Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010

Death by Scrum
Meeting @ Agile2010

Pete Behrens
Agile Leadership Coach
@petebehrens
trailridgeconsulting.com
© Copyright 2010 Trail Ridge Consulting, LLC
Friday, August 13, 2010

Stories and pictures from around the US and more...

What challenges are you facing?

It’s not about meetings...

It’s about leadership

of people

and environments
P = ⨍(p,e)
Derby, 2009


The Journey
Focus Visualize Engage


Focus
Context Matters


Why was Scrum created?


Teams & Timeboxes

Focus & Feedback


Scrum Meetings
Release Planning

Sprint Planning
Sprint Review
Sprint Retrospective

Daily Scrum


Does Scrum have too many meetings?


Lencioni doesn’t think there are too many meetings, but...

Meetings are
boring and
ineffective

They drive the
culture of an
organization


Meetings are
ineffective

They lack context
or focus


Lencioni’s
Focus/Frequency
recommendation

Strategic
Quarterly

Tactical
Bi-weekly

Daily


Scrum Meetings Focus/Frequency Meeting
Looks alot
Strategic like Scrum...
Release Planning
Quarterly

Sprint Planning
Tactical
Sprint Review
Bi-weekly
Sprint Retrospective

Daily Daily Scrum


Most complaints come from too much time...

16 Daily Scrum
10%
Retrospective
12
hours

Review
8
Planning
4

0
1 2 3 4
Sprint Length (in weeks)
Keep meeting
time under 10%


Sprint Meeting Time
16
10%
12
hours

8 Daily Scrum
Retrospective
4 Review
Planning
0
1 2 3 4
Sprint Length (in weeks)
In order to reduce sprint meeting times and increase meeting effectiveness, a number of things
need to be addressed - Strategy,Visualization and Engagement. Each of these will be addressed in
this presentation.


Scrum Meetings Focus/Frequency Meeting Duration

Strategic
Release Planning 120-240 min
Quarterly

Sprint Planning 60-120 min
Tactical
Sprint Review 30-60 min
Bi-weekly
Sprint Retrospective 15-30 min

Daily Daily Scrum 5-15 min


Scrum Meetings Meeting Duration
When we skip strategy,
everything falls apart
Release Planning 120-240 min
0 min
S**t falls down

Sprint Planning 60-120 min
240-960 min
Sprint Review 30-60 min
60-120 min
Sprint Retrospective 15-30 min
60-120 min

Daily Scrum 5-15 min
30-60 min

Story: The 1 hour daily

With a two week release cycle, often teams are just focused on the immediate
work. In this case, it turned every day into a 1 hour daily meeting. Create a
quarterly release cycle to address strategy, which will focus each sprint more
clearly. Use the sprint planning to address the tactical, and only the daily for
immediate coordination issues.


Story: The stealth release

Even with a 3 year development release, as in the case of this medical device
company, create quarterly release milestones for focus and feedback. Here they
are engaging actual physicians, clinicians and IT administrators in a milestone
internal release.


Story: Creating a rhythm

Create a daily, sprint and release rhythm to keep the
ﬂow, focus and feedback. In this case, Salesforce.com has
created a seasonal release timeline with monthly
corporate sprint cycles and 2 week team sprint cycles.
They have met release deadlines for 3 straight years.


Focus
Conclusion: Meeting Context Matters

Meetings are critical to collaboration/coordination of
teams focusing on work in short productive sprints

Spend more time on strategy every quarter

If Sprint and Daily meetings are long - typically indicates
that strategy was not addressed properly

Why is strategy so hard and often left out?

Because it’s not hard-wired


Visualize
Our potential is just being realized


Prefrontal Cortex
PFC
Memorizing
Recalling
Deciding
Understanding
Inhibiting
Small
Hungry
Limited
The PFC is a relatively new development in the brain. It is the primary thinking part of our
brain. Unfortunately, it is very small and can only hold about 4 items at a time. To do more
complex thinking, memory swapping and complex maps allow it to process more. However, this
uses a lot of energy within the brain and degrades throughout the day of using it.


Visual Cortex
Store, recall, link VC
Images

We think in pictures

Efﬁcient
Powerful
Evolved
Helper
The VC is one of the most powerful elements of our brain and can help our PFC. The brain
stores either visual or auditory maps - however the auditory maps are also relatively new to
language development and therefore much less powerful. In order to help our thinking, we must
do more to incorporate the visual cortex to help people see the space we are working in.

Problems vs. Solutions
Problems are hard-wired
Solutions are not


Thinking
Known problems
inside the
Current solutions
box

Our brain only stores what we have seen and created. Therefore, when we think, we mostly
think about things we have seen before or know about. This is what we call “thinking inside the
box”. To create new solutions, it requires our PFC to form new ideas from existing ones.


New
Solutions
Must be
Envisioned

This depicts the eyes seeing a picture, using the VC to visualize it in the brain, then through the
PFC, moving the pieces around to form new conﬁgurations. Doing this almost always engages
the visual cortex. The more we can external engage the visual cortext in meetings will help our
team’s think outside the box.

Do you play planning poker?
Why? When?

Planning poker relies primarily on the auditory brain

While Planning Poker is an excellent way to engage team members in conversation around a
story, they tend to limit the visual cortex. Not being able to see the stories in context of each
other creates silo’d thinking. We will see other ways to visualize story points.


Do you use User Stories?

User Stories are another
primarily auditory
communication that can invoke
the visual cortex.

However, the noise involved in
all of the other words within
the User Story tend to obscure
the picture and it looks like
static.

One technique is to highlight
key words or phrases to
separate the key points from
the noise to help the brain
visualize it more clearly.


Use titles and
underline words
in User Stories.


Categorize and Color Backlogs

To help the PFC process more easily, categorize the backlog in themes. Color coding themes
also helps the brain visually distinguish work, especially when cards are moved around for sizing
and prioritization. Here you see that only titles are used - no user stories. This is a quarterly
strategy session output - a release backlog.

Before the quarterly strategy release planning session...

Roles

Areas

Stories

Release
Goal
Before their quarterly release strategy
session, they had a release goal and
some proposed User Stories for the
roles and product areas.


After a quarterly strategy release planning session...
Roles

Acceptance
Criteria

Spikes
Stories

Working as a team, they discussed the known stories, created and split other stories, discussed
acceptance criteria, and ﬁlled in all of the holes in their knowledge with spikes to go research.
This was a strategy session for one quarter of their 3 year product release. In addition, roles
and product areas are visualized in a grid to help isolate functionality and usability.


Visualize Size

A more effective visualization approach to estimating size is to use an afﬁnity-based estimation
technique. Just arrange backlog items smallest to largest, then bucket into story points. The team
does this collaboratively moving them around a table or on a wall.


Visualize Time

This is a 6 month release cycle with multiple themes represented. Each story has been
estimated and prioritized. The dates are only approximations, but will be validated and negotiated
through actual velocity.


Visualize Time

Another time visualization with various themes represented. In this case, they have separated
what their two quarter goals are and will track accordingly.


Visualize Assignments


Visualize Goals


Visualize Dependencies


Visualize Strategy

To support their seasonal release rhythm, Salesforce.com has a multi-team (30-60 teams)
coordinate all of their strategy release sessions together. This helps identify shared goals,
collaboration and dependencies across teams and product areas.


Visualize Dependencies

Here is a picture of evaluating some of the technical dependencies between teams.


Visualize
Conclusion: In order to run effective meetings, visualize
as much as possible to help people see new solutions


Engage
Unleash the power of the organization


Organizational Patterns
All organizations have
communication patterns
based on their structures -
roles, responsibilities, and
environments. This chart
shows communication of a
development process -
brighter red is more central
in communication.

In this case, there are two
patterns present which are
limiting effectiveness - the
number of roles is large and
the manager roles are central
in the communication path.

Through changing the
structure of the
organization, we can impact
their effectiveness in
productivity and meetings.


Roles and communication
% Communication Saturation
100

80

60

40

20

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
# Organization Roles Harrison, 2004

Because there are so many roles in this organization, their communication saturation is very low
- this measures the actual role-to-role communication versus their potential. To increase
communication, and thus meeting effectiveness, they need to reduce their roles and re-locate
their producer-type roles into the center of the communication.

Team Structure
Here is another
communication map from a
different company. In this
case the number of roles is
much less and the developer
is at the center of the
communication, but there is
still a very limited
communication saturation.

In this case, team structure
was central to their
communication. As this team
was modeled, each developer
was responsible for a
different product set. There
was very little shared
development, learning or
growing within the
organization.


% Communication Saturation Reducing roles increases communication
100

80

60

40

20

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
# Organization Roles Harrison, 2004

Through some team and product focus restructuring, the team was able to not only increase
their communication saturation as shown in this picture, but also increase their productivity and
quality. In this case, they were formed into two Scrum teams which funneled multiple product
backlogs into their work queue.

Team Communication

Cut comm. by 5x
Cut the t
eam in ha
lf
105

84

63

3
5 42
7
9 21
11
13 0
15
In order to increase effectiveness on a team, and therefore make meetings more effective, team
size and the number of roles in an organization is critical. By reducing a team in half, you can
reduce the number of communication paths by a factor of 5. Smaller teams are just more
efﬁcient, they are much more efﬁcient.

Team Size and Distribution

Many companies leverage offshore development. However, one of the strongest at this is
McKinsey & Company as presented through two reports at Agile 2009. In one case, they reduced
onshore-offshore team size from 9 to an onshore team of 3 with improved productivity. In
another case, they restructured their support and architecture organizations into a Scrum team
to reduce support costs by a factor of 4.

Visual Sprint Planning

This team uses whiteboard walls to fully immerse into their sprint planning. After printing out
their User Stories from Rally, they post them on the wall and then begin to discuss, diagram,
split, share, write tasks, communicate, etc. After all of that is complete, they bring in their laptops
and write the tasks back in Rally. Sprint planning in less than an hour.

Visual Release Planning

Through using themes and stores represented on cards, the team is fully engaged in a visual
release planning session. It is through this hands on approach that begins to transition the
ownership of the release from management to the team members. The team will identify all
stories within a theme, size and prioritize them visually.


Viasually Engaged

Teams are more engaged when there is a visual representation of their work. When teams are
engaged, they share more ownership and responsibility in the result. To transfer ownership from
managers and ScrumMasters to team members, give the team something to hold do and own.

Team Immersion Visual & Engaged

Wireless Generation has one of the best team and meeting environments available. Their ofﬁce
space is a warehouse-like open shell with team pods throughout. Each team pod has their visual
release and sprint backlogs, space for the team members to work, and space for the team
members to hold ALL of their meetings. Environments help make or break meeting effectiveness.

Engage
Conclusion: Evaluate Organization and Team Patterns to
effect their performance and meeting effectiveness

In each of these cases, the organizational and team structures played a key role in a teams ability
to be effective in delivering value. This is directly impacted by their meeting effectiveness. So
when looking at meeting effectiveness, it is necessary to look beyond the meeting behaviors.


Summary

To run effective meetings which drive productive and effective teams, separate the strategic
and tactical context and create a quarterly strategic planning session.
Visualize the work as much as possible to help the team foster new thinking and new
solutions.Visualization also helps speed up the meeting.
Finally, evaluate the organizational patterns of roles and team structures to create effective
teams which can communicate, collaborate and engage.

Thank you
Pete Behrens
@petebehrens
pete@trailridgeconsulting.com
www.trailridgeconsulting.com


Death by Scrum Meeting Agile2010

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