Improve Scrum Team Productivity
Are you wondering how to create or improve your agile Team’s effectiveness and throughput?
If you are, this service offering and these ideas will help you achieve that goal.
Traditional ways to improve Scrum Team Productivity and their challenges
Today our industry has two primary ways to learn and adopt agile.
Option #1 - Traditional Coach/Consultant
You can hire or contract an agile coach to stay with your Team for 90 days or longer. While the Team’s productivity will likely improve in the short term, the effects are not usually long-lasting. Agile teams using this approach of short-term and intense change almost always fall back into old ways of working within a short time of the coach leaving the group.
Change proves to be too difficult for the Team to sustain, especially if the Team has learned
several new things simultaneously.
BTW Scrum was initially designed with the Scrum Master acting as the Team Coach. However, somewhere along the agile adoption journey, our industry developed a new term called “Agile Coach” and made this a full-time role, interesting but unnecessary.
Option #2 - Agile Team Training only
You can send the Team on additional agile training. Training can be helpful depending on the Team’s agile journey. One consideration, when choosing agile training, we recommend that all the team members are trained together, so everyone has a common understanding. Club Agile can provide a 2-day agile course.
5 Things we learned that makes Agile stick
We want to share with you five things we learned about agile team coaching that lead to
success:
- Ethnography counts. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the subject’s perspective (in this case, the Scrum Master and Team). In other words, this study’s how the Scrum Master and Team do things when the coach is not there; that is the real test. We want the Team to be high-performing without a full-time Coach overseeing them.
- People change slower than we want, so you have to break down the improvements into small pieces.
- Full-time coaching can be costly because of idle time when the teams are executing on their projects.
- One Agile Coach spread over several teams to reduce costs only frustrates the coach and Team since they do not get the answers they need, and the agile coaches spend most of their time putting out fires.
- Teams with a full-time coach develop something we call “learned helplessness”. Teams become dependent on the Coach for answers and don’t develop the skills to look inside the Team to solve their challenges.
We can all agree our industry needs a different approach to improving Agile Team Productivity. To solve this issue, ClubAgile has partnered with Scrum Masters to create the Agile Team Coaching Program to help you improve Agile Team Productivity.
12 WEEK AGILE TEAM COACHING PROGRAM (ATCP) OVERVIEW
The ATCP provides a more effective way to help an agile Team improve and make those improvements stick.
Agile is a team sport; exceptional outcomes come from high-performing cross-functional customer-focused teams. This 12-week agile training and coaching program helps the Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the Team simultaneously. We focus on the Team to give them the additional training and coaching they need to succeed.
As you read through this description, the other unique item you will notice is that we provide the PMI agile decision tool Discipline Agile using the DA Browser.
Disciplined Agile Delivery Decision Support Tool
Disciplined Agile provides 143 critical decision points that all agile projects should consider, along with over 1,500 practices with recommendations and trade-offs for each.
As appropriate, we will show your Team how to use this free online tool to rapidly improve and support themselves after the coaching program.
The ATCP has three steps.
Step #1 - Introduction to Agile Team Coaching Program and Create A Plan
Three meetings to gain background and develop a plan:
- one hour meeting with the Scrum Master
- one hour meeting with the Team
- and lastly, a one-hour session with the manager they report to
With the background from these meetings and in collaboration with management, Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the Team, we will create a backlog of improvements with KPI’s we will work on over the 12-week program.
Additionally, we introduce the Team and Management to the concept of Lean and Flow, which will be our primary metrics to measure improvement.
We will report on and measure:
- work in progress
- throughput
- sprint progress relative to “done.”
- impact of late User Story acceptance
- effect of adding work into the Sprint (adding scope)
- symptoms the Team is experiencing that is contributing to completing on-time
Lastly, Club Agile assigns a dedicated Agile Performance Coach who will work with the Team until the 12-week program is complete.
Step #2 - 1 day - Program Kick off - 4 hours
- Stand up Team & Kick-off Scrum Master and Team Coaching Program
- Agenda
- Prepare User Stores for the first Sprint.
- Facilitate Sprint Planning session including estimating
- Develop initial release plan
- Facilitate Sprint Review
- Facilitate a 1-hour Disciplined Agile workshop to show how this tool helps teams make faster and better software delivery decisions.
Step 3 - 12 weeks - Scrum Team Engagement and Management Progress Reporting
Scrum Team Engagement and Process – Weeks 2-12 inclusive
- Bi-weekly 1 hour Scrum Master meeting to review progress toward goals and provide coaching support to help Scrum Master progress to completion.
- Provide Weekly, small training sessions to fill knowledge gaps within the teams.
- Knowledge material development with Scrum Master so they can teach their Team.
- Bi-weekly 1-hour Team, Scrum Master and Product Owner meeting, ideally after or during the retrospective (alternating with the Scrum Master meeting)
Management Progress Meetings - Weeks 6, 10, and 13
- Management Report
- What we saw
- What we learned
- Where we need to focus
- The report and discussion will be scheduled as one-hour meetings.
Outcomes from 12 weeks Agile Team Coaching Program
- Scrum Master and Team will learn to experiment with ways of working to accelerate value delivery and become self-sufficient.
- Management, Teams and the Scrum Master will leverage information from the metrics to manage how workflows through the delivery system and what to do to improve it using PM Disciplined Agile.
- Be able to make better and faster decisions on how to improve their Agile environment.
Notes: Meetings conducted over Zoom or equivalent.