Rani has taken over as a scrum master for the team from another scrum master who has decided move to another group. While taking up the knowledge transfer from the existing scrum master, she understood the role and responsibilities including the facilitation of all the scrum ceremonies and product owners.
All the activities went on smoothly for 2 weeks (one iteration long) and as planned Rani completed the transition with feedback from the product owner, development manager as well as team members.
After about one iteration, product owner mentioned that he’s been expected to create and execute a complete disaster recovery plan for the product and asked the team to execute in the next sprint. He mentioned that the last time they ran this six months back and it took about 2 hours to complete the execution of the DR and expected that there would not be any changes in the scope of the current set of stories as well.
When Rani started looking at the scope along with the team, she uncovered that the DR plan had not been kept upto date for the past 6 months (even though the DoD for releases reflects keeping the plan updated).
What should Rani’s next plan of action. With Vardha cyclone that had hit Chennai, did you have to invoke your BCP/DR? How did you manage them?
Suggested solution:
Rani had understood that executing the Disaster recovery scripts and keeping all the documentation upto speed is a new scope in addition to the stories that were on the backlog already.
One of the first things that she did was to understand all the activities that need to be completed for DR (Acceptance Criteria).
The key deliverables were
1. Finding if the DR system has later software
2. Updating all scripts for the features created during the last 6 months
3. Do the actual DR during the maintenance window
4. Repeating #1,#2 based on the inputs.
With these ACs and creating more granular stories to accomplish each of them, she found that it was almost 40 story points scope by relative estimation.
Once the stories and ACs were presented to the product manager, he was surprised as he was under the impression that it was a 2 hour testing work that happened. He really appreciated the transparency that Rani brought out to the whole process. He spoke with the business stakeholders to conduct the tests in one month time as well as descoped some of the stories for the next 2 sprints.
WIth clear transparency and discipline in planning, Rani not only got time for completing the DR but she also understood that there is really no Minimal Viable Product when it comes to Disaster Recovery as the DR is the most important part of keeping business continuity. There is no point in taking a short cut.
9 Responses
An interesting “angle”! There is usually an emphasis on empathy among team members for better team work and self-organization. Would teams truly consider the manager/leader also as part of the team? Needs some mindset change. I think Emotional Intelligence training/coaching should bring out this aspect – that EI (Empathy being part of it) does not draw boundaries of applicability! Enjoyed reading a refreshingly different blog…
Thanks, Shiv. Yes, completely agree with your point on EI’s role in this regard. Gopal
Nice angle! And nice twist in the title of the blog!
Good perspective, which is normally missed.
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Nice article, Gopal.
We all know one filed where downwards empathy is hardly ever seen, but upward empathy is expected and demanded. Politics.
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Nice article, Gopal! Very good insight. Practicing Empathy needs an effort as it needs seeing the world from the perspective of the another person. It is all the more difficult when you do not see everything that the other person sees. I remember one instance in my life when a manager reporting to me was promoted to senior manager’s post and moved away from me on a new, higher level assignment. After a few days she came to meet me and I enquired how she was doing on the new role. She said, “Milind now I know the kind of pressure you faced from above. You never passed that onto us and kept us shielded. Now I know how difficult your role and life is. I am trying to be like you!” So, the true empathy comes out of having experienced similar situations yourself.
So, Milind is the message “a little empathy is better than a late empathy”?
Gopal,
Nice blog.
This is a very valid and necessary perspective that everyone should have.
Somehow, in most organizations, just like ‘agile’ is considered as something for the teams and team members, these may be labeled as management and only for managers – as part of the leadership development plans.
Some ways how I have contextualized this in some situations:
• At an individual contributor level: connecting to empathy as a key skill for design thinking [observing and understanding users]
• At a team level: the togetherness and one-team idea [teams making commitments, the huddles in cricket and other sports etc], to use daily standups, for example, to recalibrate oneself after sensing how the others feel on that day or in a particular situation
• For managers: understanding and doing what they can, to make their managers successful, particularly when the complaint is that my manager does not understand me or my needs