The Untrained Team

"Patience. Discipline."

Undead NPC, Undercity, WoW

Successfully getting to Agile requires two important abilities -- patience and discipline:

Patience of the ScrumMaster to let the team self-organize and learn to improve. This may sound contrary to the drive-driven personality a ScrumMaster must have. But it is important for every driver to power up an engine and just let it run on its own from time to time.

Discipline of the team to stay focused at self-organizing and improving. This may sound contrary to the good mood Scrum creates. But discipline is needed both on a personal and team basis. It is barely possible to succeed with test-driven development, pair programming, or continuous integration without discipline.

Now here is the issue: how to deal with missing discipline?

Two answers depending on the underlying root cause of missing discipline: either fire them, or train them!

If discipline is missing simply because team members do not want to be agile you should consider to break up with these guys.

If discipline is missing because team members do not know how to be agile you have to mentor, guide, and train them. It is not enough to give your team an one hour up-front presentation and tell them "you have to write unit tests for everything now because we have it in our definition-of-done." A developer without knowledge and experience how to write good unit tests will get lost. She will try to test the written code afterwards and you will hear statements like "no, I can't write unit tests now because the implementation is not finished yet."

Another fruitless approach is to tell your team "we will do continuous integration now because we are agile." It won't work as long as the team does not know how to integrate continuously on a daily basis. Developers again will get lost mentioning "yes, of course we will integrate but we have to wait for the three stories in this SVN branch to be finished before we can do so."

Do not wait any longer, act now! Your developers will fall back to old, traditional, waterfallish behavior. This will destroy huge parts of the team's success. Do not blame them - they simply do not know better.

Start now to set up training lessons, coaching sessions, and workshops to gain knowledge of all the things anyone of your team must possess. Use experts available in your organization to spread knowledge. Or get professional external help - there are lots of experienced trainers out there to help your team. And the team will be thankful to get something fresh from external people. Just weigh the pros and cons of the money invested in a trainer and the inspirational motivation of the team.

Pure self-organizing advocates will argue that the team by itself has to find all of these issues and how to improve accordingly. Yes, your team should do so. But if you as a ScrumMaster notice slack of improvement it's your turn to brief the team and kick-off some hints.

And always remember:

"Training is useful.
But there is no substitute for experience."

Rosa Klebb, From Russia with Love

Drive-Driven Personality

There was heavy "agile fun" in the last months with all the agilists working close with me. We made lots of wordy jokes like "the goal is the goal", "the way is the way" which became things like "way-driven driving" and nonsense like that. Thinking of all these things all the time made me come to the conclusion of a quite meaningful term I'm going to explain: the Drive-Driven Personality.

"Say what? Drive-driven personality? Yup, right, c'mon, go away and never come back!"

No, really and seriously. It's that easy: Drive-Driven Personality is needed to push changing the world!

Many people just live their lives as is, be it private or professionally. These people may be good, valuable, hard-working thinkers with a quality above the average. Nevertheless these people keep things as they are most of the time. At max they optimize their local environment with smallest influence. But they never will change the world with what they do. They simply do not have the drive to force change.

Drive is not about power - most people do not have vast power to change things with a fingersnip. Usually power is given to people in a local scope only.

Drive is about an inner mental state - a heavy desire to do specific things. It's an inner calling, some kind of mission one has to complete with concentrated passion.

Typical examples of Drive-Driven Personality are writers, painters, artists in general.

Applied to Scrum: everything is quite simple and understandable in scrum. What for do we need Drive-Driven Personality? Jeff Sutherland explains the basic theory of bringing an average waterfall team to be hyperproductive - an initial kind of high-energy is needed to shake and trigger the waterfall team so that it is ready to start the journey. In my opinion this kind of high-energy has to be provided by Drive-Driven Personality. The ScrumMaster has to take care that not only the team but the surrounding organization is ready to start the journey into agility. If you do not possess inner drive to change anything, your attempt to do so will stagnate after a while and will end in keeping a status quo. A Drive-Driven Personality is needed or risk to fail increases.

What for do we need Drive-Driven Personality if our scrum team already moved to a score of 6.4 on the Nokia scale? The team is self-organized, holds retrospectives, and understands how to improve on a regular basis. In this case you need a Drive-Driven ScrumMaster to perform the last hard step bringing the team hyperproductive to a score of 10. There will be impediments to change or remove which are way outside the scope of a scrum team. To change old top-management structures a fearless, Drive-Driven Personality is necessarily needed.

Drive-Driven Personality is what you want for everyone you are working with! Whenever you have to recruit and get people on your team, find out if an applicant is Drive-Driven enough for her job. Avoid working with mediocre skilled people - search a Drive-Driven team and your working paradise is reached.

Why does Scrum feel so good?

Everyone likes the feeling of having success. And nothing is more depressing than a consistently growing bad feeling that something is not right or heading in the wrong direction. Typical example of such bad feelings: hearing or reading for the 5th time "it's 90% finished".

So what is the great mood enlarger in agile, iterative methods like Scrum? Simply its transparent progress of small and visible results!

And this is not only for product owners to quickly see what they expected but also for the development team to quickly get positive feedback and as well for scrum masters to quickly see that their mentorship is fruitful.

Quick satisfaction with your own work is a success key of being agile!