Certified Scrum Professional - Scrum Master (CSP-SM)

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Table of Contents

PERSONAL FULFILMENT 4 SCRUM VALUES 4 SCRUM, AGILE AND LEAN 6 ORIGINS OF LEAN THINKING 6 KAIZEN MINDSET 7 WASTE OF LEAN MANUFACTURING 8 LEAN CONCEPTS 9 LEAN AND AGILE ENGINEERING 11 AGILE FACILITATION 12 FACILITATING OPEN DISCUSSION 12 ALTERNATIVES TO OPEN DISCUSSION 12 SETTING THE FRAME 19 DEBRIEFING 19 VISUAL FACILITATION FOR COLLABORATION 22 FACILITATING REMOTE TEAMS 24 COACHING 26 COACHING AGREEMENT 26 COACHING ASSUMPTIONS 28 PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 29 SERVICE TO PRODUCT OWNER 33 PRODUCT VISION 33 STORY WRITING WORKSHOP 37 BUY A FEATURE 37 DESIGNING PRODUCT BACKLOG 38 SERVICE TO DEVELOPMENT TEAM 40 TEAM PERFORMANCE CURVE 40 FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF TEAM 41 STARTING NEW TEAM 49 KICK-OFF A NEW SCRUM TEAM - ROLE PLAY 51 SOFTWARE CRAFTSMANSHIP 52 SERVICE TO ORGANIZATION 58 COMPLEX SYSTEMS 58 SYSTEMS THINKING 61 ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE 65 SCALING SCRUM 73 ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN 73 ALIGNMENT VS AUTONOMY 75 SCALING PRODUCT OWNER 76 CROSS TEAM COLLABORATION 77 ENGINEERING PRACTICES FOR SCALING 79 APPENDIX 80 BRIEF HISTORY OF LEAN 80 READING LIST 83

Mark on the below radar chart on the scale of 1 to 5 (1 is least and 5 is the best) on how do you rate yourself on Scrum values:

( Openness 5 Courage 3 1 )Respect Focus

Commitment

Share your Analysis of how you improved on your Scrum Values over period. Also share two concrete examples where you have used these values.

Identify and List the aspects of Lean Thinking

( ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ )

Kaizen is the Japanese word for a “good change” (Kai = change, Zen = good). It means constant improvement of all company functions, at every hierarchical level, from CEO to the least paid employees. It doesn’t matter if the change happens one time or is constant, big or small, as long as it is a change for the better.

The result of Kaizen should be a better workplace, a safer environment, elimination of hard work, teaching people how to scientifically innovate and test new ideas, reducing waste, increasing productivity, optimizing the supply chain and sales channels, and so on.

You can always do it better, make it better, and improve it, even if things are not broken. In Kaizen, problems are seen as opportunities to improve.

Relate how Product and Process Kaizen happens in Scrum

Map wastes of Product Development to Wastes of Lean Manufacturing.

Value through built-in quality: Understanding that customer satisfaction is paramount and is built-in at every step of the enterprise’s process, from building in satisfying features (such as peace of mind) to correctly building in quality at every production step. Built-in quality means to stop at every doubtful part and to train yourself and others not to pass on defective work, not to do defective work and not to accept defective work by stopping the process and reacting immediately whenever things go wrong.

Value streams through understanding "takt" time: By calculating the ratio of open production time to averaged customer demand one can have a clear idea of the capacity needed to offer a steady flow of products. This “takt” rhythm, be it a minute for cars, two months for software projects or two years for a new book leads to creating stable value streams where stable teams work on a stable set of products with stable equipment rather than optimize the use of specific machines or processes. Takt time thinking leads to completely different capacity reasoning than traditional costing and is the key to far more frugal processes.

Flow through reducing batch sizes: Every traditional business, whether in production or services, is addicted to batch. The idea as that once work is set up one way, we’d better get on and quickly make as many pieces of work as we can to keep the unit cost down. Lean thinking looks at this differently in trying to optimize the flow of work in order to satisfy real demand now, not imaginary demand next month. By working strenuously on reducing change-over time and difficulty, it is possible to approach the lean thinking ideal of single piece flow. In doing so, one reduces dramatically the general cost of the business by eliminating the need for warehouses, transports, systems, subcontractor use and so on.

Pull to visualize takt time through the flow: pulling work from upstream at takt time through visual devices such as Kanban cards is the essential piece that enables lean thinkers to visualize the gaps between the ideal and the actual at the workplace at any time. Pull is what creates a creative tension in the workplace by both edging closer to single-piece-work and by highlighting problems one at a time as they occur so complex situations can be resolved piecemeal. Pull is the basic technique to “lean” the company and, by and large, without pull there is no lean thinking.

Seeking perfection through kaizen: The old time sensei used to teach that the aim of lean thinking was not to apply lean tools to every process, but to develop the kaizen spirit in every employee. Perfection is not sought through better, more clever systems or go-it-alone heroes but through a commitment to improve things together step-by-small-step. Kaizen literally means change for the better and Kaizen spirit is about seeking a hundred 1% improvements from every one every day every where rather than one 100% leap forward. The practice of kaizen is what anchors deep lean thinking in people’s minds and which, ultimately, leads to complete transformation. Practicing kaizen together builds self-confidence and the collective confidence that we can face our larger challenges and solve our problems together.

Open discussion is the unstructured, conversational, familiar way of talking in groups. People speak up when they want to, and talk for as long as they choose. It is absolutely essential to know how to facilitate an open discussion; it is by far the most common approach to thinking in groups.

Open discussion serves many purposes. If someone raises an important issue, the entire group can discuss it. And if the issue does not engage the group, someone else can switch topics simply by voicing a new line of thought. Points of dispute can be clarified. Analyses can be deepened.

Proposals can be sharpened. Stakeholders can express diverse perspectives. At its best, open discussion can be very effective. But in reality, most open discussions are hard to sit through. Sometimes the conversation meanders or drifts. Sometimes a few individuals dominate. Sometimes people talk past one another without even attempting to link their ideas to the previous speaker’s statements. All in all, the term “open discussion” is often a synonym for “Groan Zone.” The facilitator needs to use techniques like Stacking, Mirroring, Balancing, Making Space etc to better control the discussion.

Alternatively, the meetings can have a structured process. This process includes organising the topics of the meetings, activities for each topic and formats in which these activities can be performed. A meeting can have more than one topic and a topic can have set of activities and each activity could be done in different format for effectiveness.

Each participation format has its own distinctive ground rules. For example, when building a list, a group must suspend judgment and call out items with no discussion.Obviously, different ground rules encourage different group behavior. Therefore, a facilitator can shift a group’s behavior (and by extension, the group’s energy) every time s/he shifts the participation format.

Listing Ideas

Listing ideas will help a group to rapidly identify many aspects of the subject, even when they’re just beginning to think about it.

PROCEDURE

1. Hang large sheets of paper on the wall.

2. Explain the ground rules for suspending judgment:

1. Anyone may put anything on the list that seems relevant.

2. Suspend judgment. No arguing or criticizing permitted.

3. No discussion while the listing is underway. Ideas can be discussed later, after the list has been built.

3. Ask for a volunteer to serve as the chart-writer. The job of the chart- writer is to write down everyone’s ideas without censoring or improving anything.

4. State the group’s task in the form of a question. For example, “What are our options for reducing our budget?” Give a time estimate for the activity, and have the group begin.

5. Have people call out ideas one at a time.

1. Honor everything everyone says.

2. Use mirroring as often as possible.

3. Summarize complex sentences for the chart-writer. If anyone begins arguing or discussing an item, politely remind the whole group of the ground rules.

6. Don’t panic when the pace slows down. It usually means people are thinking, now that the obvious ideas have been said. Tolerate silences. If you push for more ideas, many people will feel pressured and stop thinking altogether.

7. Toward the end of the allotted time, announce, “Two more minutes.” This often produces one final burst of ideas.

( Standard Approach A group generates answers to a question. Ideas are recorded on flipcharts. All ideas are acceptable. ) ( Brainstorming Creative ideas particularly those that are silly, oddball, or impossible – are eagerly encouraged. Quantity is more important than quality. )

( Using Sticky Notes Members write ideas on stickies, one idea per sheet. All stickies are posted on a wall. Later, ideas can be categorized. ) ( Listing Ideas - Variations ) ( Small Group Jump-Start Have members form pairs and discuss a question. Then reconvene the group to build a list of good ideas. ) ( Brainwriting Members write ideas on individual sheets of paper. Every few minutes, people trade sheets, read them, and add fresh ideas. ) ( Multi-Topic, Multi- Station Flipcharts on different topics are posted around the room. Members may begin at any station. They move to new ones every few minutes. )

Structured Go-Around (Round Robin)

Structured go rounds could be used when all the participants wants or needs to participate. This adds structure to the conversion and gives opportunity to everyone.

PROCEDURE

1. Have group members pull their chairs together to form a circle or a semicircle. It is important in a go-around that every member see every other member’s face.

2. Give a one-sentence overview of the topic to be addressed. Example: “In a moment, we’ll each have a chance to give our reactions to the presentation we just heard.”

3. Explain the process. Example: “We’ll go clockwise from whoever speaks first. While someone is talking, no one may interrupt. When you’re through speaking, say ‘pass’ or ‘I’m done,’ so the person next to you knows when to begin his or her turn.”

4. If there are specific variations in the ground rules, go over them now. For example, a facilitator might sometimes decide to give participants explicit permission to pass without speaking when it is their turn.

5. After clarifying the ground rules, restate the topic. People often forget the topic when they are focusing on your review of the ground rules. Now is the time to remind them and provide a more detailed explanation, if necessary.

6. Give people an idea of how much time to take. Example 1: “This will work best if each of you spends about a minute sharing your reactions.” Example 2: “Take as much time as you like to give your impressions of why this problem keeps reappearing.”

( The Standard Structured Go-Around Go clockwise – or counterclockwise – from whoever speaks first. ) ( Seven Words or Less People end their turn with no more than seven words. Incomplete sentences are fine. )

( Toss the Beanbag When the speaker is done, s/he tosses an object (an eraser, for example) to someone else, who speaks next. ) ( Structured Go-Around - Variations ) ( Talking Stick A member picks up the talking stick, then speaks from the heart. No one else may speak until the stick has been set down. )

( Two or Three Feeling Words People end a meeting with two or three feeling words that describe the mood. (Example: “I’m tired but happy.”) ) ( Popcorn Everyone takes a turn whenever they choose. When most have spoken, the facilitator asks, “Who still ha sn’t had a turn?” )

Working in Small Groups

Working in small groups could be useful too divide and concur the work and then consolidate as a bigger team.

1. Give a one sentence overview of the purpose of the next task. Example: “Now we’re going to discuss our reactions to Dr. Stone’s last lecture.” Leave the instructions vague for now. (Clarify them in Step 4.)

2. Tell the participants how to find partners for their small groups. Examples: “Turn to the person next to you,” or “Find two people you don’t know very well.”

3. Wait until everyone has formed their small groups before giving further instructions.

4. After everyone has settled down, clarify the task at hand. State the topic people will be discussing; then state the expected outcome. Example: “Dr. Stone claimed that married managers and single managers are treated very differently. Do you agree? What has your experience been? See if each of you can come up with two or three examples that have arisen at your place of work.”

5. If you have any instructions about specific ground rules or procedures, give them now. Example: “One person should be ‘the speaker’ while the other person is ‘the listener.’ Then reverse roles when I give the signal.”

6. Tell people how much time has been allotted for this activity.

7. As the process unfolds, announce the time remaining. Example: “Three more minutes!” When time is almost up, give a final warning: “Just a few more seconds.”

8. Reconvene the large group by asking a few people to share their thoughts and learnings.

( Casual Conversation Two or more participants. Informality prevails. Usually brief: 3 to 7 minutes. ) ( 2 – 4 – 8 Eight participants. Round one: four pairs. Round two: two foursomes. Round three: group of eight. Typically 20 to 30 minutes. )

( 2 – 4 – 2 Four participants. Round one: two pairs. Round two: all four people. Round three: two new pairs. Typically 15 to 20 minutes. ) ( Small Groups - Variations ) ( Talk, Then Switch Two participants. One talker, one listener. Switch roles at a set time. Often brief: 5 to 8 minutes. )

( Breakout Groups Any number of participants. Objective: make significant headway on a task. Chartwriting adds value. Often 30 to 45 minutes. ) ( Speed Dating Two participants. Objective: explore diversity. Casual conversation. Switch partners at a set time. Typically 15 to 30 minutes. )

When a facilitator introduces a new activity, some group members may not fully understand what they’re being asked to do, or why. To help participants see the whole picture, a facilitator can effectively set the frame by following the five steps shown above.

The Task: “Here’s what we’re going to do...”

The Outcome: “This is what we’ll have when we’re done...”

The Process: “Here’s how we’ll do it...”

The Rationale: “Here’s why we’re using this process ...”

The Expected Time: “Here’s how long this will take …”

Why

Structured activities, like Listing Ideas or Breaking into Small Groups, usually produce a wide range of perspectives. At the completion of a structured activity, it is usually worthwhile to provide time for reflecting on the discussion as a whole. For example, people might make observations like, “I never realized that there were so many different ways of looking at this issue!” or, “Now I’m starting to understand why this is such a problem.” This step is particularly important when people have been working in separate groups. It creates an immediate context for resuming work together, thus restoring the group's integrity as a single entity.

How

1. Before starting, select a question from the following list. All such questions work equally well. Now that [the given activity] is complete,

· How did this go for you?

· What have you learned?

· What concerns has this raised for you?

· What feelings did this bring up for you?

· What are you noticing about this group?

· What do you think of our prospects for success?

· Have you heard anything fresh and new?

· How do you react to hearing so many different points of view?

2. Ask for a few participants to respond to the chosen question. Alternatively, have a go-around so everyone can respond.

3. Upon completion of Step 2, proceed to the next item on the agenda. Alternatively, have the group discuss, “Where do we go from here?”

Discuss this scenario:

Your team wants to brainstorm for solutions to a problem they have been facing. Identify at least one action you can take as a facilitator to support while the team is going through Idea generation, Integration, shortlisting solutions etc. to develop an inclusive solution.

Clustering: Clustering could be used when large number of items need to be categorised during a conference process. The technique could be used during brain storming sessions, Sprint Retrospectives or any such meetings where team needs to categorise the items.

1. Team identifies possible categories. The categories can emerge as the activity is going on.

2. Each team member places their card from the list in one of the categories

3. Team members identifies duplicate and removes duplicates or combine the items if they are similar.

4. New categories are created if the items don’t fit into existing categories.

Visual Notes Taking: The Visual Note Taking is the process of representing information non-linguistically. This means through drawings or pictures. It can be simple using sketches or doodles or more complex using Mind mapping or Concept Maps as representations.

Mind Mapping: Mind mapping is a simple technique to connect all the information. This could be used for brainstorming sessions, product elaboration etc.

Dot Voting: This technique could be used for prioritisation of items. All participants are given few (2 or 3) votes and they pick the items which they feel are high priority. Once everyone voted, items are prioritised base on number of votes they got. Eg. This technique could be used while prioritising improvements in Sprint Retrospective.

Pass that Card: This technique mainly can be used to collect the information from a group of people.

1. Every one on the table gets an index card/Sticky note

2. Every one writes a question on the card and then passes the card to next person

3. On the back of the card, every one writes their answer to the question then passes the card to next person. At least three people write the answer to the question

4. Everyone summarises the answer for the question they have in hand.

Facilitating remote teams could be very challenging due to several reasons. Here are some of the techniques that could help alleviate the pain.

Establish Communication Protocol: Remote teams should have a communication protocol pre-established so that everyone is on the same page. This could include:

1. Publishing the meeting times ahead of the time.

2. All communication channels are up and running by the time meeting starts

3. Everyone is aware of what are the different ways they can join the meetings and how to join.

Turn-Taking: Remote teams can fall into the problem of talking one over the other since they don’t see each other. This would be a problem during a open discussion. Adding a little process to the facilitation can help. Turn taking is a simple technique where facilitator calls of the turns of each remote team so that this problem could be avoided.

Shared Notes-taking: Facilitator can set up an online notes facility for the all remote teams to collectively update the notes. This way each remote team would have the same visibility to the information of the meeting.

Reflect on the outcomes of a Retrospective you have conducted between Leaders and Executives of the organization for continuous improvement at organisation level:

“ Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them ” - Tim Gallwey

Coaching is a useful way of developing people's skills and abilities, and of boosting performance. It can also help deal with issues and challenges before they become major problems. A coaching session will typically take place as a conversation between the coach and the coachee (person being coached), and it focuses on helping the coachee discover answers by themselves.

It’s very important that a coaching agreement is created with client so that it is clear about what are the responsibilities of the coach and the client. A coaching agreement typically includes:

Date, Time and Location: A coaching agreement contains the Date, Time, location and duration of the coaching session. This is usually agreed upon by client and the coach.

Coach’s Responsibility:

· Build the trust with client so that client could be open.

· Be present in the moment and listen deeply to the client.

· Encourage the clients to set the goals that they really want.

· Encourage the clients to think more than what they have already done.

· Help clients focus better in order to produce results more quickly.

· Provide clients with the tools, support and structure to accomplish more.

Client’s Responsibility

Focus on Goal: Coaching works best when client has clear goals that are based on what they really want to achieve. Firstly, it is important for client to consider deeply what they want their work and life to look like.

Secondly, it is important to identify the gaps between the way things are now and how they would like them to be.

Understand the coaching process: Working with an empathic and professional coach is a definite way to grow and develop. Most clients take on a coach to work on specific goals and much of their time and energy is directed towards this. However, the coaching relationship may allow the client to discover something more about yourself. This is just a natural consequence of the coaching process.

Willingness to Step Up: Part of coach’s responsibility is to ask a good deal of client. It is important that the client is willing to experiment with fresh approaches and try new beliefs. Coach will encourage the client to be honest with themselves, raise client’s personal standards and set higher goals. However, client is the best judge of what is right for them.

Nevertheless, the more the client is willing to grow and develop, the greater will be the benefits from coaching.

Come Prepared to each Coaching Session: To get the most value out of each coaching session, it is important that the client prepare an agenda or write down some simple notes for each session regarding those matters them would like to discuss during the session, update of previous action point, etc. Preparing the agenda does not have to be time-consuming, but experience shows that if they spend 10-15 minutes preparing, it has a significant impact on the session.

Complete Your Homework: After each session, client will decide on the actions or goals they want to focus upon. Coach expects them to keep the commitments they make and will work with them to make sure that they are setting worthwhile, realistic and achievable goals. If client knows that they have a busy week or two ahead, their homework might be as simple as thinking about a new perspective. If they have more time, they might decide to handle a bigger task. Irrespective, coach will hold the client accountable and encourage them do their best.

Discuss why the following coaching assumptions are important

Emotional Intelligence

A coach needs to have high Emotional Intelligence to manage self as well as to manage the psychological aspects those may come up while dealing with the team. Having high emotional intelligence involve:

Self-awareness: Coach needs to understand their own emotions. One needs to understand when and how their emotions kick in and how it feels like when they get emotional.

Self-management: Once understood, a coach needs to know how to manage these emotions. There are several strategies to manage the emotions so that you are in good balance.

Social Awareness: A coach needs understand the emotions of others. This is in regards what makes someone emotional and how do they behave when they are emotional.

Relationship Management: Coach need to understand how to manage situations when the others get into emotional state to maintain a good relationship. If a coach can’t handle the emotional situations, it could lead to undesirable relationships.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The MBTI was constructed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. It is based on the conceptual theory proposed by Carl Jung, who had speculated that humans experience the world using four principal psychological functions – sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking – and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time.

There are 4 dichotomies to personality:

Transactional Analysis (TA)

Transactional analysis is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions

are analyzed to determine the ego state of the patient (whether parent-like,

child-like, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior. In transactional analysis, the patient is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.

Complementary transactions complete a transit from the receiving ego state back to the sending ego state. If the transaction is from adult to child, the response must be child to adult.

Crossed transactions occur when the communication transaction does not return directly to the state it came from.

Ulterior transactions always involve two or more ego states in parallel. One portion of the transaction is generally verbal and the other an unspoken psychological transaction.

Elevator Pitch Technique

The elevator pitch is a way to articulate the vision so that it can handle the classic elevator test, i.e., you can explain the product’s vision in less than two minutes (before the elevator arrives, and you step out)?

For……………………………………………………………………

(the product’s target market)

Who/That… …………………………………………………………..

(describe what need your product solves)

The product…

………………………………………………………...

(product name or product category)

That leads to…………………………………………………………

(main advantage, appealing reason for purchase)

Unlike the……………………………………..................................

(principal competing alternatives)

Our product offers……………………………… ……………….

(describe main differentiation)

Example

For the marketing of medium-sized businesses who need basic CRM functionality, CRM Catalyst is a web-based service that provides tracking sales, sales leads generation and sales support functions that leads to improved customer relationships. Unlike other services and software, our product offe rs many more features at a lower cost.

Vision Box

Vision Board

Discuss how different is facilitating Vision creation with Stake Holders vs Development Team

Participants: Product Owner, Key Stakeholder(s), Development Team and Facilitator

Agenda

1. Product owner presents the significant objective

2. Discuss user roles and personas

3. Story generation

4. Story selection

5. Schedule follow-up sessions if needed

Product owner explains the objective that could be a major feature or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) etc. Team and Product Owner come up with Users and Personas. The story generation could be done by techniques like Brain Storming or Mind Mapping.

This is an Innovation Game to prioritise the Epics and User Stories based on value and the available budget.

The Game

Create a list of potential features and provide each with a price. The price can be based on development costs, customer value, or something else. Although the price can be the actual cost you intend to charge for the feature, this is usually not required.

Customers buy features that they want in the next release of your product using play money you give them. If some features are

priced high enough that no one customer can buy them. Encourage customers to pool their money to buy especially important and/or expensive features. This will help motivate negotiations between customers as to which features are most important.

You have a product backlog for a product with 3 functional areas. There are 5 Teams working on the product. Discuss Three possible ways of arranging the product backlog and the pros and Cons of each approach.

The 'team performance curve' illustrates that how well any small group of people performs depends on the basic approach it takes and how effectively it implements that approach.

Working group: This is a group for which there is no significant incremental performance need or

opportunity that would require it to become a team. The members interact primarily to share information, best practices, or perspectives and to make decisions that help each individual perform within his or her area of responsibility.

Pseudo-team: This is a group for which there could be a significant, incremental performance need or opportunity, but it has not focused on collective performance and is not really trying to achieve it. It has no interest in shaping a common purpose or set of performance goals, even though it may call itself a team.

Potential team: This is a group for which there is a significant, incremental performance need and that really is trying to improve its performance impact. Typically, however, it requires more clarity about purpose, goals, or work-products and more discipline in hammering out a common working approach.

Real team: This is a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. Real teams are a basic unit of performance.

High-performance team: This is a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to one another's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team. The high-performance team significantly outperforms all other like teams, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given its membership.

Here are the five dysfunctions identified by Patric Lencioni in his book “The Five Dysfunctions of the team”. If you are building a team, you need to work through building each step i.e Trust, Conflict Management, Commitment, Accountability and Attention to Results.

Leader’s Role Hindrances

Focus on collective outcome

Confront Difficult Issues

Force clarity and closure

Mine for Conflict

Go First!

A. Prepare and give a short demonstration of how have you applied team development models to your team

B. Discuss the effectiveness of two team development frameworks and what factors influenced those outcomes.

Building Trust

Team Building Activities: Team building actives during team outings gives team to work closely with each other and help build trust over period. The activities should include that has an element of trust. As the team doing these activities they understand each other better and trust is built gradually.

Personal Histories Exercise: As soon as you got a new team, this exercise can help know each other better which leads to building the trust. In this exercise, each team member gives a brief talk about themselves. You can use a set of questions each member will answer or “Anything you want to share about yourself?”.

Trust-Walks: In this exercise, one member will be blind-folded and walk around with the guidance of an another team member. The blind-folded member needs to fully trust the guide. When the guide completes the task successfully, the blind-folded member starts to build the trust. Another extreme variation is a Trust Fall where one member falls backward trusting that their team members will catch them.

McCarthy Protocols:

The Core Protocols are “best practices” for people, teams of people and organizations that want to get great results – all the time. They are “Core” because they are foundational

– they can be used by all teams, anywhere, even if you already have organizational patterns and best practices of your own. They are “Protocols” because they name and prescribe ways that people can interact (behavior), predictably, like the “protocols” followed in diplomacy.

Conflict Mining: Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a “miner of conflict” - someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them. They must have the courage and confidence to call out sensitive issues and force team members to work through them. This requires Teams that fear conflict . . .

· Have boring meetings

· Create environments where back-channel politics and personal attacks thrive

· Ignore controversial topics that are critical to team success

· Fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team members

· Waste time and energy with posturing and interpersonal risk management Teams that engage in conflict . . .

· Have lively, interesting meetings

· Extract and exploit the ideas of all team members

· Solve real problems quickly

· Minimize politics

· Put critical topics on the table for discussion

a degree of objectivity during meetings and a commitment to staying with the conflict until it is resolved. Some teams may want to assign a member of the team to take on this responsibility during a given meeting or discussion.

Leader’s Responsibility

One of the most difficult challenges that a leader faces in promoting healthy conflict is the desire to protect members from harm. This leads to premature interruption of disagreements, and prevents team members from developing coping skills for dealing with conflict themselves. This is not unlike parents who overprotect their children from quarrels or altercations with siblings. In many cases, it serves only to strain the relationships by depriving the participants of an opportunity to develop conflict management skills. It also leaves them hungry for resolution that never occurs. Therefore, it is key that leaders demonstrate restraint when their

people engage in conflict, and allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be. This can be a challenge because many leaders feel that they are somehow failing in their jobs by losing control of their teams during conflict. Finally, as trite as it may sound, a leader’s ability to personally model appropriate conflict behavior is essential. By avoiding conflict when it is necessary and productive - something many executives do - a team leader will encourage this dysfunction to thrive.

Commitment

Clarity of Expectations

When there is clarity on roles and responsibilities, Deadlines and expected outcomes, teams tend to be more committed. If there is lot of confusion and ambiguity, the work may be undermined and some of the efforts may even be wasted.

Participatory Decision Making

If the team is involved or even it’s input is considered in making decisions, it is more likely to have better commitment on achieving the goals. If the decisions are made by someone else like a manager and pushed on to the team, there may not be a buy-in by the team which leads to less commitment.

The Role of the Leader

More than any other member of the team, the leader must be comfortable with the prospect of making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong. And the leader must be constantly pushing the group for closure around issues, as well as adherence to schedules that the team has set. What the leader cannot do is place too high a premium on certainty or consensus.

Team Accountability

Publication of Goals and Standards is a good way to make it easier for team members to hold one another accountable is to clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed. The enemy of accountability is ambiguity, and even when a team has initially committed to a plan or a set of behavioral standards, it is important to keep those agreements in the open so that no one can easily ignore them.

Simple and Regular Progress Reviews A little structure goes a long way toward helping people take action that they might not otherwise be inclined to do. This is especially true when it comes to giving people feedback on their behavior or performance. Team members should regularly communicate with one another, either verbally or in written form, about how they feel their teammates are doing against stated objectives and standards. Relying on them to do so on their own, with no clear expectations or structure, is inviting the potential for the avoidance of accountability.

Team Goals and Rewards By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability. This occurs because a team is unlikely to stand by quietly and fail because a peer is not pulling his or her weight.

The Role of the Leader

One of the most difficult challenges for a leader who wants to instil accountability on a team is to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism. Sometimes strong leaders naturally create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving themselves as the only source of discipline. This creates an environment where team members assume that the leader is holding others accountable, and so they hold back even when they see something that isn’t right.

Focus on Outcomes

Public Declaration of Results In the mind of a football or basketball coach, one of the worst things a team member can do is publicly guarantee that his or her team will win an upcoming game. In the case of an athletic team, this is a problem because it can unnecessarily provoke an opponent. For most teams, however, it can be helpful to make public proclamations about intended success. Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results. Teams that say, “We’ll do our best,” are subtly, if not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.

Results-Based Rewards An effective way to ensure that team members focus their attention on results is to tie their rewards, especially compensation, to the achievement of specific outcomes. Relying on this

alone can be problematic because it assumes that financial motivation is the sole driver of behavior. Still, letting someone take home a bonus merely for “trying hard,” even in the absence of results, sends a message that achieving the outcome may not be terribly important after all.

The Role of the Leader

Perhaps more than with any of the other dysfunctions, the leader must set the tone for a focus on results. If team members sense that the leader values anything other than results, they will take that as permission to do the same for themselves. Team leaders must be selfless and objective, and reserve rewards and recognition for those who make real contributions to the achievement of group goals.

( Continuous Learning Set Alignment ) ( Set Context ) ( Set Purpose )Starting a new Agile team could be different from a traditional project kickoff for various reasons. Review and relate the items below and answer the questions on the next page:

Who attends the new Agile team kickoff?

What is the responsibility of each participant?

What are various aspects to consider and why are they important?

Choose a Sponsor, Product Owner and a ScrumMaster per team.

1. Sponsor gives a short talk explaining the Constraints, Context and Stakeholder Expectations

2. Product Owner explains Vision, Purpose and Customer needs

3. ScrumMasters talk about need for collaboration and other new team dynamics and facilitate the teams on:

· Team member introduction activity

· To identify skill gaps

· Create Working Agreement

Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasizes the coding skills of the software developers themselves.

Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship

Describe couple of ways you introduced advanced software engineering practices (like XP) to your team. Discuss at your table what worked and what didn’t.

Gherkin

Gherkin is a Domain Specific Language for writing acceptance criteria that has five main statements:

Scenario — a label for the behavior you’re going to describe

Given — the beginning state of the scenario

When — a specific action that the user takes

Then — a testable outcome, usually caused by the action in When

And — this continues any of the other three operators

Example:

Scenario: Simple Google search

Given a web browser is at the Google home page

When the user enters "scrum" into the search bar

Then links related to "scrum" are shown on the results page

Express the following acceptance criteria in Gherkin format:

“User enters credentials and clicks submit, on valid credentials the user is directed to the home page”

Design a facilitation for the team to come up with their own learning and capability goals. Evaluate approaches to make sure that the team is progressing towards their goals.

Pair up and have a coaching conversation with your pair on what techniques they have used to improve the team accountability.

Complex systems are systems that are difficult to model and predict. The amount of information required to fully document a complex system at a point in time is prohibitively large such that they can't be fully modelled by any known methods. Components of a complex system may appear to act spontaneously such that predicting complex systems with certainty is believed to be impossible.

Organizations may be organized using relatively simple processes, rules and technologies that would be possible to model. The human element of organizations is what makes them complex. For example, office politics may cause organizations to do spontaneous things such as making odd decisions. Human talents such as creativity are also a wild card in modelling organizations.

Discuss and identify some of the characteristics of a Complex System

Stable

Spontaneous

Cause-and-Effect is clear up front

Un-Predictable

Emergent

Cause-and-Effect

is visible at the end Predictable

Process-driven

Relationships are Non-Linear

Has Cascading Effect

Has Localized Effect

Adaptive

Relationships are Linear

Discuss on your table how organisations are Complex Systems and Importance of having a systems view.

Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements. Systems thinking can be used in any area of research and has been applied to the study of medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems, among many others.

System Dynamics - Causal Loop Diagrams

Causal Loop diagrams are used to understand the dynamics of various entities of a system. A causal loop diagram consists of four basic elements: the variables, the links between them, the signs on the links (which show how the variables are interconnected), and the sign of the loop (which shows what type of behavior the system will produce). By representing a problem or issue from a causal perspective, you can become more aware of the structural forces that produce puzzling behavior.

Variables: Variables are the aspects of the system for which we want to study the relationship between each other. Examples of variables could be “# Defects”, “Velocity” etc.

#Defects Velocity

Causal Links: Causal links are the connectors with a row head on one side, between two variables. It shows the effect and direction of one variable on other. For example, Trying to increase velocity can increase # defects.

Velocity #Defects

Opposite Effect: If one variable has an opposite effect on the other variable, it is indicated as “O” next to the causal link. For example # Defects would have an opposite effect on the Velocity.

Velocity #Defects

O

Delayed Effect: Some variables cause a delayed effect on others. This is marked with “| |” on the causal link. Example could be hiring more developers will have a differed effect on velocity.

# Developers

Velocity

#Defects

O

Mental Models

One systems thinking model that is helpful for understanding global issues is the iceberg model. We know that an iceberg has only 10 percent of its total mass above the water while 90 percent is underwater. But that 90 percent is what the ocean currents act on, and what creates the iceberg’s behavior at its tip. Global issues can be viewed in this same way.

The Event Level

The event level is the level at which we typically perceive the world—for instance, waking up one morning to find we have caught a cold. While problems observed at the event level can often be addressed with a simple readjustment, the iceberg model pushes us not to assume that every issue can be solved by simply treating the symptom or adjusting at the event level.

The Pattern Level

If we look just below the event level, we often notice patterns. Similar events have been taking place over time — we may have been catching more colds when we haven’t been resting enough. Observing patterns allows us to forecast and forestall events.

The Structure Level

Below the pattern level lies the structure level. When we ask, “What is causing the pattern we are observing?” the answer is usually some kind of structure. Increased stress at work due to the new promotion policy, the habit of eating poorly when under stress, or the inconvenient location of healthy food sources could all be structures at play in our catching a cold. According to Professor John Gerber, structures can include the following:

· Physical things — like vending machines, roads, traffic lights or terrain.

· Organizations — like corporations, governments, and schools.

· Policies — like laws, regulations, and tax structures.

· Ritual — habitual behaviors so ingrained that they are not conscious.

The Mental Model Level

Mental models are the attitudes, beliefs, morals, expectations, and values that allow structures to continue functioning as they are. These are the beliefs that we often learn subconsciously from our society or family and are likely unaware of. Mental models that could be involved in us catching a cold could include: a belief that career is deeply important to our identity, that healthy food is too expensive, or that rest is for the unmotivated.

During Agile transformations, entire organisation has to go through a change which could be challenging.

Kotter’s 8 Step Model

Dr. John P. Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, invented the 8-Step Process for

Leading Change. It consists of eight stages:

Create Sense of Urgency: Help others see the need for change through a bold, aspirational opportunity statement that communicates the importance of acting immediately.

Build Guiding Coalition: A volunteer army needs a coalition of effective people – born of its own ranks – to guide it, coordinate it, and communicate its activities.

Form a strategic vision and initiative: Clarify how the future will be different from the past and how you can make that future a reality through initiatives linked directly to the vision.

Enlist a volunteer army: Large-scale change can only occur when massive numbers of people rally around a common opportunity. They must be bought-in and urgent to drive change – moving in the same direction.

Enable action by removing barriers: Removing barriers such as inefficient processes and hierarchies provides the freedom necessary to work across silos and generate real impact.

Generate Short-term wins: Wins are the molecules of results. They must be recognized, collected and communicated – early and often – to track progress and energize volunteers to persist.

Sustain Acceleration: Press harder after the first successes. Your increasing credibility can improve systems, structures and policies. Be relentless with initiating change after change until the vision is a reality.

Institute Change: Articulate the connections between the new behaviors and organizational success, making sure they continue until they become strong enough to replace old habits.

Kübler-Ross (5 Stages of Grief) model

The Kübler-Ross model (otherwise known as the five stages of grief) postulates a progression of emotional states experienced by both terminally ill patients after diagnosis and by loved-ones after a death. The five stages are chronologically: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

The model was first introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler- Ross and used for any grief management. This model could be applied during the organisational transformations, since the employees of the organisation goes though similar grief cycles during the transformations.

STAGE 1: Denial

In the beginning, team members may be in shock and defensive in relation to the announced change. They may not be able to digest the fact that they will have to adapt to something new. It can bring about a dip in productivity and the inability to think and act. After the shock, a person may cling to the past and move forward like nothing has changed. In the most extreme cases, they may remain in a state of denial for a long time and lose touch with reality.

STAGE 2: Anger

When the realization finally hits, employees or workers may begin to feel fear for what lies ahead and some team members may even become angry and full of resentment. Anger can be manifested or expressed in many ways. While some take out the anger on themselves, others may direct it towards others around them. You can expect those in this phase to remain irritable, frustrated and short tempered.

STAGE 3: Bargaining

When the stage of anger passes away, one may start thinking about ways to postpone the inevitable and try to find out the best thing left in the situation. This is when you may hear your team members say, “What if we do this?” or, “Can I fit here?” They’ll need to test and explore what the change means. They will do this more easily if they are helped and supported to do so, even if this is a simple matter of allowing enough time for them to do so.

STAGE 4: Depression

You’re not out of the woods quite yet. After the bargaining phase, there is one more dip in the curve. The learning phase may not always be a happy and comfortable zone for most employees of a workplace. Employees may have realized by now that there is no way out of the situation, resulting in low morale and energy, and even depression. Team members stuck in this stage may display signs of indifference or push others away. This is a low energy phase and requires a lot of support to renew feelings of motivation.

STAGE 5: Acceptance

When people realize that fighting the change that is coming into their life is not going to make the grief go away, they resign to the situation and accept it completely. This stage is the one you have been waiting for! This is where the changes start to become second nature, and people embrace the improvements to the way they work.

Take an organisational Dysfunction you addressed or would like to address and explain your approach to address it

Transforming to Agile Mindset

During an Organisational Transformation, working on mindset change of Individuals is extremely important. Here are some of the aspects important for successful agile transformation.

Knowledge: Imparting knowledge about Scrum and other Agile practices to everyone in the organisation is the starting point in Agile Transformation. In addition, training middle and senior managers on Agile Leadership is very essential for the success of the transformation. These trainings can help early adopters to get on board who could help accelerate the progression of transformation.

Empowerment: All the change agents like coaches and leaders should be empowered to make decisions rather than controlling with organisational bureaucracy to make speedy decisions. Also, all Scrum Teams need to be as autonomous as possible to do deliver value to the end customer.

Transparency: Keeping everything transparent to the whole organisation could help the workforce have trust in the organization. This could include what the vision is for the transformation and what to expect during the transformation etc. Creating open culture improves the morale of the teams as well as reduces the fears about what will happen to their future etc.

Coaching: Coaching is most important aspect in changing the mindset of leaders, middle managers and Scrum Teams are equally important for creating agile mindset. Leaders, Managers and any one who has people responsibility need to be coached on leadership skills like Empowerment, Alignment, Encouragement etc. Scrum Teams need to be coached on cross- functional behaviour and self-organisation.

Explain at least couple of techniques how you applied to help your organisation or team to change to agile mindset.

Discuss on your table how change from command and control to Agile Mindset helped following:

While scaling Scrum to multiple teams, it is extremely important to design the organisation in right way to deliver maximum value to the customer.

Organisation structures are key aspect of organisational design.

Team-based organization:

Dedicated teams—Each team member is dedicated for 100% of his time to one and only one Team. This might feel inflexible, but team members require dedication if you want them to (1) take a shared responsibility for the Team’s goal, and (2) take ownership of how a team works—own their processes.

Cross-functional teams—Each team contains all functional skills needed to produce a shippable product. Traditional functional specialization might feel the most ‘efficient’ from that function’s perspective, but most effortand problems in product development is “between the functions” and thus teams require to be cross-functional if you want them to focus on the whole working product.

Co-located teams—Each team is co-located in the same room. This might sound unreasonable. Wouldn’t you, in today’s globalized world, want to use the best skilled people in the place where they are? No. We want the best teams that can take a shared responsibility for the outcome of the Team, and learns from each other. Shared responsibility requires trust. Humans build up trust quickest by close cooperation and face-to-face communication. Co- location also promotes team learning—the essense of continuous improvement.

Long-lived teams—A Team stays together ‘forever.’ This might feel idealistic, but Teams need to have stability if you want the team to care about how they work as a Team. Anyone who has ever been on a real long- lived team knows that teams get better as the team members get to know each other and learn how to do and improve work together.

Feature Teams

Spotify Model

Identify characteristics of organisation in each quadrant

Source: Henrik Kniberg

Contrast following patters of scaling Product Owner

Model 1: One product owner for several teams

Model 2: Product Owner hierarchy with each team is helped by a product owner

( Source: Mike Cohn Copyright © 2018 - All rights are reserved by Power Agile Technologies Private Limited ) ( 76 )

Colocated Teams: Colocated teams certainly collaborate than distributed teams. Technology can solve the distribution problem to some extent, but if the teams need to highly collaborate, they better be co-located.

Joint-Meetings: Joint meetings could be used for the meetings where multiple teams need to be involved. These meetings could be Multi-team Product Backlog Refinement, Multi-Team Sprint Planning, Multi-Team Sprint Reviews.

Scrum Of Scrums: Scrum of Scrum (SoS) is coronation meeting between teams when they need to collaborate. Each team identifies couple people who attends the Scrum of Scrums meeting to coordinate the work of multiple Scrum teams. These meetings are analogous to the daily Scrum meeting, but do not necessarily happen every day. In many organizations, having a Scrum of Scrums meeting two or three times a week is sufficient.

Cross-Team visits to Daily Scrum: A simple coordination method for teams is to send a representative —not the Scrum Master—as a silent observer to the Daily Scrum of other teams doing related work. The observers then report back to their teams so they can take further action.

Travellers: Sometimes a product group relies on a couple of experienced technical experts. How can the knowledge of these (scarce) experts be kept available to all teams? They can become travelers. Each Sprint they join a different team, coaching via pairing, workshops, and teaching sessions.

( 77 ) ( Copyright © 2018 - All rights are reserved by Power Agile Technologies Private Limited )

What collaboration techniques would you use in your teams on various occasions:

Explain what engineering practices help with multi-team Scrum how are they beneficial.

(from www.lean.org)

Although there are instances of rigorous process thinking in manufacturing all the way back to the Arsenal in Venice in the 1450s, the first person to truly integrate an entire production process was Henry Ford. At Highland Park, MI, in 1913 he married consistently interchangeable parts with standard work and moving conveyance to create what he called flow production. The public grasped this in the dramatic form of the moving assembly line, but from the standpoint of the manufacturing engineer the breakthroughs actually went much further.

Ford lined up fabrication steps in process sequence wherever possible using special-purpose machines and go/no-go gauges to fabricate and assemble the components going into the vehicle within a few minutes, and deliver perfectly fitting components directly to line-side. This was a truly revolutionary break from the shop practices of the American System that consisted of general-purpose machines grouped by process, which made parts that eventually found their way into finished products after a good bit of tinkering (fitting) in subassembly and final assembly.

The problem with Ford’s system was not the flow: He was able to turn the inventories of the entire company every few days. Rather it was his inability to provide variety. The Model T was not just limited to one color. It was also limited to one specification so that all Model T chassis were essentially identical up through the end of production in 1926. (The customer did have a choice of four or five body styles, a drop-on feature from outside suppliers added at the very end of the production line.) Indeed, it appears that practically every machine in the Ford Motor Company worked on a single part number, and there were essentially no changeovers.

When the world wanted variety, including model cycles shorter than the 19 years for the Model T, Ford seemed to lose his way. Other automakers responded to the need for many models, each with many options, but with production systems whose design and fabrication steps regressed toward process areas with much longer throughput times. Over time they populated their fabrication shops with larger and larger machines that ran faster and faster, apparently lowering costs per process step, but continually

increasing throughput times and inventories except in the rare case—like engine machining lines—where all of the process steps could be linked and automated. Even worse, the time lags between process steps and the complex part routings required ever more sophisticated information management systems culminating in computerized Materials Requirements Planning(MRP) systems .

As Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota looked at this situation in the 1930s, and more intensely just after World War II, it occurred to them that a series of simple innovations might make it more possible to provide both continuity in process flow and a wide variety in product offerings. They therefore revisited Ford’s original thinking, and invented the Toyota Production System.

This system in essence shifted the focus of the manufacturing engineer from individual machines and their utilization, to the flow of the product through the total process. Toyota concluded that by right-sizing machines for the actual volume needed, introducing self-monitoring machines to ensure quality, lining the machines up in process sequence, pioneering quick setups so each machine could make small volumes of many part numbers, and having each process step notify the previous step of its current needs for materials, it would be possible to obtain low cost, high variety, high quality, and very rapid throughput times to respond to changing customer desires. Also, information management could be made much simpler and more accurate.

The thought process of lean was thoroughly described in the book The Machine That Changed the World (1990) by James P. Womack, Daniel Roos, and Daniel T. Jones. In a subsequent volume, Lean Thinking (1996), James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones distilled these lean principles even further to five:

· Specify the value desired by the customer

· Identify the value stream for each product providing that value and challenge all of the wasted steps (generally nine out of ten) currently

necessary to provide it

· Make the product flow continuously through the remaining value-added steps

· Introduce pull between all steps where continuous flow is possible

· Manage toward perfection so that the number of steps and the amount of time and information needed to serve the customer continually falls

Lean Today

As these words are written, Toyota, the leading lean exemplar in the world, stands poised to become the largest automaker in the world in terms of overall sales. Its dominant success in everything from rising sales and market shares in every global market, not to mention a clear lead in hybrid technology, stands as the strongest proof of the power of lean enterprise.

This continued success has over the past two decades created an enormous demand for greater knowledge about lean thinking. There are literally hundreds of books and papers, not to mention thousands of media articles exploring the subject, and numerous other resources available to this growing audience.

As lean thinking continues to spread to every country in the world, leaders are also adapting the tools and principles beyond manufacturing, to logistics and distribution, services, retail, healthcare, construction, maintenance, and even government. Indeed, lean consciousness and methods are only beginning to take root among senior managers and leaders in all sectors today.

· Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making by Lenny Lind and Sam Kaner

· Coaching for Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose by John Whitmore

· Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Dr Travis Bradberry

· The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

· Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn

· Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

· Leading Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck