[sKale] getting the most of both world: Scrum and HR

[sKale] getting the most of both world: Scrum and HR Pierre E. NEIS, Erik CHAPIER-MALDAGUE coProcess S.A., 11 avenue de la Gare, L-1611 Luxembourg, Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg {pneis@coprocess.lu, echapiermaldague@coprocess.lu} http://www.coprocess.lu1. A B S T R A C T We launched the [sKale] Project to address first Human Resources issues and then it becomes evident that this on-going framework is evolving in a complete other way like Agile organization. When we discovered Human Resources legitimate aspirations to be Business Partner, we had remembered that IT’s got the same aims several years ago. The management of people in organization is shared between Business Management and Human Resources (HR). As true as Business is concerned by operations, lot of HR services are kept far away from the front. Too often regarded mainly as an administrative function, HR service can be the revelator of the competiveness of a firm. The development of an organization, in an Agile or co-production mode, changes the role and the responsibilities allocated to the Human Resources Department (HRD). While retaining the “Agile” values, the [sKale] project provides a realistic framework to allow HRD to achieve its strategic development by becoming the key player in the definition of the skills and positions assertiveness. Thus, HRD is value oriented and participates this way to earn more market shares and more revenues for the whole organization. Enhancing HR role turning it to the market ensures the ability to generate value for the entire organization. The [sKale] for HR research has uncovered a new matrix of Agile enterprise organizations involving humans, interpersonal relationships and customers in the heart of the global Value Chain.KEYWORDS: Agile Organization, Agile Enterprise, Human Resources, operational HR.2. I N T R O D U C T I O N Erik Chapier-Maldague is a Coach and expert in Human Resources and he knew my strong engagement in Agile management techniques. He came to me with a special request according to the escalation of Human Resource Department as a real business partner. On my side, as a Scrum Coach, I also discover that “Agile Thinking”, where the Project Management approach is very people centric, evolves in more “coaching” attitudes than pure managing techniques. This publication is relative to our common research about the etablisment of a HR organization in Agile mode. We called this project the [sKale] project. 1

3. T H E C O N T E X T I N D E T A I L S Our research started first by analyzing the different issues according to the specificities of the HR context and the evolutions of large scaled Scrum projects. a. T H E HR C O N T E X T According to the HR outsourcing (HRO) bigger players, the maturity of HRO globally shows that HR internal services focused more and more on strategic attitudes. These new challenges are re-shaping internal HR services. To make it happens; the HR Senior Management has to be empowered by the board as a solid Business Partner. It surely helps to answer to:  How to enroll in a mode of production that simultaneously increases profits, the intrinsic value of the company and the feeling of Commitment to the firm?  How to implement a continuous improvement of skills?  How to succeed massive cultural changes, without a plan for "change management"?  How to develop operational presence for HR services?  How could the organization rapidly rise up and assume the risk of growth changes? b. T H E S C R U M 1 C O N T E X T : E V O L U TI O N O F T H E S C R U M M A S TE R 2 R O L E A S A COACH Observing the good practices like mature Scrum Projects, we can see an evolution in the role of ScrumMaster. As the initial set, ScrumMaster helps team to implement the methodology in smooth transition and with hard engineering techniques. Then emerges more organizational issues and a lot of communication defects: implementing self- organized people concepts in a rigid structure can produce chaos aspects. Teams are self-organizing with the support of a ScrumMaster who protects it from all external impediments. So, that production team can focus on the release of what it is committed to. The evolution of the Scrum framework allows us to say that the process doesn’t deliver only a “potentially shippable product increment” and a “leaner” process optimization but also delivers on-going organization architecture. According to these facts, ScrumMaster and Scrum Product Owner roles are evolving to management roles:  Scrum Product Owner is accountable for the deliverables and value creation  ScrumMaster is accountable for the whole “Process”: here “Process” groups both Scrum Process and organization architecture. The empirical process aspect of Scrum lets the whole Scrum Team (Team, ScrumMaster 3 and Scrum Product Owner ) inspecting and adapting the whole framework after iteration during the Retrospective Meetings. There is the place and time where emerging dysfunctions can be revealed and solutions found, like: transparency, over-commitment, lack of knowledge, conflicts, demotivation, etc. 1. Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple. (Source Scrum Alliance) 2. ScrumMaster is the Process manager in the Scrum Project. 3. Scrum Product Owner is person who is accountable for the delivery of the Product into a Scrum Project. 2

Our experience with Scrum reveals that the role of ScrumMaster let appear the need of more coaching presence to go with individuals on a development pathway, for them and so induced for their company. c. T H E V I S I O N O F A N E W HR C E N TR I C F R A M E WO R K During the development of this project we discovered that the “Agile thinking way” is in line with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), part of the “[…]Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” supported by the European Commission. To make that happen, to find some links between both Scrum and HR approaches, some assumptions must be done:  If HR Service wants to be a real countable actor in an organization they need to be valuable. The values of HR’s are described beyond but they need also to have a Process to fix maturity  ScrumMasters are more involved in “Resource Management” and coaching getting closer to HR’s because they are the keepers of HR’s values at the project level  Management aspects need to be redefined. To manage more efficiently self- 4 organized people, we need servant-leadership. To have servant-leadership we decide that management should be a part of the whole organization getting the same values of sustainability than self-organized teams. Servant-leadership is more emerging than a must. It’s based on: o Leadership actions o And the alignment of management processes.4. T H E C O N C E P T : B U I L D I N G A N O R G A N I Z A TI O N L I K E A T E A M The approach that we decide to follow is based on “Systems Thinking” who enables an “Agile” oncoming to link people, programs and value (e.g. Declaration of Interdependence ©2005). The challenge of the [sKale] Project was to create an ideal framework to keep the focus on self-managed teams and “servant-leadership”. We do agree that those concepts sound a bit “high level” but fact is that it works into Scrum Projects. If we transpose the concept of Scrum into an organization, we must set up both “push” and “pull” to keep balance.  “Pull” gives people the freedom to achieve realistic goals adapted to their actual competences,  “Push” is reduced to border the organization’s scope: like initial Product Backlog + Initial Roadmap + Vision in a Scrum Project. 4. Servant-leadership means that managers should literally serve, or be a servant to, their subordinates. This seems to be the intention of the originator of the concept, Robert K. Greenleaf. 3

The complexity is to face this new cultural challenge into the enterprise organization. Building an organization as a team requires:  Interactions  Self-organization  Co-evolution  Co-production Let us describe the framework top-down.a. THE GOVERNANCE MODEL Governance is the heart of the organization, there is the place where the enterprise Vision is given and the roadmap to achieve it on strategical level. The board “team” is composed of 5 members adding CEO and HRM (Human Resource Manager). The board is working on the enterprise Portfolio like a Scrum Team but the main difference is to handle with both projects and non-projects (like support and daily standard tasks). CEO is inspecting and adapting the enterprise backlog with two targets: Value Creation and Time-to-market. HRM gives an input how the organization is reacting to change, gives the feed-back on Resources Capacities. This enterprise backlog is managed in a “Scrum-like” empirical process, decisions are been taken according to “production” capacities. Here “production capacities” have to be understood as “we have the people to do this”. The Governance should measure 3 different outcomes:  Product and services including customer satisfaction, value creation, opportunities, innovations, risk and performance management  Organization and architecture including employee engagement, business alignment, resources management  Process including standards and maturity 4

b. THE PROGRAM LEVEL We have seen that a pure project focus is no matter in an organization context where you have to deal with productive and non-productive, with support and multi-projects teams, with no project teams and administrative. What happens with the teams when you do not have a single project? 1. Build a team 5 2. Install Scrum Ceremonies 6 3. Set up a management of the business portfolio with the help of Kanban and Visual Management techniques. We used Scrum as a common language between the people so administrative people can understand IT people and IT people the management. We have branded the framework [sKale] to make it neutral to all stakeholders and to use the framework as a major part of company culture.c. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT ISSUES  SUSTAINABLE PACE FOR ALL In Scrum, we make the focus on sustainable pace for the team inside a Scrum project without any attention on what happens beside or outside the Scrum project: it is the same in any Agile projects. In organizational thinking, we want to extend the Agile framework to the whole organization thus we should have sustainability for all the people: operational, administrative, management, etc. Managers do the best job if they only make their job. Splitting managers’ role into a 7 democratic four eyes management helps each Manager or Scrum Product Owner to be a coordinator and each ScrumMaster to act as a coach to be better in servant- leadership.  THE VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS IS KNOWLEDGE Each people come into a “project” with a certain set of skills. During the project, new skills are emerging, new trainings are done. What we want is to feed the learning process coming from continuous improvement during “project” challenges. We kept Scrum Ceremonies to foster coordination and team building. After each Retrospective, the ScrumMaster takes the measure of earned knowledge facing the objective that the team wants to reach during one sprint: measures are based on effectiveness (lessons learned” and “experimentation). The impact of collecting those information sprints after sprint creates a more positive feeling that biannual carrier meetings do not attend. Understand that everybody is different and difference is wealth 5. Scrum Ceremonies is the name for the Scrum Meetings that give the beat of the Scrum Process. These Ceremonies are: Sprint Planning Meetings, Daily Scrum. Sprint Review Meeting, Retrospective. 6. Kanban is a tool and a framework to visualize the workflow. 7. Four eyes management is that every manager (with two eyes) cannot take a decision without the agreement of a pair manager (with two more eyes), so that every decisions has been checked out twice for more safety. 5

d. A NEW ORGANIZATION MATRIX In our project, we redesigned the entire organization so that the values and goals amply flourish. The organizational engine in terms of management is based on basic concepts:  Value Creation  People engagement  Customer satisfaction Managing to combine these three elements, forces us to rethink the organization by making it the most "operational" as possible. Making a more operational structure is possible through the adoption of a project mode organization model. A project mode organization model leads to high flexibility of the latter in its ability to develop self-directed teams focusing on a dedicated project in the prescribed time. These teams are made for the project and then dissolved, to integrate a new project. The current model is built on verticality and any cross-units research is desired but seldom understood or implemented. Setting up a cross-unit organization needs a new steering mode and project alignment. This can be achieved through a governance-based portfolio management and Project Management Office (PMO) model for alignment. The managerial model is completely revised. Who is responsible? Who leads? To understand the feasibility of this approach, management becomes participatory and each project team is committed and is responsible for: creating value for the company, involvement of individuals within the project, quality of its relationship with customers (customer addressed by the project deliverables). 8 Our initial organization matrix has been inspired by “Beyond Budgeting®” principles with a particular focus on emerging leadership:  “LEADERSHIP ACTIONS:  setting fair and clear values, goals and boundaries  improving hyper-productivity based on effectiveness and relative targets  promote transparency to support self-management 8. Beyond Budgeting®: was established over ten years ago its vision was to find steering mechanisms that could replace budgeting and help to make organizations more adaptive to change (source BBRT). 6

 ALIGNING PROCESSES WITH LEADERSHIP ACTIONS  Goals are fixed for the team for each project  Rewards are given to the Team and distributed to each individuals  Planning: [sKale] provides planning instead of following a plan. Planning is continuously improved  Coordination is made continuously. The Coordination Team follows the same objective that the project team: emerging values and impediments are managed daily at least weekly  Controls are simple and easy understandable: value, release (time), empowerment, commitment and involvement  Resources Management is made available when needed not annually.”e. FIXING OPERATIONAL HR On the way to help HR’s to generate measurable value for the organization we couldn’t pass through operational HR. In our research, building an operational HR was perhaps utopia. But thanks to Scrum and some “Beyond Budgeting®” principles like reducing the waste of back and middle office and pushing the whole organization at the front that reinforced the idea that in the [sKale] project, the ScrumMaster should be a HR representative. Based on this assumption everything is starting to be clearer and logical. The Program 9 Office is build on a “meta scrum” model where the organization matrix is driven by domain, 10 areas and product lines and the “Scrum-of-Scrum” model has been integrated as a part of the HR Department instead to be third party. This add-on to ScrumMaster’s role creates the most of value at the hiring of new people. When during a retrospective, hiring necessities are emerging; we add this task into the “project” backlog so the self-managed team hires on its own a new candidate to insure their commitment to the “project”. The ScrumMaster should have then the agreement to validate team’s choice and report to administration for contracting. At last, in an extreme case, the ScrumMaster should be enough empowered by the organization and the team to dismiss people that impediment the team behavior and to protect the team from itself. 9. Meta Scrum: is a high level Scrum structure organized around a Scrum Product Owner Team where the focus is given to Product Definition and Work Breakdown structures. 10.Scrum of Scrum: The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration. (source Scrum Alliance) 7

These new responsibilities of ScrumMaster are only possible if the ScrumMaster is acting as a coach with mentoring support.f. GENERATING TOOLS TO SUPPORT THE NEW FRAMEWORK To facilitate ignition and adoption of this new organizational approach, we needed to define new smart tools to support the increasing amount of work and to optimize the decision process of the governance board. Our reflection pushed us to follow to major paths:  a tool to collect HR emerging values like knowledge, competencies  a tool to support the “pull” principle in project selection and emerging innovation  WCI: WORK LONG COMPETENCIES IMPROVEMENT Objective of this HR tool is to design an effective picture of people-in-action in the organization and to support the continuous improvement process. At the early stage, WCI monitors:  People’s aims and competencies  Emerging competencies  Measure the commitment to the “project” It works like a wiki on organization’s intranet.  IPM: INTERNAL PROJECT MARKET IPM is a simple collaboration tool that could be translated as a trading room inside the company. This is an intranet or a wiki where you submit new projects to the whole enterprise. IPM has many interests:  Having a productive pipeline with project proposals  Optimizing the resources allocation skills and outcomes  Self-initiative culture raising  Motivation, involvement, sharing Consider an example: “John Doe is a member of a team dedicated to a project. During the project, a new idea emerges and John discussed with his team. This idea is interesting but it does not make sense in the current project. This idea is enhanced by the ScrumMaster as an innovation and is valued as such: John continues to lead the innovation. This is recorded in the Lobby of IPM. The lobby area is where all the emerging innovations are waiting for validation. As its name suggests, the lobby should allow John to begin a discussion on the project and assess its feasibility. For that, John can invite some members of the company to test his idea (the project is still public). After one week, or earlier if John wishes, he may invite all persons of its choice in a discussion in a meeting room and assess the interest it brings to it. If after that meeting, John can build his team, the concept is fixed; he will present it to the board for scheduling. John will be the Owner of the project.” 8

5. C O N C L U S I O N The [sKale] project starts as pure research on Human Resource organization modelling and we discover that a lot of people have been engaged that way according to a high level of demand by the business. To get an effective organization based on both value production and people behaviour, the “project” model or “program” model was the first important step; consider knowledge and competencies as a value was a second. The third step is the Scrum process: Scrum has been designed for software development and we have customized it for global management without big changes. This conclusion is more or less a milestone in the deployment on the [sKale] approach: we set up a keystone and now the deployment into organization has to improve the framework.6. A B O U T T H E S K A L E P R O J E C T The [sKale] Project has been developed into a program and it’s supported by a dedicated Business Unit of coPROcess. This unit is driven by Erik Chapier-Maldague and strongly focus on implement the framework at HR Department level with the support of Pierre Neis, Head of PMO and Scrum Coach, who facilitate the concept of [sKale] into large scaled Scrum Project. It’s first mission was to develop an Agile framework for HR’s and now the scope is enlarging to the whole organization: governance, non-IT projects (IT Projects are done with Scrum), Venture Capital, Transition Management, Assessments, Coaching, Sales & Marketing, Communication, Support. Keeping in mind that [sKale] has to be continuously improved, the [sKale] Unit has created two work groups with professionals from HR’s and from Private Equities to challenge the framework. Their goal is to help companies being more flexible and reactive in a changing world.7. R E F E R E N C E S J. Sutherland and K. Schwaber, The Scrum Guide, Feb.2010 J.Hope and J. Fraser, Beyond Budgeting, Harvard Business School Press, 2003 B.Dusollier, Comprendre et pratiquer la Process Communication (PCM), InterEditions, 2008 Robitaille, Les cahiers de la communication interne Nr.25, AFCI, Dec. 2009 Software Engineering Institute, Appraisal Requirements for CMMI, Version 1.2, Aug. 2006 T.Sulaiman, AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle, InfoQ, Oct.2007 D.Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bantam ,19958. D E F I N I T I O N S  CSR: Company Social Responsibility, "A concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis." (source European Commission)  SYSTEMS THINKING is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various 9

elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. (source Wikipedia) BEYOND BUDGETING®: was established over ten years ago its vision was to find steering mechanisms that could replace budgeting and help to make organizations more adaptive to change (source BBRT). SCRUM: Scrum is an Agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple. (source Scrum Alliance) META SCRUM: is a high level Scrum structure organized around a Scrum Product Owner Team where the focus is given to Product Definition and Work Breakdown structures. SCRUM OF SCRUM: The scrum of scrums meeting is an important technique in scaling Scrum to large project teams. These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration. (source Scrum Alliance) SCRUMMASTER is the Scrum Process manager in the Scrum Project. SCRUM PRODUCT OWNER is person who is accountable for the delivery of the Product into a Scrum Project. 10

[sKale] getting the most of both world: Scrum and HR

by Pierre NEIS on Jun 14, 2011

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