Moving to Scrum of Scrums

It's about 10 months now that I have been working with a project team on a 1year and half long project. My role started as Project Manager, moved to Scrum Master and now I'm Coach/Agile guide.
As new to Agile, my team was pretty insecure 10 months ago on how will they get a handle of this huge project, AND do that in a new way, Agile, as part of the transformation the company is going through.
At the beginning, I started this project with 6 people.
2 months after there were 25 people involved (either core or external)
3 months after there were 45 people involved (either core or external)
5 months after we had a good understanding of the core team and externals.
There were about 30 people on the Core team and maybe another 30 as externals/SMEs/as-needed.

You can probably all jump and tell me how I should have started splitting this team right away into smaller teams. Yes, yes. I know.

I will tell you the 2 reasons I had  to continue with 1 big team for a little longer:
1- These teams did not know a lot about each-other's areas. Consider this a project like an app with multiple components, but all presented through 1 interface. It is something like what Spotify uses when they talk about their squads. But in this case these components were not talking in a "controlled" way to each other. Everyone knew well their component and a little bit about how their component connected with 1 or 2 other components. Looking at the big picture, nobody knew how all the pieces connected together and what was the ripple effect of a small change we would make on one component.By working together as 1 team, they got to learn a lot about each-other's areas, about the other components and understand better the effect of their changes. If you put this on the System thinking, we moved from a system where everything was complex, to a system where some components became complicated and some are still complex.

2. As new to agile, they all needed help with thinking, planning, reporting, understanding the meaning behind certain scrum ceremonies, etc. Doing most of the scrum ceremonies together, all of them got to hear from me the same message, at the same. Of course, I had to put more attention, time and coaching on the teams that were bigger and had to work on the bigger component. Nevertheless, after 7 -8 months working like this, they all got to a comfort place with what Scrum meant, how to run the ceremonies, what the Product Owner role was, what did I mean when I asked them "What do you really mean when you say - We are Agile?", etc. As part of this process, some people grew up naturally into some areas they didn't know they had the skills and strength to shine. For example, one of the Business Analyst showed a lot of skills that are required from a Scrum Master. Because we had multiple Product Owners, we had to pick one of them as Product Champion. He showed some really good leadership skills on handling not only his team (where he was playing the Product Owner role) but also coaching the other Product Owners of the other components. The Dev lead, grew as a technical coach for the developers we had to hire and for the new team of automation testers we started for the first time. The Project Manager went to a Scrum Master training and came back with a lot of energy to share.

So as per the pure spirit of the Agile development, this 1 project team grew empirically on knowledge about the product they are creating together AND on the process they are using while working together.

It was time to split them into smaller Scrum Teams.
I thought this would really easy, but I was wrong. Although the idea was taken as "Sounds great!" when I first presented to them during a Retrospective session, they were still hesitant to action on it. Project Manager was one of the members that put the foot on the break the hardest. She was feeling like she was loosing control of the project. How could she manage now these teams? How could she trust now these new Scrum Masters to do the job right? I know this because I found myself answering more than once questions like:  What will happen to X person that needs to go into all the other standups? How will we handle dependencies between these teams? How will we know when there are problems?
 So it took about 1 month and half to make this change official but we are now a project made out of  9 scrum teams with sizes from 3 to 14 people.

I need to break them again!!! 14 people is a big team and 3 people is a very small team. Yes, yes I know!

As a change agent, I have to pace changes I bring. It was a big deal to get here. I want them to focus now on getting better results within these smaller teams. I expect a better focus to their work, smaller iteration length on at least one of the teams and, a better focus and clear understanding on the dependencies between teams during the Scrum of Scrums sprint planning. Once I verify this hypothesis, we will decide what to do next.
The good thing is that now I have 9 Scrum Masters in training.  Pretty soon I will see a group of Scrum Masters discussing and solving issues between each-other, rather than look on my direction.

Kids as Products

I guess I am not the only person that is married to someone that comes from a different culture, and as such has different values in life. This is cool up to the point where you find yourself being played by the child, in our case a girl, pre-teenager. She comes to me and asks for something, I say No. She goes to daddy and asks for that same thing and hears Yes.
At her karate classes, I happened to meet her friend's grandpa', who happened to be a life coach. Often I spend the 1 hour karate class talking to him and, let's be honest, sometimes stealing some ideas from him. As an agile coach, anything people related is important to me so I have never enough good ideas to grab and use.
A week ago, he gave me this idea to have a meeting with my husband and decide on the Vision for our daughter. Once the Vision is defined and agreed, than when we get asked by her to do/buy/get/start  something, we can easily go back to the Vision and ask "Is this going to help her get one step closer to the Vision we agreed?" and if yes, then say Yes.
I just had a "Eureka!" moment. He considers my daughter like a product that we have to create!
I coach everyday my team to focus on the goal, what we want to achieve, how every story that we commit will bring us one step closer to the goal. I constantly remind my Product owners to go back to the Vision and make decision based on "Is this taking us one step closer to what we want to achieve?"
Now, I am not planning to take this literally and consider my daughter a product, with releases and versions and continuous delivery...nope! But having a Vision and using "Responding to change over following the plan" principle, I think it is a good way to align the efforts and decisions.
So we had a family meeting and we agreed to some basic and broad things. My daughter was present and she had a saying  about everything we put on the Vision. As a result we created also some personality attributes that she has to work on in order to achieve this Vision. For example,
Goal: Travel around the World and see a lot of places
Attribute required: Have an open mind and tolerance toward other cultures. Learn other languages.

As much as I wanted to put there "Goal: have PhD", I was pushed back :) Ok I get it. The idea is that we are not setting here specific goals. If she wants, she can open a bakery and make french bread rather than have PhD on Bio Chemistry. So we agreed that the number 1 goal is "Be Happy", whatever she decides to do.
Not sure where will go from here because now it needs some discipline to start using this, keep each-other accountable that all our decisions are helping to get one step closer to the Vision, etc, etc. But if nothing more, it was a good family meeting, good brunch at a nice restaurant, some good awareness of what the expectations for the future are and ....fun ... yeah, something like " if you want to have a private jet as a goal then  we can put PhD as well on the list ^-^"

Meeting Protocol and Context switching games

My team is going through a big integration stage and it is showing to be really complex situation. A lot of people are involved, they make plans and have meetings.
I am seeing a couple of problems:
- Meetings becoming a big waste of time
- Everyone multitasking

So we had a Lunch&Learn today and I played two games. One of them, The Meeting protocol, is something I came up with Gino Marckx, after his "Core protocols" session he had with the coaches last Friday. I put down here the plot and personas we came up with. It ended up really fun and they actually thought that Alignment Check was a good idea. Check-out did feel a bit rude for them (!) so they think they should rather say "I am ok now and got what I needed out of this meeting " not "I'm checking out". Also, when someone starts using phone or laptop during the meeting, they either say "I'm checking out" or someone will ask "Have you checked out?".
One thing was interesting during the acting. The guy that picked the Martin persona, did not get on the role at all. He continued being himself. So someone else jumped and asked: Can I act your role?. They agreed and I have to say that the second actor did a better job at the end.
According to some statistics about meetings, they have found that 55% of meeting is dominated by 2 people. This was really clear, Mary and Sam were constantly talking while Barb and Jane were more vocal during Alignment check. So Alignment check is a good technique to get the feedback from the quiet people during the meeting.

The other game was the Context Switching game.  We did not have much time for the Context switching so we played only the multiplication by 3 and Alphabet (skipped the multiplication by 5). I think even that was good enough to bring up the point and see the time spent between switching the tasks. It felt painful for the non participants to see how much the participants were trying to get back to where they left, so they started helping! Still, some parents with teenagers, think that listening music and doing home work, might not be bad. Maybe. At the end listening music does not request your envolvment/response/act on something. It's between texting and studying that the problem is. Let's see how this game will be received when they go home and play it with their teenagers. At least, parents are getting some learning out of it (and that's what I really care :) )

At the end, everyone enjoyed it and I heard one comment saying "This is the most fun I have had since I started this project"

MEETING PROTOCOL GAME

Plot:

Will ask for 4 people to volunteer and pick one piece of paper where there is a profile of the person they will act. Will give them some time to read their personas and answer any question, without revealing much of the plot

Facilitator will start the meeting with a quick check-in.

         -    “I am a bit tired but glad that holidays are almost here. How about you?”  

-  Give time to everyone to do a check-in quickly

Facilitator will continue with:

          -  We are having this meeting to come up with a solution about a team party for holidays. I have no ideas so far so I need your help.

Expected that at this point Susan will start talking.

Around minute 10, Facilitator to remind Mary to bring up the new idea about photo booth, by pushing a piece of paper to her: “Mary realizes that a positive event like the one she wants to have is a great opportunity for capturing 'fun times' with the team. So she adds an objective to her desired outcomes. Mary adds something like: I want a photo booth (or something similar) to allow people to take a souvenir of the party home. 

Facilitator keeps track of conversation and whenever notices that people are stuck/not aligning with resolution will do an alignment check by saying:

         -   On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you feel so far with the objectives you have for this meeting?

- Ask the person with the lowest score “How can we help you to get closer to 10?”

Meeting will be timeboxed to 20 minutes.

At the end of the exercise, Facilitator will point out the techniques used:

-          Check-in

-          Stating the meeting objective

-          Alignment check

More details: http://liveingreatness.com/additional-protocols/meet/

Personas  

Personas are created with two names, to cover cases when a female picks up the persona belonging to a male and vice versa.

 

Susan (or Sam)

She is extrovert by nature, always looking for ways to generate energy. She is usually the first to start a discussion and has strong opinions on how things should be done/ resolved. Sometimes, when people are proposing solutions that do not match her thinking, she might interrupt and point out what might be wrong with that thinking and what else can be done.

Susan needs to manage the budget, so she wants this party to cost as little as possible. She is adamant that there needs to be a party, though, even though to her it's just a must-do thing, she is not terribly passionate about it. But not having a party is not an option. 

 When people bring up ideas that will increase the cost for the party, she comes up with options that are more economic (like potluck, or order pizza).

Susan reaches her objectives when there is a party and she is confident that it can be done at a reasonable cost.

Susan’s objective for this meeting:

"I want a team event where everyone shows up and the party doesn't cost us too much."

Bill (or Barb)

He is quiet, smart and very detail oriented. He wants to have a perfect party, where everything is taken care off and there will be something for everyone. Bill is always keen on helping other people organize things, so he will likely end up volunteering to find a venue, order food, drinks, name it... but in order to do so, he wants to have everything carefully planned out.

For every idea that comes on the table, he asks details like what food to order to consider allergies, what drinks to have, from what time until when, will there be dress code, etc. 

Bill reaches his objectives when he has a clear plan with sufficient detail for him to walk away and organize the party, either alone or with help. 

Bill’s outcome for this meeting:

I want to come out of this meeting with a good understanding of the party plan and some action items where to begin with the party organization tasks.

Mary (or Martin)

She is an introvert by nature. She doesn't speak often, but when she does, her opinions are strong and show a ton of wisdom. She really cares about the team and feels that the event needs to be fun for everyone. She does not see value in a party for the sake of a party, she wants the team to walk away feeling they spend valuable time together and come out as a stronger team. 

After about 10 minutes, Mary realizes that a positive event like the one she wants to have is a great opportunity for capturing 'fun times' with the team. So she adds an objective to her desired outcomes. Mary adds something like: I want a photo booth or something like that to allow people to take a souvenir of the party home. 

Mary reaches her objectives when she feels there is a plan for an event where everyone can have fun and can take a souvenir back home. 

Mary's objective for the meeting is:

I want the event to allow us to really connect as a team and be fun for everyone. 

John (or Jane)

He is a social guy, he is interested in an event, but doesn't really have a strong opinion on what needs to happen. He supports everyone in getting their objectives and just wants to get this party organized so he can hangout with everyone in a non-work related setting. He realizes that all other participants need to buy in to make it happen. 

John reaches his objectives when all other meeting participants have reached theirs.

John's meeting objective is:

I want Susan, Bill and Mary to get what they want. 

 

Back at Agile Tour Toronto

Agile Tour Toronto 2012 is probably the first Agile conference I attended fully aware of my purpose to learn, share, steal ideas and use everything I could hear around.
One year after, I decided to attend as a speaker. I submitted two sessions and one of them got selected, the one where I would present solo. The idea I had submitted was not new and for some,  the concept of T shaped people was quite familiar. I had about 2 months to prepare the slides and refine the game I had in mind to play. The very fist slide I created for this presentation had this picture.

I find this photo very funny but also captures the message I wanted to pass to people that are "thrown" into Agile teams and feel like they lost their identity by becoming "just" a team member. And off course I was tweaking the deck till last minute, trying to make it better. I am pleased to report that the session went well and I got some really good feedback in the grade of "9 out of 10". Off course some criticism too, but nothing lower than "6 out of 10".
 What made a difference this time, was that I changed my participation from "Attending" to "Presenting". I also decided to help with reviews of the submissions, twitting about it, paired up on CoachClinic, etc. This year I wanted to make Agile Tour Toronto better experience. What I learned, in no particular order:

- It is pretty much a full time job to put together an event like that. Considering that the guys and girls doing the work are volunteers, Kudos to all of them for the extra time, effort and passion they put into making things happen!
- Gift bags have awesome chocolates! So good, I didn't want to share them with my family
- It's a great event to hang out with other Agilistas in Toronto. I feel now part of this "Agile family" where a number of familiar faces have found ways to stay connected and have a beer together once in a while.
- There is always something new to learn. Not just for beginners, but also for the experienced ones. The trick is to use it right away when you go back to work.
- There are quite a few technical people in Toronto and together they make a fine group of Software crafters
- Projectors of the hotel do not work with my laptop. I really appreciate the previous speaker in my room and also my colleague Gino Marckx for leaving his laptop back so I could use it for my presentation.
- A good keynote speaker sets the stage properly and pumps up the blood in the right way. Gojko did a really good job with his "Make impact" message.
- The number of people that want to participate on these events gets higher every year.
- Sponsors on booths are not all about selling. Some want to "buy" you
- There is always room for improvements
- There are about 5 Firkin pubs downtown Toronto and sometimes you might book your event on the wrong one (or they might forget that you booked)

MVP-BFF, Tomato-Tomato

While the transformation is progressing well with Agile thinking being integrated in all areas of the Enterprise, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are a sore area that my client is trying to work out.
Because of the draw of the sticks, usually QA is the team that is pointed as the bottle neck on the delivery. Why? Because it is last on the process. Why? Because the feature work doesn't start with testing in mind. Why? Because the features are still being designed and built with very little input from QA. Why? Because the system is complex and testing end to end for a small change is very expensive.
So the ball ends into QA's port. In order for QA to do something about being called bottleneck, the feature delivery should start with the end in mind, with a thin slice of functionality. And the QA manager at my client, came up with this idea on his own, after a long week of thinking stuff over, on his way to Sunday golfing. His thinking was to start working on "Basic Functionality First". The way he explains this is:
If the goal of the project is to create an online store, start with setting up a way for a client to order a sprinkler using only Visa. Client should be able to go online, select the only item available (a sprinkler), pay for it with Visa and have it delivered home in 3 days. This is the BFF. Once this is proven, start adding more items, more ways of payments, etc,

For a mature Agile ear, this is the concept of MVP, where you deliver to the client the Minimum Viable Product and then based on the feedback expand and add more features.
When I heard him explaining BFF, MVP came to mind but I decided not to ask him to use MVP. He liked BFF, it is original, makes sense on that company and it is THEIRS. It is not something that someone else is talking about, and maybe on a different context.
So BFF is now something everyone talks about and everyone wants to see it happening. In the spirit of making BFF work, the need for Automation Testing and a Continuous Integration system is identified. You can't have BFF without a good CI system, right?! But to have a CI system in place, you need Dev team to work with Ops team. Guess what? DevOps is now on the table and is being considered!
It is amazing what the intrinsic motivation can do! Way more than I was thinking and how I was thinking to run with it. Pfffff.. my plan sucked! My plan was not a BFF.
I am well aware that setting up a CI and DevOps on an Enterprise organization that is complex and sort of behind in technology is not an easy bite. But once again, I am experiencing, an agile transformation hitting the technical wall. There is so much you can do with only Agile thinking. Technology has to step it up and support all that. Call it MPV, call it BFF it is the same need over and over.
No offense to Eric Reis, but I like BFF better than MVP. Has a more collaborative and amicable tone! I imagine Developers, Testers and Business holding hands and running together on green fields, with a cycadelic tune behind it!
BFF FTW!

My first Agile 20xx conference

Yes, was my first and I went as a speaker! The proof is on the shiny gold letters.
Well, co-speaker really. I presented with Jason Little  on what we have been working on during last year, Transforming a Public sector company  to Agile. It was definitely an experience that I had to go through and feel it by myself, while working with a PRO on presentation like Jason.
I am very happy that our presentation went really good. I was impressed that our talk got the attention of some really cool names in Agile circles like Ellen Gottesdiener,  Jeff Morgan (aka Cheezy), Diane Zajac-Woodie, Leslie J. Morse, Mike Bowler, Alexis Hui, Raj Mudhar, Jake Calabrese, etc. Receiving a positive feedback from them meant A LOT!
It was really good that our session was on the first block. After that, I could enjoy the rest of the conference. And there were a lot to enjoy there. As a first timer, I didn't know how to maximize my time there. I tried to pick a session where I would benefit the most, but I don't think I did well. There were so many good sessions and I know I missed a lot. The other thing I missed were the non-official sessions going on outside the rooms. I kick myself for not spending more time there. The one time I stopped by, I laughed the most. Matt Barcomb and Bryan Beecham started a game on how to best use the estimation cards. A lot of people joined the circle after we started and a lot of rules were set and re-set. The game at the end was called "Promiscuous Poker" (don't ask why) and we intend to publish it as Plan H for our early retirement.   
I was really proud to see Alias on one of the slides from Jeff Patton. I have worked at that company for 11 years and I know that what we did there was special and unique, until was acquired.
The session with Sue Johnston and Andrew Annett was great too. People like me, that think while talking, have a lot to learn from them.
The surprise of the conference for me was Andrew Shafer.  First he surprised me by reading "The commitment" book at the party, on the boat. Then he surprised me for keeping me awake on the very first session in the morning, after a long party. I really enjoyed his point of view and I proposed him to be the keynote speaker for next year. He ended his presentation with something like "You are awesome. Continue learning. Go!" that would have been the right message to open the conference.
Another session I enjoyed was Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson. They work together like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, beautiful harmony, fun and entertainment.
The best story I heard: after a presentation, Mike Cohn and his assistance discussed about the next venue and decided on the hotel where to hold the venue. Mike went home and next day he gets a message from her saying "Mike, the hotel is booked". Happy with the results, Mike considered this venue all set up and ready to go. 2 weeks before the venue, he gets an email from her saying "Mike, what are gonna do about the next venue. We don't have a hotel yet and there is no time left". He writes back and calms her down, reminding the email where she told him that the hotel was booked. To which she replied "Yes Mike, the hotel is booked as: There is a wedding and the hotel is booked!". Oops!
I have a lot of things to remember from this conference. Nashville, the huge hotel Opryland, Tootsies, first time to try fried green tomatoes, 3 hour naps during the day, Bourbon beer, meeting all these "agile rock stars" that I knew from books or Tweeter, feeling comfortable in the crowd that spoke my language, got a hairy LeanDog hat, first karaoke (duet with Declan Whelan) "Superstitious", awesome guacamole made fresh in front of us, and the feeling like I was on a different planet without gravity.

Disconnect the tool from the mindset shift

The team I am working with is new to Agile. They are fully aware of being for a long time on Waterfall environment and moving to Agile is something they are struggling with.
One the things they are struggling a lot is the tracking of the project.
Working with MS Project, tracking activities, tracking the time spent to the project to the minute, is so deep on their way of thinking, planning, doing and behaving that over and over I find myself pulling them up a level to get them to track stories, value and deliverables.
On the same time that they are asked to shift the thinking and what they track, they are presented with a new tool. It can be any tool but everyone know about Jira, Rally, VersionOne, etc. So I'm not gonna say what is the tool here, let's just call it StoryTtacker.
What I constantly hear is the blame about this tool. How will we enter the stories to StoryTracker? How will we break the stories to StoryTracker? How will we track in StoryTracker the big stories that we can't break into smaller chunks that fit in one sprint? I need to create a story in StoryTracker about the meeting I have next week with another group. Testing should be a story in StoryTracker because is really big.
I have heard the same complains before on another place where instead of the StoryTracker we used just stickies on the board. Exactly the same issues.

So today I got an AHA!! moment. It's not the tool to blame, it's the story tracking thinking.
They are struggling with working with stories, with giving value to a story, with understanding what the story is for a user, with understanding who the user is for the work that is being done, with understanding what the GOAL is for the story that will be done on the next sprint.

I'm thinking that I might suggest to them to use MSProject as story tracker if they think they will do a better job with that. The conditions will be that we will not track activities and meeting. Continue to track stories, but let's see if the problem is the tool or the mind set.
First thing I'm gonna challenge them when I get back to work after the Agile 2013 conference in Nashville.