Are You Dominating with Scrum or is it Dominating You?

August 14, 2013

Done right, Scrum can help every component of your business perform more efficiently. Done wrong, it can be a huge waste of time and resources. Is your business succeeding with Scrum?

Are You Succeeding with Scrum? Common Pitfalls & Solutions


In many ways, software development groups are a lot like professional sports teams.
After all, both are often under pressure to deliver results, and software development projects have a tendency to operate under incredibly tight deadlines — something that franchises like the Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox can undoubtedly relate to.
Above all, software businesses and sports franchises share one very important quality — they both like to win. And whether those wins yield customers or championships, the only way to truly put your organization on track to be victorious is to ensure that every member of your team is performing optimally.
Ultimately, that’s why Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland co-created Scrum in the early 1990s — to establish a framework that helps companies crush their competition through smarter, more efficient execution.
“Our initial goal was to help teams function a lot better in software development, but the principles of Scrum translate to virtually any team,” says Dr. Sutherland, the CEO of Scrum Inc. and an OpenView Senior Advisor. “Companies today are expected to deliver impact and results more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Agile development methodologies like Scrum can provide them with the structure and roadmap they need to do that.”

3 Pitfalls that Prevent Companies from Harnessing the Value of Scrum

 
 

When implemented correctly, Scrum can help you control risk, manage projects, and develop products better and faster than you thought possible.
Of course, just like a professional sports team can botch the execution of their championship strategies (see: Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Browns, New York Mets, etc.), software companies can also easily screw up Scrum if they don’t manage it properly.
“Scrum is designed to produce a shippable piece of software in a maximum of 30 days,” says Dr. Sutherland. “If you aren’t doing that or you’re sending out software that nobody uses, it means that you’re doing something wrong. And in both scenarios you’ll never realize the full benefits of Scrum.”
Where do companies go wrong? Dr. Sutherland says there are three pitfalls that most commonly lead to Scrum failure:

1. Poor testing protocols and bug removal processes: If your teams are unable to complete product tests and remove bugs before the end of a sprint, Dr. Sutherland says it will cut your speed by at least 50 percent — and that’s a huge problem. After all, if the primary goal of Scrum is to improve efficiency by churning out better products faster, how can you achieve that if you’re consistently missing deadlines or shipping a product that’s full of bugs?

2. Releasing products without proper customer feedback: Ultimately, if your product backlog is not largely fueled by feedback from customers, then you’ll likely churn out product features that nobody really cares about. According to Dr. Sutherland, on average 65 percent of software features are never used by the customers they were created for. That speaks to software businesses’ failure to build features that their customers want, and seek feedback (ideally, every 30 days) on the usefulness of those features.     

3. Uninvolved management teams: The principles of Scrum are derived from lean manufacturing in Japan. And to run a lean manufacturing facility, Dr. Sutherland says that businesses must have a management system in place that’s fully bought into agile development,  that actively seeks to help teams do great work. If a software company’s management team is hands-off or it fails to proactively help teams overcome roadblocks, the business will never be able to fully leverage the benefits of Scrum.

Here’s the bottom line, says Dr. Sutherland: When an objective is unclear or poorly developed, adding it to a Scrum sprint will likely bring everything to a screeching halt and severely hinder your productivity. Even minor debris can significantly clog a sprint, which is why keeping your process free of productivity inhibitors and impediments is critical.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Scrum

Looking to assign a Scrum Master to manage your sprints?

Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic performs Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5. Conducted by Ronald Zollman

Make Sure They Have These 4 Qualities


The good news, of course, is that minor debris is relatively simple to remove if you know to look for it. And the three mistakes listed above are correctable if you invest some time and effort into diagnosing why your business is making them.
That being said, here are four tips from Dr. Sutherland that help you avoid the most common pitfalls of Scrum and improve the outputs of your agile development efforts:

Pay Attention to “Yesterday’s Weather”

Teams that are able to consistently finish what they set out to do are able to accelerate at a faster rate, which is why it’s so important to tackle only what you’ve proven capable of doing in previous sprints. In Scrum, that’s often referred to as implementing a pattern of “yesterday’s weather.” Not only will this help you cut down on planning time, it will also make your team more comfortable and confident.

Incorporate a Buffer for Inevitable Delays

Naturally, things will pop up that could potentially derail you during a sprint. But because this is an inevitable pattern, you should be able to plan for those issues.
By creating an interruption buffer, you can allow a product owner to take on a certain percentage of unexpected, high priority work that crops up during your sprint. That person can then triage interruptions, deciding whether unplanned for interruptions are work the team must do during this sprint, or work that can simply be thrown into the backlog for future sprints. In the event that too many interruptions occur, you can simply abort the sprint and re-plan, but with a buffer you will at least be prepared for a reasonable amount of distraction.

Build Repeatable Patterns

The key to successfully completing sprints is to have repeatable patterns you can rely upon. Pulling in the right amount of work and being able to handle your interruptions are key patterns to establish.
But you’ll also want to develop emergency procedures for when you find your productivity slowing down even with those two safeguards in place. That way, when you are behind schedule you can alternate your pattern of work to compensate as a fail-safe.

Don’t be Afraid to Press the Reset Button

Inevitably, there will be instances in which a sprint is so flooded by disruption that it gets totally derailed. When that happens, the temptation can be to continue forging on, even if it means the likelihood of finishing on time is slim. What you should do, however, is stop, press the reset button, and start all over again.
That might sound counterintuitive, but the last thing you want to do is encourage your team to coast unhappily toward inevitable failure. Resetting gives your team the chance to refocus and reenergize so that it can be successful going forward.

The Importance of Agreeing on the Definition of “Done”

How do you apply scrum to all branches of your business?

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While each of the above tips can help you incrementally improve the performance of your teams and the output of your sprints, Dr. Sutherland says there’s one thing that absolutely must happen before the launch of any new Scrum project.
The team must be able to create and adopt a common definition of project completion.
“That’s critical for every project, not just writing code,” Dr. Sutherland says. “Completeness needs to be a consideration at every level, whether you’re working on new features or incorporating Scrum into sales, marketing, or customer service functions. There is often more than one in-house opinion on what constitutes ‘done,’ so it’s critical to iron those out and arrive at one universal definition that everyone agrees on. Otherwise, you may create miscommunication that disrupts the entire project.”

Are you dominating with Scrum or is it dominating you? What tips do you have for other business interested in implementing Scrum?


OpenView, the expansion stage venture firm, helps build software companies into market leaders. Through our Expansion Platform, we help companies hire the best talent, acquire and retain the right customers and partner with industry leaders so they can dominate their markets. Our focus on the expansion stage makes us uniquely suited to provide truly tailored operational support to our portfolio companies. Learn more about OpenView at openviewpartners.com.