I wanted to share an interesting experience I had today.
I was doing a retrospective with a team that’s about 2 months / 3
sprints into scrum. Coming into the retrospective the team seemed to
be feeling pretty low – they had yet to hit their sprint goals, and
were seeing other unpleasant things — and comments like “IF we keep
using scrum” were coming up in their conversation.
Over the first hour or so of the retrospective the team came up with
two lists: “what’s working” and “what’s not working”. The “what’s not
working” list wound up being about 17 items, almost twice the length
of the “what’s working” list. Most of the discussion centered around
the things that were not working; it was an imposing list, made all
the more so by the fact that it was a lot longer than the other one,
and we spent most of the time talking about it. Once the lists were
complete, the group spent a moment or two staring quietly at them.
Then, I tried something I hadn’t done before. I suggested the team go
through both lists, and mark each item as either “C” (caused by
Scrum), “V” (made visible by Scrum, ie would be happening with or
without Scrum), or “N” (not related to Scrum, ie the weather, etc).
Then we tallied them up.
Under “what’s working”, the score was C=7, V=1, N=2.
Under “what’s NOT working”, the score was C=5, V=12, N=2.
We stared at the results for a minute. Then one of the junior members
of the team volunteered, a little tentatively: “so it looks like Scrum
is actually CAUSING the good stuff, but the bad stuff is mostly just
things it’s MAKING VISIBLE. [pause] That’s exactly what we want, isn’t
it?”. The rest of the team nodded and murmured in agreement. In an
instant, the group’s understanding of its situation went through what
felt like a polar reversal.
It was a really wonderful moment!
