Have you ever had one of those days when you wondered if your ScrumMaster was on crack? Or maybe you’re the ScrumMaster and the you wonder why you are doing what you’re doing! I think we’ve all been there, so this post is for when you are having one of those days. A little bit of humor to brighten things up (while also being somewhat serious at the same time).

Bill Engvall is one of my favorite comedians. The guy just cracks me up every time I watch or listen to him. His most famous line is “Here’s your sign.” So here are a few “sign” stories for you to ponder.

[Imagine Bill Engvall voice]

So the other day I was watching a Daily Scrum meeting at the office and this ScrumMaster was doing something I’ve never seen before. He was asking and answering questions like he owned the place! I may be a bit slow now that I’m getting older, but even I know the ScrumMaster is supposed to make sure this meeting allows the team members to talk to each other and not to others. So, like an idiot, I asked him about it. He said… get this… he said… “If I don’t do the talking, no one will!” Well, Mr. ScrumMaster, here’s your sign!

[still in Bill Engvall voice]

That reminds me of another ScrumMaster I met once under unusual circumstances. I was answering a question from a team member when out of nowhere this ScrumMaster comes up behind me. She had that look that seems to say “You’re a dead man.” You know that look. Right, THAT look. The look your mom or a teacher gave to you when you were disappointing them terrible. Anyway, she gives me that look and I wonder what her problem is. I’m just minding my own business, and besides, it was her team member that asked me the question! It CAN’T be me, right? Welllllll… I’ll never learn my lesson around ScrumMasters, so I asked her what her problem was. Turns out she didn’t think I had a problem, she thought I WAS the problem! According to her, as a stakeholder I should never speak directly to a team member. That’s reserved for her and the Product Owner only. So, Ms. ScrumMaster, for ignoring the agile value of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” as well as the principle of “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” well, all I can say is, here’s your sign!

Finally, one more quick story before I go. The funniest, well, ok, maybe not funniest, but you can decide that in a minute. Anyway, the funniest ScrumMaster ever was the one that told me the team was committed to getting 40 story points done within their sprint. I asked why the team felt that was possible since they had never exceeded 25 points in any previous sprint. The ScrumMaster response was classic: “We calculated the velocity we need to finish all the features before the release date and we need to get 40 points done per sprint, so that’s our new commitment.” I asked what they would do if they fell short in a sprint and the response was those points would carry over to the next sprint and increase the commitment. A couple of sprints later I was in that area of the building again and asked the ScrumMaster how the team was doing. He said their new commitment was 84 points. I looked at the release burn-up chart on the wall behind him and saw that a whopping 27 points was their new high for any sprint. Then I turned and said here’s your sign!

[End Bill Engvall voice]

Ok, so I don’t write as well as Bill Engvall does his routine. I hope you at least see some humor in the stories.  ScrumMasters, please remember that being a ScrumMaster isn’t about YOU getting results. Your role is to help enable the team to be great, while also helping them understand reality.

If you need help figuring out how to be a good ScrumMaster or you have a ScrumMaster who needs help, get signed up for Certified ScrumMaster Training. It will make a big difference in how well the team performs!

Until next time I’ll be Making Agile a Reality® by helping ScrumMasters recognize when they are about to get a sign – and stopping themselves in time!

Since it is that time of year, I hope everyone has a wonderful and prosperous 2012!

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Have you ever been in a flamethrower war? I sincerely hope you have never been in one like the picture, but if you have been there serving for the US armed forces, then thank you for what you did for our country! Most of us have not been in a literal flamethrower war, but some of us have been in our share of them in the virtual world. I may be showing my age, but we used to have a phrase for arguments on message boards: flame wars or flaming. They were all the rage when a social network was really a Usenet newsgroup. Now we’ve grown up to using fancy mailing lists from Google and Yahoo and we still have the same core issues around disagreements. People will make statements in a message that they would never make in a face-to-face environment.

There were arguments about agile even before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created in 2001 by 17 brave individuals (some of whom I’m honored to be able to call friends). Lately, I’ve come to realize that the world of arguing around agile hasn’t changed in the past 10+ years at all. The players have changed, but not the fact that we can’t all get along. In the past year I’ve seen “discuss-ments” (give me credit if you use my made up word!) around all of the following issues:

• Is a backlog prioritized, ordered, or should we use some other word?
• Kanban is much better than Scrum, isn’t it?
• Scrum is much better than Kanban, isn’t it?
• Why don’t more people teach XP practices?
• Certified ScrumMaster should be abolished because it is evil.
• Certified ScrumMaster should be enhanced to make it something useful.
• There should or shouldn’t be a test or assessment or essay responses to something asking questions or scenarios or something for people to become certified or certifiable or…
• Certain courses should or should not be allowed to be advertised in certain mailing lists.

I don’t mind people speaking their mind. I do it quite often myself, but I try very hard to do it in a respectful fashion. Today it seems people just shout as loud as they can, as often as they can, and hope people with a differing opinion will just acquiesce. I’m pretty sure that in the history of mankind that has never actually occurred, but it doesn’t stop people from trying.

Too many people seem to believe life is a zero-sum game. If you win, then they must lose. I don’t believe it works that way. It could work that way if greed was everything to everybody, but it isn’t. When you give up trying to win it all, you often end up winning in unbelievably wonderful ways. It is Christmas time and during this time of year you can always find heart-warming stories of incredible charity (like this one and this one). If life were a zero-sum game, would things like this ever occur?

There is always a win-win out there to be had. Make it a personal goal to go find the win-win rather than escalating to using a flamethrower to make a point. Treat people with respect and dignity and you will be pleasantly surprised at how things can change. The Golden Rule “treat people as you would like to be treated” is still good advice no matter how old it is! When was the last time you actually thought about the Golden Rule in a way that mattered?

Of course, I’m saying this in an environment where people in the US Congress are appearing to treat each other with respect and dignity by calling each other “esteemed colleague” or “friend from the other side of the aisle,” but it is all for show and not real. Do you really think the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader actually like each other? It’s pretty obvious the people of the US don’t like them much!  One of the Scrum Values is to be transparent and open. Another is respect. Doing both at the same time works better!

I don’t expect the agile world to stop their discuss-ments overnight – or ever. What I sincerely hope is a renewed effort at respecting the differences we have and understanding we can all be right (and all wrong) at the same time. None of us is perfect, nor are our solutions or ideas. The best of the best uphold agile principles around continuous improvement. Ask yourself if it is possible for you to be at least partially wrong? If so, then there is room for improvement. The day you say you are completely right is the day you are probably no longer being agile because you can always improve!

How does this apply to teams? Let’s make it a bit more real now. On agile teams, don’t blame people or other parts of the organization for the issues you have. Those things happen based on the process and expectations in place. Change the core items! Don’t just put a band-aid on it by glossing over the issue. Don’t try to say it won’t happen that way again (and this is how many times you’ve tried the same thing and received the same result???). Make a change and adjust based on how the change worked or didn’t work. Plan, Do, Check, Act or Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation or something else – it doesn’t matter which, they all say to TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT!

For me, the something different, is going to start right now. I’m going to add a module to my workshops around dealing with conflict. I’ve seen enough of it being detrimental to enough agile teams, and at this point enough is enough (did I use enough enoughs in that sentence?). Don’t want to come to a workshop? No problem, start reading about the subject. Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka, Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson and others, Managing Transitions by William Bridges and many other books are great starting points for how to have needed conversations and make them effective.

For me it is the time of the year to consider gifts and changes. If it is for you as well, then consider this blog entry my gift to you as it is also a challenge to think about change!

Until next time I’ll be Making Agile a Reality® for organizations that are having too many discuss-ments!

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I love it when someone who was in one of my workshops sends me a message saying something from the workshop worked well for them. Recently I have started telling people in my Certified ScrumMaster training workshops that far too many ScrumMasters talk too much. I tell them they need to learn a new skill – being silent! The graphic makes the point perfectly. In fact, it adds that if you can’t stay quiet, buy some duct tape!

Below is a message from a recent workshop attendee that really hit home and made me realize adding this little segment to the CSM workshop was well worth it! He had the patience required of a good ScrumMaster and the result was worthwhile.

Bob,

I wanted to share a story with you that I think you’ll appreciate.

First, some background:  I’m leading a large project that can hardly be called agile.  It’s basically fixed-scope waterfall with short development cycles, but I’m trying to take as much advantage of scrum principles as I can.

Coming out of my CSM class, my biggest takeaway in terms of things I could be doing better within the constraints of my non-agile project was to hold regular sprint retrospectives.  The first thing I did when I got back in the office was to put one on the schedule.  That first one took a little bit to get going, but I was careful to remember to keep my mouth shut and let the team do the talking, and they eventually identified a variety of things that had been working well and not so well.  I was particularly pleased with the fact that they came up with the same list of “not good” issues I would have identified if I had been doing the talking.

Since the CSM class, we’ve now held three sprint retros following very closely the guidelines you laid out, and the results have been incredible.  With each one, the team has identified the top 1 or 2 issues they want to work on, laid out a plan for addressing them along with a team conscience to keep them honest and followed through to become more productive and successful as a result.  They have fixed all of the issues I was initially concerned about; and although new ones have come up, they’re now quick to identify them and put a plan in place to fix them.

Here’s the kicker.  In our latest sprint retro completed last week, one of the items on the “working well” list was, you guessed it, the sprint retros themselves!  The team loves taking that time to figure out how to get better at what they do.  There’s no longer any prompting or patience required on my part to get the discussion going.  All I have to do is sit back, take notes and watch the team figure out how to succeed.  How cool is that?

From Brennon M. to Bob Hartman on November 15, 2011

Until next time I’m hoping I’ll be Making Agile a Reality® for more of the people who attend my workshops!

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