Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010

11. Lencioni doesn’t think there are too many meetings, but... Meetings are boring and ineffective They drive the culture of an organization © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

14. Scrum Meetings Focus/Frequency Meeting Looks alot Strategic like Scrum... Release Planning Quarterly Sprint Planning Tactical Sprint Review Bi-weekly Sprint Retrospective Daily Daily Scrum © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

15. Most complaints come from too much time... 16 Daily Scrum 10% Retrospective 12 hours Review 8 Planning 4 0 1 2 3 4 Sprint Length (in weeks) Keep meeting time under 10% © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

16. Sprint Meeting Time 16 10% 12 hours 8 Daily Scrum Retrospective 4 Review Planning 0 1 2 3 4 Sprint Length (in weeks) In order to reduce sprint meeting times and increase meeting effectiveness, a number of things need to be addressed - Strategy,Visualization and Engagement. Each of these will be addressed in this presentation. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

17. Scrum Meetings Focus/Frequency Meeting Duration Strategic Release Planning 120-240 min Quarterly Sprint Planning 60-120 min Tactical Sprint Review 30-60 min Bi-weekly Sprint Retrospective 15-30 min Daily Daily Scrum 5-15 min © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

18. Scrum Meetings Meeting Duration When we skip strategy, everything falls apart Release Planning 120-240 min 0 min S**t falls down Sprint Planning 60-120 min 240-960 min Sprint Review 30-60 min 60-120 min Sprint Retrospective 15-30 min 60-120 min Daily Scrum 5-15 min 30-60 min © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

19. Story: The 1 hour daily With a two week release cycle, often teams are just focused on the immediate work. In this case, it turned every day into a 1 hour daily meeting. Create a quarterly release cycle to address strategy, which will focus each sprint more clearly. Use the sprint planning to address the tactical, and only the daily for immediate coordination issues. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

20. Story: The stealth release Even with a 3 year development release, as in the case of this medical device company, create quarterly release milestones for focus and feedback. Here they are engaging actual physicians, clinicians and IT administrators in a milestone internal release. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

21. Story: Creating a rhythm Create a daily, sprint and release rhythm to keep the ﬂow, focus and feedback. In this case, Salesforce.com has created a seasonal release timeline with monthly corporate sprint cycles and 2 week team sprint cycles. They have met release deadlines for 3 straight years. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

22. Focus Conclusion: Meeting Context Matters Meetings are critical to collaboration/coordination of teams focusing on work in short productive sprints Spend more time on strategy every quarter If Sprint and Daily meetings are long - typically indicates that strategy was not addressed properly © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

25. Prefrontal Cortex PFC Memorizing Recalling Deciding Understanding Inhibiting Small Hungry Limited The PFC is a relatively new development in the brain. It is the primary thinking part of our brain. Unfortunately, it is very small and can only hold about 4 items at a time. To do more complex thinking, memory swapping and complex maps allow it to process more. However, this uses a lot of energy within the brain and degrades throughout the day of using it. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

26. Visual Cortex Store, recall, link VC Images We think in pictures Efﬁcient Powerful Evolved Helper The VC is one of the most powerful elements of our brain and can help our PFC. The brain stores either visual or auditory maps - however the auditory maps are also relatively new to language development and therefore much less powerful. In order to help our thinking, we must do more to incorporate the visual cortex to help people see the space we are working in. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

28. Thinking Known problems inside the Current solutions box Our brain only stores what we have seen and created. Therefore, when we think, we mostly think about things we have seen before or know about. This is what we call “thinking inside the box”. To create new solutions, it requires our PFC to form new ideas from existing ones. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

29. New Solutions Must be Envisioned This depicts the eyes seeing a picture, using the VC to visualize it in the brain, then through the PFC, moving the pieces around to form new conﬁgurations. Doing this almost always engages the visual cortex. The more we can external engage the visual cortext in meetings will help our team’s think outside the box. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

31. Planning poker relies primarily on the auditory brain While Planning Poker is an excellent way to engage team members in conversation around a story, they tend to limit the visual cortex. Not being able to see the stories in context of each other creates silo’d thinking. We will see other ways to visualize story points. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

32. Do you use User Stories? User Stories are another primarily auditory communication that can invoke the visual cortex. However, the noise involved in all of the other words within the User Story tend to obscure the picture and it looks like static. One technique is to highlight key words or phrases to separate the key points from the noise to help the brain visualize it more clearly. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

34. Categorize and Color Backlogs To help the PFC process more easily, categorize the backlog in themes. Color coding themes also helps the brain visually distinguish work, especially when cards are moved around for sizing and prioritization. Here you see that only titles are used - no user stories. This is a quarterly strategy session output - a release backlog. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

35. Before the quarterly strategy release planning session... Roles Areas Stories Release Goal Before their quarterly release strategy session, they had a release goal and some proposed User Stories for the roles and product areas. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

36. After a quarterly strategy release planning session... Roles Acceptance Criteria Spikes Stories Working as a team, they discussed the known stories, created and split other stories, discussed acceptance criteria, and ﬁlled in all of the holes in their knowledge with spikes to go research. This was a strategy session for one quarter of their 3 year product release. In addition, roles and product areas are visualized in a grid to help isolate functionality and usability. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

37. Visualize Size A more effective visualization approach to estimating size is to use an afﬁnity-based estimation technique. Just arrange backlog items smallest to largest, then bucket into story points. The team does this collaboratively moving them around a table or on a wall. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

38. Visualize Time This is a 6 month release cycle with multiple themes represented. Each story has been estimated and prioritized. The dates are only approximations, but will be validated and negotiated through actual velocity. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

39. Visualize Time Another time visualization with various themes represented. In this case, they have separated what their two quarter goals are and will track accordingly. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

43. Visualize Strategy To support their seasonal release rhythm, Salesforce.com has a multi-team (30-60 teams) coordinate all of their strategy release sessions together. This helps identify shared goals, collaboration and dependencies across teams and product areas. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

47. Organizational Patterns All organizations have communication patterns based on their structures - roles, responsibilities, and environments. This chart shows communication of a development process - brighter red is more central in communication. In this case, there are two patterns present which are limiting effectiveness - the number of roles is large and the manager roles are central in the communication path. Through changing the structure of the organization, we can impact their effectiveness in productivity and meetings. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

48. Roles and communication % Communication Saturation 100 80 60 40 20 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 # Organization Roles Harrison, 2004 Because there are so many roles in this organization, their communication saturation is very low - this measures the actual role-to-role communication versus their potential. To increase communication, and thus meeting effectiveness, they need to reduce their roles and re-locate their producer-type roles into the center of the communication. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

49. Team Structure Here is another communication map from a different company. In this case the number of roles is much less and the developer is at the center of the communication, but there is still a very limited communication saturation. In this case, team structure was central to their communication. As this team was modeled, each developer was responsible for a different product set. There was very little shared development, learning or growing within the organization. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

50. % Communication Saturation Reducing roles increases communication 100 80 60 40 20 0 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 # Organization Roles Harrison, 2004 Through some team and product focus restructuring, the team was able to not only increase their communication saturation as shown in this picture, but also increase their productivity and quality. In this case, they were formed into two Scrum teams which funneled multiple product backlogs into their work queue. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

51. Team Communication Cut comm. by 5x Cut the t eam in ha lf 105 84 63 3 5 42 7 9 21 11 13 0 15 In order to increase effectiveness on a team, and therefore make meetings more effective, team size and the number of roles in an organization is critical. By reducing a team in half, you can reduce the number of communication paths by a factor of 5. Smaller teams are just more efﬁcient, they are much more efﬁcient. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

52. Team Size and Distribution Many companies leverage offshore development. However, one of the strongest at this is McKinsey & Company as presented through two reports at Agile 2009. In one case, they reduced onshore-offshore team size from 9 to an onshore team of 3 with improved productivity. In another case, they restructured their support and architecture organizations into a Scrum team to reduce support costs by a factor of 4. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

53. Visual Sprint Planning This team uses whiteboard walls to fully immerse into their sprint planning. After printing out their User Stories from Rally, they post them on the wall and then begin to discuss, diagram, split, share, write tasks, communicate, etc. After all of that is complete, they bring in their laptops and write the tasks back in Rally. Sprint planning in less than an hour. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

54. Visual Release Planning Through using themes and stores represented on cards, the team is fully engaged in a visual release planning session. It is through this hands on approach that begins to transition the ownership of the release from management to the team members. The team will identify all stories within a theme, size and prioritize them visually. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

55. Viasually Engaged Teams are more engaged when there is a visual representation of their work. When teams are engaged, they share more ownership and responsibility in the result. To transfer ownership from managers and ScrumMasters to team members, give the team something to hold do and own. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

56. Team Immersion Visual & Engaged Wireless Generation has one of the best team and meeting environments available. Their ofﬁce space is a warehouse-like open shell with team pods throughout. Each team pod has their visual release and sprint backlogs, space for the team members to work, and space for the team members to hold ALL of their meetings. Environments help make or break meeting effectiveness. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

57. Engage Conclusion: Evaluate Organization and Team Patterns to effect their performance and meeting effectiveness In each of these cases, the organizational and team structures played a key role in a teams ability to be effective in delivering value. This is directly impacted by their meeting effectiveness. So when looking at meeting effectiveness, it is necessary to look beyond the meeting behaviors. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

58. Summary To run effective meetings which drive productive and effective teams, separate the strategic and tactical context and create a quarterly strategic planning session. Visualize the work as much as possible to help the team foster new thinking and new solutions.Visualization also helps speed up the meeting. Finally, evaluate the organizational patterns of roles and team structures to create effective teams which can communicate, collaborate and engage. © Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC Friday, August 13, 2010

Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010

Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010

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Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010