Omega systems worldwide Inc. is a Software Platform and Solutions provider in the areas of Customer Relationship Management and Healthcare systems. They have been in the Agile/Scrum journey for over 5 years now. While they have achieved a fair degree of consistency with Agile implementation in various teams across the organization, they have not experienced the kind of success that they expected when they introduced Agile in the first place. Despite this, their leadership has been very supportive of Agile.
Omega has employed you as an Agile coach to coach teams across the organization in their bid to achieve successful business outcomes with Agile. One thing you find as an Agile coach is that all teams have been trained on Scrum and Omega has also evolved an organizational process for working with Scrum and implemented an in-house developed Project Management tool that supports Scrum.
One of the teams that you coach called the Tigers, is working on the engine software for the platform. When you attend their retrospective for a sprint, one of the things that comes up is the fact that the team has been missing planned commitments by a fair margin during the last four to five sprints, despite good planning and detailed task effort estimation as required by the organization’s process. As you seek to find reasons for this, one of the team members suggests that the team should experiment in the upcoming sprint by skipping detailed task estimation and volunteering for tasks as part of their sprint planning session on day 1. He suggests that they should just stop with task break-down for the stories as part of sprint planning. He feels that the team needs to use daily stand-ups to decide who will do what tasks and focus on completing stories one at a time. He says the team needs to collaborate effectively to complete as many stories as possible through this approach. The entire team supports this idea after some discussion.
What would you recommend as a coach? Isn’t this going against the organization’s defined process for sprint planning and tracking that requires detailed effort estimates as part of sprint planning? Do you believe this approach could address the problem that the team is facing?
Suggested Solution:
The situation here seems to be one where the team wants to experiment with an approach that they believe could improve their say/do ratios (they have been consistently failing in the last 4 to 5 sprints in meeting commitments). The suggestion is from one person (and this is not the Scrum Master or you as coach), and the team says yes to it. However, as a coach you need to ensure that the team is saying so wholeheartedly – and not because they are tired of the conventional way of planning and want to avoid some steps in the process.
The argument about going away from the organization recommended process is a feeble one – especially since Agile is about learning and adapting from experience. The process is a guideline and teams should be able to tweak it as long as they are not violating any of the agile values and principles.
The key aspect here is the ownership demonstrated by the team in doing whatever it takes to improve their predictability of delivery. Towards this, if the suggestion is coming from a team member, and the team says yes, you would find high levels of ownership in making it work. At the end of the day, if the team is collaborative in planning and execution on an on-going basis, and committed to making something work, specific process steps do not matter. In this case, they are planning to use the daily stand-up as an effective planning (re-planning) and tracking tool which is fine.
I have personally seen a team that has adopted this exact approach and been very successful so I would allow the team to experiment and learn from it. If they find that this approach has not worked after a couple of sprints, they should be (and will be) willing to re-look at the process they used and change as required.
4 Responses
Hi Shiv, I can relate to this, it is a real different world.
I was invited a few times to address students appearing for CET exams as an industry person and found it challenging to connect with them. I was able to connect somewhat as one of their concern was what if they do not get into a good college, which I was able to address by sharing real life examples.
Thanks Vasu. College “brand” no doubt helps early on in work life – corporate doors open more easily. But down the line, it is people’s motivation and track record that helps build careers. I am sure we have all seen examples affirming this. I have stressed with the mentees that I work with. An aside, the mentorship program I am involved in spans 4-5 months and so, I have had time to work on the “connect”! Yes – takes time and effort.
Hi Shiv – very well written – thanks for the write-up.
Many years ago I was a volunteer mentor for a couple of youth as part of Dream A Dream’s life skills mentoring program. This was in person mentoring where the mentee and I would meet periodically (usually on a weekend) and discuss general topics. There was no prescribed structure though all mentors did go thru a few hours of in person training. Based on that experience I can corroborate that it takes time for the mentee to open up, especially in that case given their lack of confidence in expressing in English which was the recommended language for communication. Switching to Tamil (in one case where the mentee was from Tamil Nadu) helped.
Can also relate well to your point on swings in mood and engagement level of the mentee and the need for mentor to shift gears accordingly.
I am sure the mentees are benefiting a lot from your vast and varied experience – hope you will come back to mentor more such students after you complete the current mentorships and possibly take a break!
Thank you, Bhasker!