School of Agile

Scrum Master KPI – Agile

Hey guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here. Today I’m going to be answering a couple of questions from Sint.

What are the top three KPIs for a Scrum Master and Agile Coach during their three months at a company?

That’s a great question. Not many people talk about KPIs for Agile Coach and Scrum Masters. I think that they should have KPIs. I think that they should plan to do something cool and then make sure that our people will keep them accountable for it.

When I joined the team, that I am currently consulting, my KPI was: “I want to make you the most efficient team in the department in three months.” That was my KPI.

The reasonable KPI’s would be:

“I want to set up Agile ceremonies in one or multiple teams.”

“I want to have an Agile workshop that everyone in the company understands Agile”

“I want to make sure to meet with every team member, understand their concerns and resolve most of them.”

“I want to set up Jira in such a way that people will find it useful.”

“I want to help create a process around interaction with our stakeholders”

“I want to improve transparency and happiness” ( you can measure that by having some happiness with your exercises on your retrospectives).

The next question is:

Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches we are often givers of the team as resources, removing blockers, etc. How does one fuel himself personally with new ideas to experiment?

I fuel myself with ideas by asking my team. I ask people, what would they think would helpful? They might say: “Maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that,” I say, “Definitely, let’s try that.” This is how new ideas would work. I gather information and act on it right away.

Since I have experience working with different teams, I might recommend them some ideas.

Also, I am part of Facebook/Linkedin/Reddit groups. I read books about Agile, about Scrum. I talk to people in the industry and then we share what works, what doesn’t. I have many peers that I know who work in different companies and they have many different ideas, so we share them as well.

Thanks for reading, hope that helps!

If you want me to help your teams be Agile, please click on FREE Consultation above and lets see how I can help your business.

School of Agile

Velocity in Agile Methodology

Hi guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here!

Today we’re talking about velocity in Agile.

A lot of you guys ask me:

“Anatoly, what is velocity?”

“How can you calculate it?”

“What is an average velocity?”

“Do we even need to care about it? Is it something we need to track?”

Those are all amazing questions. I’m going to answer all of them.

Velocity is a metric that shows us how successfully we complete our stories.

Here’s an example:

We are a team of people. We have a two-week iterations or two-week sprint. In these two weeks we thought, “We will complete ten stories,” (stories are features) and we said every story we think is a two-story points value (arbitrary measure of how complex story is + how long it might take). So then if we complete all of them at the end of two weeks, our velocity will be 20 points.

Easy, right? We have 10 stories, 2 point stories each equals 10 * 2 = 20. If that is all that we need to know about velocity, why so many people are confused by it ?

First of all, because velocity is not a precise measure. Velocity is based on estimates, so it can definitely vary. I also find that if you have a small project and you don’t give enough time for velocity to establish itself, for a team to learn how to estimate properly, then velocity will be pretty useless.

However, if you have a team that works together for a long time and that they track everything, they are pretty good at estimating their stories – velocity would be pretty accurate. They will be able to predict how many stories they can complete in a certain iteration, which is very good for road-mapping, for giving expectations to the business and stuff like that.

The most useful metric I find with regards to velocity is an average velocity. To calculate average velocity, we usually take about four iterations, we add them up, and divide them by their number.

Let’s say our team worked for 4 iterations of 2 weeks. First time their velocity was 40, the other week it was 10, next week their velocity became lower: 20, after that their velocity came back to 40, and finally it lowered back to 20.

What we need to do is we have four numbers: 40, 20, 40, and 20. We take all those numbers, add them up. We are having 120 and then we just divide them by the amount of those numbers. So we divide them by 4 and then we know that our average velocity in this case is 30.

I find that average velocity is useful for a team because it shows them how they progress, if something went wrong, and if there’s something that we as a team can improve. So, it’s a good metric for us internally to see if something has gone wrong with the team. Also, when we as a team are doing spring planning, we sometimes think, “How many stories can we take in two weeks iterations?”

If we have average velocity, we can say, “Our average velocity right now is 30, so we should probably take somewhere around 30 story points.” You can go a bit more, a bit less, depending on if people are on vacation, stuff like that. But this metric helps us to know how much work we can take.

Thank you for reading! If you need my help moving your teams through Agile Transformation, please click on a FREE Consultation above and lets see how I can help your business!

Anatoly

School of Agile

Difference Between Scrum Master and Agile Coach

Hey guys, Anatoly here from Define Agile. Today we’re talking about the difference between Agile Coach and a Scrum Master. I’m getting asked lots and lots of times, “Anatoly, what’s the difference? They sound familiar, they both deal with Agile, so what’s the deal there?” So, I’m going to explain to you just that today.

The biggest difference between Agile Coach and a Scrum Master is in the scope of their work. While Scrum Master is focused on a single team, making sure that the team processes are in place and the team operates as one single efficient unit, the Agile Coach, on the other hand, is focused on making sure that the whole organization understands Agile well.

Agile Coach is not only focused on Scrum, the good Agile Coach knows different frameworks and understands that to achieve different results, you can use different tools. So, Agile Coach is more enterprise level working with the executives, working across teams, supporting Scrum Masters, making sure they have everything they need, and making sure that the whole organization is moving to Agile transformation.

It does not mean though that Scrum Master supports the Agile Coach. Agile Coach supports Scrum Masters. Scrum Masters then support their teams. Also, Agile Coach brings to the executives all the impediments that Scrum Masters have that they cannot resolve at their level. Agile Coach should be able to help resolve those bigger issues with the help of executives.

School of Agile

Scrum Master Interview Questions: 3 Most Important Questions to Ask

Hi guys, Anatoly from Define Agile here again. Today we’re talking about three questions you can ask a Scrum Master to understand if he/she is a good fit.

Question #1: What was your worst day at work?

You will tell me, “Anatoly, how does it relates to a Scrum Master?” Okay, let me explain. First of all, Scrum Master is a person who brings Agile into an organization, usually helps organization to transform to Agile. When you work with a constant change and tasked with transformation you deal with lots of conflicts and stress. So if a person doesn’t have enough experience dealing with the high stress situation, it will be very hard for this person to be successful at the job.

I find that people who tell me that they had a really bad time at work and then they were able to overcome it and they still love this work, those are the people that I want to see next to me working as Scrum Masters. If people didn’t have any major stressful change-related experiences in their career yet, I might find that they don’t have enough experience for them to join my team.

Question #2: Tell me the difference between Kanban and Scrum, and when you should use one or the other.

You’ll tell me again, “Anatoly, why would a Scrum Master know about Kanban? Why should he/she care?” You care for the sole reason that the Scrum Master needs to be a well-rounded person who looks around and understands all the other frameworks that are there and makes sure that the Scrum Master can make an educated decision which one to choose. So if a Scrum Master always works in his/her small box of Scrum and not looking around what is happening in the industry, I don’t think he’s the right person.

Question #3: What was the change that you introduced to the team and how did you do that?

This is very important, because the Scrum Master comes to the team and often introduces lots of things that the Scrum Master thinks is right. If you don’t introduce them well, if you force something on people, it won’t work and then you won’t have any good relationship with your team. The Scrum Master is there to support the team, to advice things, and a good Scrum Master should be able to explain to you how he made sure that everyone understood that the change is good and how he rallied people around the change and made sure they implement in such a way that everyone is happy.

These are my three questions I usually ask every Scrum Master.

School of Agile

Difference Between Product Owner and Scrum Master

Hi guys, Anatoly here from Define Agile. Today we’re talking about the difference between a Product Owner and a Scrum Master. A lot of times people are confused between the roles and responsibilities of those two. Sometimes Scrum Masters are taking the role of Product Owners and Product Owners are taking the role of a Scrum Master. So, I’m here to figure out what exactly is the difference and why people confuse them so much.

Let’s start with the Product Owner. Product Owner represents the stakeholder. The role of Product Owner is to go into the field of stakeholders, figure out the requirements, make sure they are clear, and then put those requirements into stories that the Development Team or any other teams can work on. Also, the Product Owner’s job is to make sure that the backlog, which is a collection of stories, is prioritized so that the team has enough work to do and every unit of work they take has everything they need to complete it.

Let’s go to the Scrum Master now.

The role of the Scrum Master is to help the team to understand Scrum. The role of the Scrum Master is to promote Agile, facilitate meetings, make sure that the processes are good, make sure that the team is healthy, they trust each other, figure out the ways on how to make the team more efficient in terms of processes, make sure to optimize things that don’t work, and support the team in anything they need.

So as you might see, those are two very different roles, and if one person starts to do both of them, most of the time it doesn’t really work. If you don’t have a dedicated Scrum Master, my suggestion would be instead of making a Product Owner a Scrum Master, to make one of the developer Scrum Master or make a rotating Scrum Master role in your Development Team because I find it to be much more efficient than to have a Scrum Master and Product Owner in one person.

School of Agile

Differences between Kanban and Scrum

Hey! How are you guys?

This is Anatoly from Define Agile, and today we’re talking about Kanban vs. Scrum.

A lot of people ask me:

What’s the difference between those two and when should you use one over the other?

Today I want to take a couple of minutes to explain to you this. I hope it will bring you value.

Kanban and Scrum are both Agile frameworks. They’re under the Agile umbrella. They both help our teams to become more efficient, to promote Agile, to work in an iterative manner.

But what’s the difference between the two?

Let’s take two simple examples. I’m a software developer and I work in an IT company. How would my day look like if I would do Kanban or I would do Scrum?

Kanban example

I come to work in the morning and my team does Kanban. I will probably have a board which is called Kanban board. It can be a digital board or it can be a physical board. I have tickets in this board and my sole job will be to take just one of those tickets, to move it across the swimming lanes from “To do” to “Done.”

Do I have many meetings? Nope.

In Kanban there is not a lot of structure, or should I say – you work with what you have.

Scrum example

Now let’s talk about Scrum. Scrum is a little bit more involved. I come to work in the morning. I will probably have a stand-up meeting which will be 15-minutes. During standup I will meet with my team; We will talk about what we did yesterday, what we are going to do today, and if there are any blockers.

We’ll also work in the intervals.

Our intervals could be two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. Intervals are called Sprints in Scrum. At the start of the Sprint, we will have a planning meeting where we’ll estimate some work and see how many issues we can take in this interval. In the end, we’ll have a retrospective or we’ll see how we did.

We’ll talk about what we can improve, how we can grow the team. Also, we’ll have a demo where we’ll invite stakeholders, show them what we did and see if they have any feedback and if we need to change anything in the process.

So as you might see, Kanban and Scrum are different. Scrum requires more overhead while Kanban has less overhead. But the question people ask me is:

“Anatoly, when should I choose one over the other?”

That’s a great question.

First of all, I think how mature the team is. If the team is already mature, they work well together, they have a nice gel there, they do not require a lot of meetings, they are on time in every step of their work and they’re doing Kanban – let’s continue what works. I never ask people to change what works.

If it’s a brand new team and they don’t know what to do and they just ask me, “Anatoly, which framework should we choose?” I usually say, “Scrum”. I say Scrum because I want people to communicate more, I want people to be engaged, I want people to constantly give feedback to each other and understand how they can work together as one big, efficient team.

So, for more mature teams, Kanban. For new teams, less mature teams, for teams that have some inefficiencies, I would suggest Scrum. (Note: of course those are not the only criteria, I also look at how work gets sent to teams, how eager is team to move to new framework etc)

Also, mind you that lots of teams move from Scrum to Kanban when they become more mature because they don’t really need more of this overhead.

Thank you for watching/reading. I hope I was able to bring you value today. If you have any questions or comments, please ask them here or on Youtube, Linkedin. Subscribe to my newsletter to get latest blog posts and videos! We are releasing them every week!

This was Anatoly from Define Agile.

Bye-bye.

P.S. If you want me to help you to move your teams to Scrum or Kanban, or introduce Agile to your whole team, please go to DefineAgile and schedule a free consultation!