Communicate sprint/release progress to stakeholders

[tabby title=”For Each Release”]

Create/Update the Vision
Identify epics and features
Assign business value to epics and features
Group features into “minimal releasable feature sets”

[tabbyending]

Would it help to have your standard work documented? Can it help you, your team improve the productivity and deliver more VALUE for your customer?

Go ahead and document your Standard of Work. Start with this list, update it, refine it, and put your team on the “hyper Productivity” lane!

Get your FREE copy of Standard Work Today!

In essence, Standard Work helps you in minimizing waste and maximizing value delivery
Click here to Download your FREE copy