The document discusses the challenges faced by organizations implementing Agile and Scrum, emphasizing the importance of transparency in identifying and solving dysfunctions within product development. It highlights the need for teams to embrace self-organization, continuous improvement, and adapt to evolving practices while considering economic impacts and systems thinking. The text also poses critical questions for Scrum Masters to evaluate and enhance team performance, ultimately advocating for a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to Agile methodologies.

1. Scrum Master
Or
Agile Master
SAIKAT DAS
SA, SASM,KMP, CSP, CSD,CSM, DAD-Yellow Belt,

3. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” --- more emphasis towards the right part
‘tools and technologies’ now due to -- Distributed Development and DevOps Automation
“Working software over comprehensive documentation” – Delivering incremental working software
is not enough. Teams now deliver a complete usable business functions at regular cadence.
“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” – Developing solution not only require
communication and collaboration with customer/end-users, but a whole lot of other stakeholders
“Responding to change over following a plan” Agile ways of working are all about planning with
a range of reoccurring planning events
Eclipsed Agile Values ??

4. Ken SchwaberIn an interview in February2008
The intention of Scrum is to make every inadequacy or dysfunction in product Development
transparent.
Unfortunately, many organizations change Scrum to accommodate the those instead of solving
them.”
I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in
getting the benefits that they hope for from it.
1. Does Scrum really expose the dysfunctions to be seen? Do we need Lean-Thinking ?.
2. Second, why do “many organizations change Scrum to accommodate exposed problem
instead of solving them”?
Is management incompetent, unmotivated?
- Alan Shalloway CEO, Net Objectives

5. Are we Change Ready?
• Organizational Change
• Leadership Change
• Team Change
• Status Change
• Job Description Change
• Role Change
• Culture Change

6. Createyourownbasicchecklistto
assessperformance Clear Team Vision, Sprint goal or focus, good quality User stories?
Scrum board up to date to make our work visible and transparent?
A dashboard to communicate to others the status of progress?
Does the team feel recognized and valuable?
Does the team, want to work with you again?
Do you Measure and shift Focus?

7. By knowing WHY we do what we do that…. we can do our best work,
Scrum Masters ensures that this basic enabler of team performance is clear.
Help the team define their purpose, so that the team finds their own definition
of success

8. It Is Important To Try New Things and
adapt your practices
The team you worked with yesterday
is not the same you will work with tomorrow
Clarity on how to think, without clarity on how to act,
leaves people unmoved. – Daniel H Pink

9. Measure all the things, keep notes and see the big picture
Get numbers on everything to see
trends and flagging
Look at metrics that show you how the “system” behaves so that you can help the team
understand their own context.
Crunch information to see Risk and
plan to mitigate, absorb or transfer
Categorize details to have broader
view to the areas of impact
Pick the high priority issue/risk/
impediment/blocker to work upon

10. Is that what is meant by self-organization as it pertains to agile?
SelfOrganizingTeams
No managers; team decide
what problems to solve or
what product to build.
No constraints –
tooling, architectural ,
budget, timing
Team decides the team and
work to be done.
Just facilitate and watch

11. Shift focus to the team
dynamics,
organizational
impediments,
interaction with
stakeholders, etc.
Once Team “Owns” the
process the Scrum Master
role is not over it grows
beyond

12. Agile is simply about managing (and shortening) your feedback cycles

13. Our methods must keep pace with
an increasingly complex world
• Agileshows the greatest promise but was
developed for small teams
• We need a new approach, one that
harnesses the power of Agile and Lean and
applies to the needs of the largest
development Enterprises

15. Decentralize
decision-
making
Take an
economic
view
Apply systems thinking
Assume variability;
preserve optionsBuildincrementally with
fast, integrated learning
cycles Visualize andlimit WIP,
reduce batch sizes,
and manage queue
lengths
Base
milestones
on objective
evaluation
of working
systems
Apply cadence,
synchronize with
cross-domain
planning
Unlock the
intrinsic
motivation of
knowledge
workers
Lean – Agile Principles
© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

16. “Understanding economics requires understanding of the interaction
amongst multiple variables.”
Taking an economic view does not always require knowing
“dollarized value” but is rather a general thinking tool
Define the economic logic behind decisions; empower
individualsand teams to actually make them
Validate key decisions based on how they impact the
Five variables

17. Indicators that may have surprisingly high
economic impact in the long run:
1. Cost of late defect fixing
2. Cost of branching with late merge
3. Cost of delayed performance testing
4. Cost of large batch of cross-team
dependencies
5. Economic value of test automation
6. Economic value of “Enablers,” such as
research spikes, refactors, etc.

18. • Severe project slippage is the most likely result
• The most important batch is the transport (handoff)
batch
• Proximity (collocation) enables small batch size
• Good infrastructureenables small batches

19. Systems thinkingComplex systems
development requires
disciplined, systematic
systems thinking
Optimizing a
component does not
optimize the system
The value of a system
passes through its
interconnections
A system can evolve
no faster than its
slowest integration
point
Understand and
optimize the full
Value Stream
Most inefficiencies and
impediments in your
process will
surface themselves as
delays in value delivery
Consider all steps as part of
the Value Stream, including
definition, analysis,
validation, and delivery
Customers and
Suppliers are part of
your Value Stream
Establish a culture of
continuous improvement of
the full Value Stream

20. The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course
• How large is your product
backlog? .
• Typical age of a user story in the
product backlog?
• Average lead time from an idea
to the backlog to delivery?
• Backlog with user stories team is
not familiar with?
• Frequency of Product Backlog
grooming?
• No. of user stories worked in
parallel during backlog
grooming?

21. The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course
• Time to groom a typical user
story take?
• How are you creating user
stories?
• Where are you discussing user
stories?
• Do you apply a “definition of
ready” standard to your user
stories? If so, of what ?
• Who is writing acceptance
criteria and in what format
• How are you estimating the
likely effort of a user story?

22. The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course
• Estimating in man-hours or story
points?
• Typical distribution of story sizes
in your sprint backlogs?
• Are you re-estimating user
stories at the end of a sprint?
• Velocity of the last three
sprints?
• Unfinished user stories within a
sprint and for what reasons?
• Are you changing user stories
once they become an item of a
sprint backlog?

23. The Next Level Scrum Master – Questions to stay on course
• Obstacles the team is facing
today?
• Dependencies on other teams
• Define and discuss at least three
key team goals for the project.
• What do team members hope to
achieve with this project?
• What can we do as a team to
make sure that we support each
other to achieve our team
goals?
• How should we celebrate success
for achieving our goals?

25. Linkedin - https://in.linkedin.com/in/saikatdas16
Twitter - @dsaikats