Things no one tells Scrummasters — Data does matter
How combining the people approach with data helps get the establishment to back your asks for helping the team
A typical conversation with a Scrummaster
SM: The team has done really well this sprint.
Me: Sounds good, how do we quantify that?
SM: They met their commitments for 9/10 items, and are almost done with the last, just a few hours of verification left.
Me: Good to hear that. So how did the demo go?
SM: Went well, the customers were happy.
Me: What items got a 5 star, or a Wow or caused delight for your end customer?
SM: Actually, we did not ask them to rate it in any way
Me: Did we get any free form feedback, any suggestions for doing better?
SM: Just a couple of questions if something was possible, we have put it in the backlog for future sizing
Me: Let’s move on. How was the retrospective?
SM: We had fun, did an activity with the team that helped blow off some steam, here are some photographs
Me: Looks like the team did enjoy the retro. What were the improvements that the team is going to take up next sprint?
SM: They want to increase their collaboration and improve their quality. They want to get better quality requirements
Me: And how are they going to do this?
SM: err, actually we kind of ran out of time and did not get around to that
Me: And the improvements from last sprint, are they working and giving the desired outcomes?
SM: We have not measured it either, but I think at least some of the items were completed but we did not discuss if it worked
~
I wish this was a one-off, but unfortunately, it is all too common. I say this from a perspective of someone who works with a large service provider giving me exposure to practices on the ground over the last 12+ years of seeing agile in action.
Some very simple actions can help fix this.
One- Gather data through the sprint. Not just scramble for it at the start of the retro.
Two — link it. By itself any data or metric goes only so far. Linking the data to have the story of your sprint helps the team to develop systems thinking abilities, understand the bottlenecks that are slowing them down and have action items to resolve them
Three — Bring out the achievements and successful/failed changes to give a complete picture when anyone outside of the team looks at the sprint data/reports
Four — Have a headline statement to summarize — sending a report that says “PFA — Sprint 15 report for Team WorkHard” means you are letting go of an opportunity to showcase your team
Five — Anyone in the hierarchy above the team (and there are plenty of people in this category) would love to understand what was achieved, call outs for standout performers and what they can do to help the team do even better. Action items backed by data to show how the bottleneck can be resolved by actions taken by management are actually very well received.
For eg. — “the team would have been able to deliver a further 13 SPs of value if they had an additional/separate environment to generate the test data set independently instead of juggling this with 3 other teams.
Alternately, we could have a database refresh into a lower environment every weekend so that we can generate test data separately.
A separate environment would cost £x for standing up and £Y on an ongoing basis every week
A database refresh will cost us £Z every week
Either approach will save us £XYZ approx 8 hours of wait time, allow 4 teams to work without cross dependencies and potentially add 10 SPs to our throughput every sprint”
Put on the hat of a Senior Manager or Program Manager and you will see the possibilities this opens up for them, particularly on the de-risking of work as well as possible productivity gains. Very likely you will at least get a discussion, if not approvals and budgets for the same.
Being a Scrummaster is about putting people first in your approach to improvements. However, it does not imply that you should not use data to support the needs of your team. Getting support across the ecosystem is vital to getting the team what they need. Its time to recognize that we are part of a larger, complex ecosystem that should be leveraged as part of the role.
