One of my fellow Certified Scrum Trainers, Henrik Kniberg, created this excellent video that describes agile software development from the point of view of the product owner. I’m really impressed, and I regularly share this with the participants in my Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner workshops. Great job Henrik!
A client recently contacted us for guidance regarding managing individual performance in a scrum environment. This is a growing company that successfully adopted scrum a few years back. They asked me what they should do with a scrum team member that is not performing. Should they implement a performance management system, and if so, how? Read the full article…
Hi Chris. It was great to have you in Beijing and you provided us with awesome Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner trainings. We are having internal discussions about the role of quality engineers in scrum. Should they be on the scrum teams? Do we need quality engineers if we are doing scrum? If we have them, who should manage them? Should we move them around from team to team?
Should a scrum team include user experience design professionals or should they be separate from the the scrum team? I’m often asked this question by UX designers and managers when their organization adopts scrum. Here is an email I received recently.
My company is making a transition from waterfall to agile development using the guidelines from your book The Elements of Scrum. In your coaching of various companies, I was wondering if you’ve worked with teams that have user experience designers (UX) and where they’ve fit into the process. As a manager, I wanted to get your thoughts on whether it makes more sense for individuals with these skills to be part of a scrum team as a team member or work with the product owner as a stakeholder.
Thanks,
K
The short answer is, “It depends.” I’ve seen both approaches work: have the user experience people on the scrum team, or have the UX person be part of the product owner’s inner circle of advisors but not actually on the scrum team. Let’s look at each approach.
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A couple of years ago, Hillary Louise Johnson and I had nearly finished writing The Elements of Scrum and we were discovering that the options for publishing it through traditional means didn’t satisfy us. A traditional publishing deal wouldn’t give us the creative control we wanted, and the royalty terms offered by traditional publishers weren’t to our liking. The answer, Hillary saw, was to start a publishing company; Dymaxicon was born.
Hillary had big plans right from the start. “Because of my years spent as a journalist and author, I had a huge backlog of books I knew of that had never found a home with traditional publishers,” she says. “So I started making calls.”
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I recently received the following question about performance reviews from a human resources professional at an organization that is adopting agile development practices.
Question:
My organization is just starting to use Agile and the question regarding performance management and specifically how performance reviews were now going to be done for the employees came up. Everyone turned to the HR team for the answer so I’m doing some research on this.
It appears in the agile world, some coaches and practitioners will say “there should be no such thing as performance management” but I’m hoping people recognize this is a reality in the corporate world and needs to be addressed. Currently our performance management system is based on an annual cycle and individual performance reviews/assessments are completed by the managers for their direct reports.
Can you share with me how organizations are addressing performance management and specifically performance reviews/assessments for individual employees that are on agile teams?
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Chris just did a scrum workshop for us and it was GREAT–I learned a TON. I have a follow-up question about the scrum role of product owner, and how we should implement it in our organization. The way we are doing this, the product owner is also the product manager. Is this typical? This seems potentially like two different jobs to me–one who goes to customers and gathers requirements, and one who is available during the sprint to answer questions about how things should work. I asked one of our brand new POs how he was going to do this, and he said that once the sprint starts, he does not need to work with the team. This was not my understanding, but I’m not sure.
On very large projects, it is common to have a high-level product manager setting the over-all direction for a product. That product manager might work with several teams, each of which might have their own product owner. Each product owner would maintain the backlog for their team. It might be true that the product manager is a bit more customer-facing and the product owner a bit more team-facing. That said, you don’t want the product owner to simply be a pass-through between the product manager and the team; what value would they be adding? Instead, you want the product owners to work closely with the product manager, customers, and the other product owners in order to understand and prioritize (order) the stories in their team’s product backlog in way that supports the overall direction and goals.
It sounds like your new product owner has the common misconception that all they have to do is capture requirements and then relay them to the team. If only it were that easy. In reality, it’s a lot of work to truly understand the needs of users and customers, as well as the needs of our own business. Once a product owner has this understanding, it’s also a lot of work to help the whole team share this understanding.
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A scrum team has many decisions to make, all the time. Should we focus on usability or new features? Should we fix the bugs that are driving our current customers crazy or develop the new features that will help us land the next big customer? Should we use PHP or Ruby on Rails? There is a lot of pressure to make the best decision, the choice that results in the most valuable result. Something many people miss, is that when we make the decision will often impact the value of the result. Should we make the decision now? Or wait a bit and keep our options open? One of the sessions I led at Agile Open Northwest was titled “When Should We Decide?” and it examined this very question.
We explored the idea, using a simple casino game. Each player places a single $2 bet on the outcome of two coin flips. The choices are: heads-heads, heads-tails, tails-heads, and tails-tails. If the player guesses right, the house pays $8, otherwise the player is paid nothing.
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Thank you for the certified scrum master training last week in Beijing. Your training is very impressive, and I appreciate it a lot. I asked you a lot of questions; may I ask one more? In our company, the automation for regression tests hasn’t been set up, yet. Without automation of the regressions tests, unit test, and pair-programming, how can our scrum team improve the quality of the product?
First, let me encourage you to keep up the work to automate your regression tests. Few things have as big a return on investment. Test automation enables the team to move much faster and make improvements fearlessly. The other practices you mention: unit testing and pair programming, are also great practices, and I encourage your team to try them too.
Having said that, your question was what else could your team do. Additional practices I would recommend your team consider are: code reviews, frequent testing by real users, testing bashes, and whole-team ownership of quality and testing.
Back in June, we were lucky enough to have Elizabeth McClellan record the proceedings of one of our Certified Scrum Master workshops. Elizabeth drew in real-time during the workshop, providing the participants a unique way to remember the experience. Below are the drawings she created. Click on them to get a higher resolution version of each image.
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