About Retroagil

This time I'm just writing to indicate the following website:

https://retroagil.wordpress.com/

It contains several ideas for Sprint Retrospectives. You can find one of my own there. It's only available in Portuguese at the moment. It explains in details how to do a Project Timeline so you can go by every step of the project and get insights with your team.

https://retroagil.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/jornada-do-projeto-jp/

Book review: Scrum 360

Name: Scrum 360 - Um guia completo e prático de agilidade

Author: Jorge Audy
Languages available: Portuguese

Personal Review: This book is a collection of small texts published originally at the author's official website. As expected, the language is informal and light; it's like you're talking with the author and he is sharing his knowledge with you. In this book you can learn a lot about what is working with Scrum in practice. The author has lots of years of experience in the agile world.

One of my favourite chapters is the very first one. It brings a discussion about who we are, what we do and why, and how we are perceived by others. In the agile world we work as a team: there is no way to be successfull if we don't know how to combine efforts with each other and work in equilibrium. He mentions that "being happy at work is to colaborate and contribute with the construction of a winner team, grow up, see your carrer launch by merits on the company that you are working and that pays your salary." (free translation). This full text is available (only in Portuguese) here.

In this same chapter, he brings up the Individualism versus Collectivism topic. The text (in Portuguese only) is available here. I absolutely agree with that:

"In an agile team, there are no space for superstars; if you want to be the center of attention or continuously put someone from the team at focus, good or bad, review your concepts. The goal is the balance of the collective, knowing that ideas and good initiatives are opened to everybody, the same way as participate and collaborate with continuous improvement" (free translation).

In the subsequent chapters, the author introducts the Scrum method and talk about its roles, ceremonies and artifacts, explaining each one in detail. Also the topics of vision, user stories, acceptance criteria and MVP (minimum viable product) are approached. A very nice gathering of tips can be found at Chapter 8: Continuos  improvement. He presents the most important factors of Sprint zero, Planning, Daily, Board, Review and Retrospective. For example, the 4 tips about the Daily ceremony: (free translation)

1. Total focus on sprint delivery (risks and opportunities)

2. Assertivity (each one should prepare: what happened of good and bad)

3. What to say and not to? An abstract of the things that are relevant to the sprint

4. After 3 dailys with no decisions, risks, opportunity, look under the mat.

At last, the topic is knowledge management. For me, the most interesting part of this chapter are the tips for making good presentations. In short, I think that this book is worth reading and I'd recomend to Scrum learners, specially beginners in the agile world.

Price and where to buy:

1) Saraiva Bookstore: R$ 44,90

http://www.saraiva.com.br/scrum-360-um-guia-completo-e-pratico-de-agilidade-9247659.html

2) Cultura Bookstore: R$ 44,90

http://www.livrariacultura.com.br/p/scrum-360-um-guia-completo-e-pratico-de-98383591

Everything you always wanted to know about the Iteration Burndown

There are several techniques that can be used to track team progress during an Agile Iteration. One of the most popular ones is the Iteration Burndown Chart. It's a simple chart, however it has the power to provide quite a bit of information. In general, the most interested in the burndows are the team's Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM). Also, it can be used for anyone else who is interested in Sprint outcomes, as Project/Product Managers and stakeholders.

Components

In the burndown chart we usually put the period of time at the X-axis and the hours of work at the Y-axis. This way, you can find out how many hours the team still needs to work in order to complete the Sprint (green bars) and also how many hours of work have been delivered (yellow bars).

This chart above is an example of what would be the "perfect" sprint of the "perfect" team. The velocity of delivery is consistent throughout the sprint. In the middle of the sprint we have exactly 50% of the planned work delivered. In the end of the sprint, everything was already delivered and the Sprint finishes as a success. Of course, this is a perfect balanced sprint and it's not expected that real teams work like this.

One more example

Let's take a look at another example. This is a situation where the team completed the sprint successfully, but there are things to improve for certain. Observe that the velocity was not uniform throughout the sprint. There was a very small amount of work delivered on day 2 and a big amount at day 3. Besides that, between days 14 and 15 there were absolutely no work delivered. Two things could have happened here: Either the tool wasn't updated appropriately or the team rushed to finish the sprint on time.

Sprint failure

A final example of a failed sprint: about 23% of the planned work was not finished. The velocity of delivery was uniform, but it wasn't enough to finish all the work on time. The team must adjust their velocity in order to prevent failures on next sprints.

At last, let's take a look at this text from the Official Scrum Guide:

"Various projective practices upon trending have been used to forecast progress, like burndowns, burn-ups, or cumulative flows. These have proven useful. However, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has happened may be used for forward-looking decision-making."

In other words: trending graphs are useful and can help your team to understand whats going on in the current sprint and the chance that it might fail or succeed; however, you should use them with caution, specially when dealing with a complex system or even maybe a complex team, where team members are joining and leaving the team constantly and the team has not yet achieved a mature level.

Team phases

In 1965, psychologist Bruce Tuckman proposed a model for team growing and development. The author defends that teams don't perform well in the beginning and that it would take some time together until it stop being only a group of strangers to become a group with common goals. The original paper “Developmental sequence in small groups” explains the following 4 stages:
 

Image source: http://www.newdirectionsconsulting.com

1. FORMING: This is the stage where team members are getting to know each other and the work to be done. They tend to be positive, polite and respectful with one another, which reflects their wish to be accepted by the group. They are searching for information both about the work to be done and about each other. Some may feel anxious and some may feel excited. Leaders play a important part here; members are seeking for guidance to find their role in the group.

2. STORMING: In this phase, team members start to share their feelings and thoughts. Hence comes the name of the phase - it's common to have conflicts and unforeseen problems in this stage, which can cause anxiety and frustration. People still act more as individuals than as a team. Leadership can start to be questioned. Besides that, they can feel stressed by not having friends with whom to share their anguish and not having the support of a well-know process. Although it's a necessary phase for every team, it's the stage where we see the biggest number of failures.

   

3. NORMING: This is a more pacific stage. Now the team members can see each other strong points and have more trust on their peers. They work as a group and compromise with the group common goal. Roles and responsibilities are clearer. Unfortunately, teams usually keep changing between Storming and Norming phases.

4. PERFORMING: In this stage, teams have a high productivity and the work environment is the best possible, with no conflicts, a good structure and well -established process. Leaders can focus on people career management instead of process adjustments and conflict resolution. It's wonderful to be part of a team in this stage; people coming in and out does not affect the productivity. It's a sad reality that not all teams can come to this phase.

5. ADJOURNING: In 1977, one more phase was added to the model by Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen: The Adjourning Phase. Here, the team is undone and people are allocated to do another work. There may be a sense of lost of routine or sadness for losing friends or colleagues. Also, some may feel anxious about their future work. In this phase we can have recognition for the work the team has done.

In this video from education-portal.com, you can find a very nice summary of the group phases:

 

You can download the original article in pdf format here: DOWNLOAD

 

Scrum Retrospective Technique: The Sailboat

Today I'll present one more technique that can be used to drive Scrum Retrospective meetings.

For this technique, you can either draw on a white board or you can print pictures and just attach to the board or the any wall available. I usually prefer to print stuff cause I'm not that good at drawing!! ;)


I'll provide some pictures for download at the end of the post.


Follow these steps:

1. [10 minutes] Arrange the board/wall with the drawings or pictures before the team arrive at the room. Don't forget to book the room for 10 minutes previous to the meeting for you to have this time.


2. [10 minutes] With the team in the room, explain that you'll be gathering 3 kinds of feedback:


- Things that propel us: Nice stuff, things that are helping the team and making it improve. Make a relation with the windy cloud in the picture.


- Things that are holding us back or making us slower: Usually obstacles, things that went wrong, that we don't want to repeat and to keep in the team. Make a relation with the anchor attached to the boat.


- Things to look out for: Stuff that we need to pay attention and give value; maybe things that are not an issue right now, but can become an issue later. Make a relation with the iceberg.


3. [5 minutes] Distribute post its (preferably 3 colors) and make it clear in the board what color will be used for each category of feedback.


4. [15 minutes] Encourage the team to write and to place the post its on the wall. Make sure everybody participate and let them know that every voice needs to be heard and is equally important.

5. [30 minutes] Read the feedback posted (or ask your team members to do so!) and evaluate one by one. Here, the team needs to decide what will be the action item for each one, if it's possible to find one. Keep the discussion rolling and take note of the action items. You can let someone responsible for writing the action items also. The more they participate, the more they will feel involved and pay attention to what's going on in the room.


6. [5 minutes] Closure - Thank the team for their participation and tell them where you will keep the action items in order for everyone to have access. Don't forget to tell them that you will keep track of the items and make sure they don't just stand out as a list.



Material for download:

-Boat pic

-Cloud pic

-Iceberg pic

-Anchor pic

-Slide presentation (very useful for distributed teams]



You can find out more about Retrospective techniques in this post:


What your Retrospectives should look like

 

Are your team members involved or commited?

Let's start to think about that with a famous analogy, the pig and the chicken:

 

 Cartoon source: https://www.implementingscrum.com/ 

Observe that the chicken is being pretty smart here: He wants to provide eggs to the restaurant; yet the pig would have to provide ham.

The following situation could happen: The pig then suggests the name of the restaurant to be "Wings and Ribs"; this way, both of them would be committed.

So, now you start to wonder: are my team members committed to the work we do?

There are many factors that can make a person not engage in their work. I'd say they are probably unhappy with something; it could be some problem with their daily work (a boring routine? a job that they didn't really choose?); could be salary/benefits dissatisfaction; or even relationship problems with colleagues.

Whatever the issue is here, it need to be found and the not engaged person might need help with it. If you are feeling that way, try to find help with your manager or scrum master. If you perceive that you have one or more team members with this problem, you need to help them. Try to use empathy and gentleness; maybe they haven't even realized that they are not being the employee that the company needs; sometimes a small change can totally change the way an employee behave and can greatly improve their commitment.

The committed person is pretty easy to find: it's the one that worry with problems the team might have and do something to help; the one that tries to learn more about the job and understand what she's doing, instead of doing automatic work; the one that helps other team members to get better, helping to improve the overall team productivity. Their contribution is priceless and they should be rewarded for that. Teams in the 4^th stage of development - Performing - usually have a lot of committed members. I talk more about the team stages in this post.

What your Retrospectives should look like

Today I'll talk a little bit about Scrum Retrospective meetings. This is one of the most important Scrum ceremonies and there are some tips you can use to drive a productive meeting and to pull important action items from your team.


If you have a new team, the first thing you should do is an ice breaker activity. I'll provide some examples in later posts.


After that, you can start the Retrospective by explaining the technique you are going to use. One of the techniques that I like most is the Rocket Retrospective. I got the idea from here and I have already used it lots of times, always with good outputs.

Just follow these steps:

1. Draw a rocket on the board, following the example in the picture.

2. Provide team members with pens and post its in 2 colors.

3. Explain the technique, mentioning:


3.1: Team is gathered in the rocket. We are coming together from a place (last sprints, last whatever) and we're going together to another one (the goal, the next sprint, the next release, wherever you are going). This step gives a sense of objective and team union: "we are all on the same boat".


3.2: To move a rocket, there are driving forces (enablers) and pulling forces (disablers). Also, in the team we have enablers and disablers helping, and that is exactly what we are trying to gather from the team.


4. Ask them to write enablers and disablers in the post its - and make sure you tell them that it can be just anything that comes to their minds. The evaluation will come later.


They can place the post its in the board themselves.

The most important thing that people usually forget is to capture action items according to the provided feedback. The action items should provide some kind of team improvement. They should be tracked by the Scrum Master and sent to the team. Also, it's a nice practice to keep them at a visible location. Depending on the action item, you might also want to add an ending date and an owner - one or more, actually. Don't forget that sometimes it's desirable to have the whole team as the owner.


So, in short words, to run a good retrospective:



0. Choose and study the technique

1. [Optional] Ice breaker activity

2. Explain the chosen technique

3. Gather team input

4. Gather action items


Distributed team only: If you work with a distributed team, you can adjust this technique. If some members are physically near you, get a room, use a board and ask the local team members to gather input from the distributed members via chat. If all your team members are away, make an online meeting and share a slide presentation with them.


One more Retrospective technique can be found in this post.