presentation given to ACS Agile Special interest group. Outlines my experiences as an Agile coach introducing Scrum to the team. By using psychology based approach to implementing Scrum we were able to guide them through the learning process over a three month period

1. How to teach your team Scrum in 3 months
Mia Horrigan
Director Strategy and Advisory Services
Zen Ex Machina
@miahorri
zenexmachina.wordpress.com

2. How do we learn a new skill?
• How the human mind works on collecting
information and then applying it ? and then
applying it ?
• Having an understanding of how you learn is
incredibly useful.
• Once you know how it all works, you can apply
the same principles to new skills

3. Learning to Drive

4. Needs to adapt to new way of thinking
• Gradual process that requires cognitive
processing to work with our abilities to perform
• Brain has to process info
• Relative speed to other cars
• Road Signs and signals
• What to focus on
• Apply that thinking to your behaviour
• It’s the same when learning any new skills

5. Saw an opportunity
• Manager saw an opportunity to give Team a new
skill and a unified process
• The transparency and collaboration he saw
emerging out of the intranet project was very
appealing to him
• Tend to think about Agile as a software
development approach
• Decided it might be adaptable to Business as
usual (BAU) to improve business processes and
gain efficiencies

6. Experiencing Pain
• Business unhappy at lack of progress (backlog of
work and new work coming in)
• Team working hard, long hours but not
delivering (starting a bit of everything)
• Waterfall not allowing them to adapt to changes
• No collective process to process new requests
• Team not sure which work was important
• Geographically dispersed
• Asked ZXM to help them implement Scrum

7. What is the Biggest Reason Why People Don’t Get
Good at a New Skill?

8. Lack of results
• Demotivates them, they quit
• Especially if they don’t have support through the
process
• Needed the team to trust in the process of
learning and stay motivated even when initially it
may seem “chaotic”

9. What is the best way to learn a new skill?
• We can read a book
• We can observe others
• We use a coach to facilitate learning and
behavioural change

10. Aim was to teach team Scrum in 3 months
By using psychology based approach to
implementing Scrum we were able to guide
them through the learning process
Conscious
Incompetence
Unconscious
Incompetence
You don’t know that
you don’t know
something
Month 0
You know that you
don’t know
something and it
bothers you
Conscious
Competence
You know that you
do know something
but it takes effort
Unconscious
Competence
You know how to do
something and it is
second nature to
you
Month 3

11. Month 0
UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE

12. Learning to Drive a Car
Unconscious Competence
http://canime.busybuild.co.uk/Mario-Kart.php

13. Started with a Workshop - Scrum 101
• Taught them the rules

14. Scenario based approach to learning
• Established these rules of scrum, its roles, its
controls, its processes by:
– Showing how Scrum works
– Giving team a practical lesson (lego)
– Ensured everyone was speaking the same
language, terminology
– Set expectations of using Scrum

15. Inspect and Adapt process
zenexmachina.wordpress.com

16. Creating the Product Backlog
•
•
•
•
3 streams BUT one product backlog
Thrown straight into developing user stories
Estimating stories
Ranking of stories

17. Visualised the products in flow
• Developed Kanban board
• Kinaesthetic learning

18. Month 1
CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE

19. Learning to Drive a Car
Conscious Incompetence
http://lolsnaps.com/news/51946/0/

20. Always chasing our tails….
• PMs assigning products to the Team
• Felt rushed and busy
• Still not completely moved away from their old
ways of working
• Chaos
• Uncertainty
• They were now conscious of their incompetence

21. There is a Learning Curve

22. Always chasing our tails….
• Still not completely moved away from their old
ways of working
• Still working on project issues from before the
sprint to 'please everyone and keep them happy'
– "But we're part of a bigger team"
– "We don't have the luxury of working on just these
projects"
– "We have to keep everything running"

23. What we did in reaction to this as their Coach
• Changed 2 week sprints to 4 week sprints
– 2 weeks too hectic
– 4 weeks 'felt right', but would be tested and
examined in retrospectives
• Pressed the PMs to act as Product Owners to
clearly define products and dedicate time to the
backlog

24. Concentrated on refining our estimations
• Took on too many stories
• Pressed the Team to move everything not yet
complete into the product backlog
• Concentrated on better estimations (relative
measures, Fibonacci scale

25. Moved the Kanban board to Jira
• Solved non-collocation issues
• Shared desktop to help drive the standups, planning and review sessions
Lost the high
visual
representation

26. Emerging issues
• Stories not being Done because they were
contingent on actions from outside the team
• Team not coming to ceremonies prepared
• PO still not having sufficient DoD and writing them
in the planning meeting
• PO chairing and controlling the meetings
– almost like status reports to the manager
– sprint review had replaced their traditional team meeting
– this meant the old behaviours just moved to the ceremony
•
This was an issue for strong resolution for us as
coach

27. Month 2
CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE

28. Learning to Drive a Car
Conscious Competence
http://www.proudinteractive.com/defensive-driving-courses-make-safe-drivers-on-the-road/
http://mylicence.sa.gov.au/road-rules/the-drivers-handbook/drivers-licensing

29. Starting to understand what needed to be done to get
better
• Projects that had been sitting around for ages
were actually getting done!
• Streams starting to talk about value in
discussions with business
• Passing on new requests to the product owner
for ordering of product value
–
–
they LIKED this :)
first sense of empowerment and self-management

30. Mood of the team
• Improved
• Starting to understand the process and getting
good momentum
• Keen to keep going with the process as it was
working
• Recognised need to break stories down further

31. Coached them through breaking down stories
• Stories too complex and not being completed
within the Sprint
• Looked at ways to break down the stories:
–
–
–
–
–
Workflow
Business rules
Non functional requirements
UI complexity
Core first then add value

32. Story hierarchy
• The product backlog was built up using a
hierarchy of themes, epics, stories and tasks
• Traceability from the lowest to the highest level
helped team members understand where their
work fits into the bigger picture

33. Defining the Product Backlog
Themes
• Strategies that define overall direction for Information Management
• Defined in the Information Management Strategy 2012-14
Business Intelligence
Stories
Community Broadcasting
Section want new reports to
be developed, because they
value meeting their KPIs
• A story requires a tangible outcome as specified in the Definition of Done
Epics
• Work requiring a number of pieces of effort
• Must have an outcome valued by business (not just internally by IMS)
• Written in the user-centred design format X wants Y because they value Z
Consult with business to
determine complexity of
reports
• Based on DoD, the story should be capable of completion in a single sprint
• May not have immediate business value if part of a larger epic
• Anything that needs to be done by the team in order to complete the story
Tasks
• Self-managed by team
Send final cost estimate to
business

34. Organised Product backlog
Do in Future sprints
60%
Unscheduled
stories
Proposed
priority stories
Do Next sprint
20%
Do Now
20%
Known priority
stories
This
sprint
Anyone can add stories
Team can move stories to Proposed priorities
Product owner can move stories to Known priorities
Team add stories they believe should be actioned next
If accepted, product owner moves to Known Priorities
Medium grain user stories (weeks of work)
Product owner adds stories and writes Definition of Done
Team review stories & estimate effort as part of grooming
Fine grain user stories (3-4 days of work)
During sprint planning, Known Priorities are accepted by team
based on capacity for delivery
Team work to achieve Definition of Done for each story

35. What we did as their Coach to highlight the CC
• Kept stories and DOD to things the Team could
commit to deliver in a single Sprint
• Team gained an understanding of capacity of the
team and individuals - helped with sprint
planning and commitment
• SM not PO Moved chairing ceremonies
• Tracked BAU time vs project time (30%)

36. Succession planning
• We put in behaviours so that ceremonies could
continue even if people weren't present
• Started putting in succession planning
- people had to arrange for another team member to
act on their behalf for demo/retro/sprint planning

37. Combined Standups
• Started to combine standups when there were
only a few team members available
– first opportunities to hear about other stream workin-progress
– first opportunity to identify areas for crosscollaboration across their old silos for work-inprogress
– first heads up of product backlog pipeline and
transparency of work in other silos

38. Month 3
UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE

39. Learning to Drive a Car
Unconscious Competence
http://www.whatpoll.com/best-driver

40. Issues at the beginning of the month
• New way of working not in sync with other
processes
– Utilisation
– Billable vs non billable work
• Left over story points (eg stories 'rolled
over' to the next sprint to account for
effort)

41. What to do when a User Story is Undone?
• Put it back into the Product Backlog?
• Partial credit or don’t reap the Story Points
for this Sprint?
• Re-estimate the remainder of the
complexity of the User Story
• Ensures that the Team’s velocity isn’t skewed
by the inflation of effort already spent

42. Action and Successes
• As a result of the single stand-ups in month 3 we
achieved radical visibility
–
–
Opportunities to be involved across silos
Emerging of pairing across silos on work
• PO was getting more input into products & DOD
• Finally getting into formalised backlog grooming
• Team scheduling time to break down the
product backlog with the PO
• Scrum well known and working for them

43. Team behaviour by month 3
• Knew what's coming up from conversations in
standups
• Knew to groom the backlog with the PO in order
to establish the DOD, estimations and tasks
• Asked to be involved in work across old silos
• PO comfortable to move to only stating the
WHAT and not nominally delegate it to team
members or prescribing HOW it should be done

44. Outcome at end of month 3
• Better understanding of commitment to take on
a product/story in a Sprint
• Greater visibility of BAU capacity
• Collaboration and pairing across old silos
occurred to complete tasks
• Not silos of 3 streams -- a single team with a
single, shared vision of how to get their work
done

45. So we gave them the keys to the car

46. Checked back at end of the 3 months
•
•
•
•
Rotating the SM role
One team
Keeping to their rule of 3
Seen as achieving outcomes
–
–
–
–
people noticed that they get stuff done
enhanced reputation amongst their business users
increased trust in the team
increased transparency amongst the business of how
the team work

47. Why a behavioural learning based approach?
• Demonstrates how to retrospectively assess
story complexity to improve capacity planning of
teams
• A framework for coaching agile teams based on
observing their behaviour to identify their of
learning
• It is the behaviour that needs to change to
ensure the agile approach is successful

48. Why was it sucessful/?
• Helpful in getting agile teams to understand
where they are at in their knowledge and skill
level and what they need to learn to improve
performance and achieve process improvement

49. Happy travelling - Fin

50. Contact Details
Mia Horrigan
@miahorri
zenexmachina.wordpress.com
Mia Horrigan
Mia.Horrigan@zenexmachina.com
http://www.slideshare.net/miahorri