3 Unsung heroes of Scrum Framework
In my experience, some elements of the Scrum Framework are less practiced in the community knowingly and unknowingly. I am going to emphasize those elements in this article.
Practicing those would bring change in the behavior of teams, stakeholders, and customers.
Scrum has 11 essentials: 3 Roles(accountabilities), 5 Events, 3 Artifacts. But around these eleven essentials, there are other key elements like Scrum Values, Empiricism, Sprint Goal, Product Goal, the Definition of Done that support these essentials in achieving the purpose.
My favorite elements are listed below:
- Sprint Goal over Sprint Commitment
- Value delivery over Task Completion
- Product over Project
1. Sprint Goal
In my experience, Sprint Goal is the most neglected element by Teams, Organizations, and even by many Scrum practitioners.
One of my team, use to consider the entire Sprint backlog as a Sprint Goal. Everyone worked on different items during the Sprint, gave priority to their individual task for completion. Daily was like a task update sync among developers. It was more like a group of individuals working together, developers use to pull more items once they finish the previous one instead of supporting another developer- which turns to be a more task spillover to the next Sprint, some team members were anxious as they were unable to Visualize the System…
After observing two Sprints, I asked them a couple of questions in Retrospective, What is that single Objective are you trying to achieve in a Sprint? And How is it related to our High-level Objective?
We decided to craft a single Objective from now on. Entire team spends time learning about Sprint Goal. The dynamics of Daily has changed, now the focus is on the Objective and developers are supporting each other instead of pulling more items into the Backlog. Coherence within Team has improved significantly.
The Scrum artifacts and the progress toward agreed goals must be inspected frequently and diligently to detect potentially undesirable variances or problems. — ScrumGuide 2020
The definition of Sprint Goal from Scrum Guide 2020:
The Sprint Goal is the single objective for the Sprint. Although the Sprint Goal is a commitment by the Developers, it provides flexibility in terms of the exact work needed to achieve it. The Sprint Goal also creates coherence and focus, encouraging the Scrum Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives.
Without having a Sprint Goal, Sprint would be directionless, team members will work on their individual tasks instead of focusing on a common objective and hence less focus and less coherence.
This would lead to:
- slowly silos formation within the team
- individual task commitment over team commitment
- team members will start feeling more anxious -> less motivation
- focus more on task completion rather than delivering value to the customer
- the current value of the product might go down
- creativity and innovation might take a hit
In order to tackle these challenges, Scrum evolves around achieving and setting (Sprint)Goals.
In the 2020 Scrum guide, it is explicitly mentioned that the Sprint Goal is the commitment to the Sprint. The Scrum team’s commitment should be to the Sprint Goal, rather than to the Sprint Backlog. Achieving Sprint Goal should be the highest priority of the team.
Great Teams start their Daily Scrum by inspecting the progress towards Sprint Goal and adapt their Sprint Backlog if necessary. This enables the team to work as a single coherent unit.
After practicing Sprint Goal for quite a long time- Sprints after Sprints, the dynamics of the team changes as a coherent unit, they started to pull the items, become self-organized, get involved more in value delivery, and the product discovery process. The team, now, focuses more on the objective to achieve rather than on finishing the tasks. This element of Scrum remains a hidden success factor.
If you have not explored the benefits of a Sprint Goal, please start it from the next Sprint, you would definitely notice the change in team dynamics. Initially, it would be a little challenging but the unrealized value of the Sprint Goal will come to you soon.
As I stated above, the Sprint Goal enables the team to focus on value delivery over items completion, this leads to the next less talked element of the Scrum framework.
2. Value Delivery
Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems. — ScrumGuide 2020
Defining a value provides the team with something to Inspect. It is imperative that the team should define their Value proposition in association with user and customer needs, then only the change in behavior can be measured.
The Scrum Team’s usable Increment at the end of each Sprint is still an output of the team. This can only be validated when that it is released to users and received feedback on it, this is where you would measure the outcome of the Increment — The Value.
Why delivering value is so important? Nokia, once upon a time, was the leading mobile handset producer in the world. They delivered phone after phone, now where are they? A department in Microsoft. They were so busy in producing phones eventually forget the need of customers and users.
Our ultimate goal should be building a Product that supposes to fulfill the need of customers and fulfilling the need eventually creates value for Customers.
The Product Owner should validate the Increment by releasing it more often to market and observe the change in customer behavior.
Tip: Involve the Scrum Team starting from product discovery to its delivery. The team which focuses on this element is more successful than the team focusing on output creation.
When the entire Scrum Team gets involved in the product discovery process the Ability to Innovate(A2I) and Time to Market(T2M) Key Value Areas(KVAs) improved significantly. The entire Scrum Team starts taking responsibility towards the Value delivery process instead of only PO or Stakeholders.
By having an environment of Value-based validation, teams and the organization focuses on the Product instead of Project delivery. For all successful Scrum teams, this element is as much powerful as Sprint Goal even more and still remains a hidden treasure.
The co-relation between Sprint Goal and Value is like, Sprint Goal enables team’s ability producing more Output and Value delivery helps validate these Output and Produce the Outcome once accepted by Customers. e.g.: Improving Cycle time directly helps in T2M KVA, which means PO can release the Increment more often and validate the Current Value(CV) of the Product.
3. Product Mindset
Back in 2017, we were supporting our client in delivering an EHR platform that would help their Recruiter to reach out to the maximum number of job hunters and vice versa. PO, who was from the client-side, use to have very good interaction with the team. The team used to meet the expectation of the client, any deviation was used to discuss in Retrospective.
This was a two years project initially, an agreement was PO, who sits in The Netherlands will visit Indian Teams(Developers+SM) at least twice or thrice a year. During that visit, the entire team will discuss together possible Improvements that are specifically collected from Recruiters and Candidate(Job Hunters). We used to prepare a high-level backlog for upcoming Sprints and quarters.
Everything was going in an expected direction, except a few, the team had limited knowledge of the System, Recruiters used to complain that their requirement has not been implemented- this feedback was given to PO.
We decided to bring some changes, First- Inviting recruiters to our Sprint Review, and Second- Team will visit The Netherlands to have direct interaction with Recruiters and collect improvement points.
After two quarters, developers started proposing new Features through small POC to Recruiter in Sprint Review, developers were involved in the Product discovery process, Recruiter now gives feedback directly to developers in Review, Team has more System understanding. In the end, the two years contract was renewed with a flexible one.
What happened? The team feels more involved directly talking to Users of the Product, instead of focusing only on Task- Team focused entire eco-System. The mindset changed from a Project perspective to a Product.
If the company think in terms of projects and less in terms of products and value, the tide of fortune can turn rather quickly.- book ‘The Professional Product Owner by Dan McGreal & Ralph Jocham’
Scrum framework has been designed to deliver Products to customers and users by releasing them to market frequently. Take any products, a company internal payroll application or you are helping your customer to build their product, in the end, it is a Product intended to solve the problem.
A product is a vehicle to deliver value. It has a clear boundary, known stakeholders, well-defined users or customers. A product could be a service, a physical product, or something more abstract.- ScrumGuide 2020
Taking the same analogy as above about Nokia- it used to lead the market in producing mobile phones on tight schedules. It knew how to run a project, and each team members or individual associated with each project were proficient to complete the task on time, and within budget. But what about the company’s phones? You all know.
This Project mindset defines the success in terms of inside-out, focusing on KPIs that are mostly internal on task management and accuracy on the initial plan.
Nokia was successful in delivering phones after phones but failed to understand the customers' needs and their problems. — Source https://www.researchscript.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/IJMH050304.pdf. In this Case Study, the writer has mentioned a lack of vision, value delivery.
In the meantime, other companies launch their products with less price, more features using Android OS which provides flexibility to customers on using the mobile applications. These companies focus on the needs of customers.
What could have been done differently? What do your customers value? Project or Product?
The ultimate objective is not to deliver a project rather value through a product- a product that leads to change in customer behavior, high revenue, and low cost of the organization.
Product mindset is an outside-in approach that uses the external business factors to measure the success of a product. Product Owner plays a crucial role in creating this mindset within the organization.
“behind every great product there is someone- usually someone behind the scenes, working tirelessly- who led the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that met the needs of the business.”- by Marty Cagan, Inspired.
Thinking in terms of products has many benefits:
- it encourages more frequent releases, which results in earlier feedback from the marketplace. Eventually, the risk assessment would be faster.
- communication and commitment happen in terms of objectives instead of tasks.
- teams get more creative with their solutions and approach, take more ownership over their plans.
- minimizes waste by depending less on task management, reporting, and management decisions.
- maximize the value delivery
Conclusion:
I have personally experienced the benefits of using these elements in my teams and organization. In a scaling environment having a system-thinking is often difficult for all teams thus it becomes imperative for Product Owners to create an environment where teams focus on the Product mindset, Value-based validation, and Objective-based planning.
Having Objective-based planning leads to Value-based validation and ultimately leads to Product-oriented thinking.
The above 3 elements have a major impact on the effectiveness of Teams, not only that they also bring happiness to Stakeholders and a motivated Scrum Team.
Thank you very much for reading, please feel free to comment with your ideas, suggestions below. Do share your success story on these mentioned elements, I will be happy to read those.
References:
Books: The Professional Product Owner by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham, Inspired by Marty Cagan
Blogs: http://agiletweak.com/2021/04/25/how-to-evaluate-scrum-teams-productivity/
EBM Guide: https://www.scrum.org/resources/evidence-based-management-guide
