Yet again, this is another concept introduced to me by my mentor friend.  It just shows how having a coffee and asking, “What new techniques are you using at work that are giving you an advantage?” can provide golden nuggets.

If you have not attended a scrum course, you still have a beginner’s belt, whereas you need a ‘black belt’ in the SCRUM methodology.

Do your project meetings go nowhere slowly? Is there a stagnation of ideas? Is your team stuck in a ‘Groundhog Day’? If so, you need to completely change the way you communicate with each other. The SCRUM methodology is a rethink of project management. Jeff Sutherland, a US fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, noted that combat fighter planes and big projects had a lot in common. They had to avoid being shot down. He noticed that large projects were:

  • Characteristically late with lots of pressure and no fun
  • Having too many long dysfunctional meetings
  • Slowed even further when more resources are applied to help speed them up, as the new staff are tripping over each other with unnecessary duplication
  • Frequented with duplication of effort
  • Often over-planned, only for the project team to find out that the game has changed
  • Constantly hitting roadblocks, with members not having the skills or internal authority to fix the problem by themselves.

The birth of scrum

Sutherland had a challenge to produce a new product in six months.  He discovered:

  • A 1986 HBR study “The New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka that noted best teams looked like sports teams, all linked together, overcoming obstacles with intensity
  • Discovered a company called Borland who thrived on – communication saturation – a daily SCRUM meeting.

The features of SCRUM are best illustrated in Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 1:  How SCRUM works  Source: Boost Agile.  Visit www.boost.co.nz/blog

Planning in detail only two weeks out

The new SCRUM method is where you take a chunk of work – between one and two weeks of effort – which is a standalone part of the project and is signed off at the end by the in-house or external customer. This chunk is called a sprint.

The daily stand-up SCRUM

Each day of the sprint, the team meets in a stand-up scrum meeting. They are asked to talk for one to two minutes about:

  • what they did yesterday
  • what they are doing today, and
  • any current roadblocks.

Each debrief is to take no more than a minute or so; some teams even have a rule that you can only talk if you can hold a dumbbell in your extended arm.

Removing the roadblocks

The team leader or ‘scrum master’ notes all the roadblocks and immediately sets about removing them with an appropriate phone call or walkabout visit. At the end of the session, the group touch fists– a homage to the source of this technique.

The many benefits of a daily stand-up SCRUM

Team members now get to know what has been done, what is going to be done, and by whom. They also know that they will be having a scrum tomorrow, alleviating the need to email. Everyone is accountable, with no place for ‘cruising.’

 

This is an extract from the toolkit (whitepaper + E-Templates) ,Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager by David Parmenter