Watch and listen as Dan Pink tells us what we already know in our hearts: extrinsic motivators are ineffective for complex work!

Five years ago, almost to the day, Ron Jeffries wrote a great post entitled “A Metric Leading to Agility“. In it he coined the term “Running Tested Features”.

More recently he has talked about another helpful metric for teams transitioning to Agile. It is “Running Automated Tests”. For those who need some guidance about choosing the right test automation tools (and avoiding the wrong ones), Elizabeth Hendrickson has written a great article.

As Lean enthusiasts might be tempted to celebrate the demise of General Motors and the assumption by Toyota of the #1 auto maker rank, James P. Womack* gives us pause to think about the end of an era.

*Author of “The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production“.

I’ve been updating myself on the activites in the Prince2 camp to update this project management framework. One thing that stuck is the lamentations about the large number of PINO projects. PINO is an acronym (actually an initialism) for Prince In Name Only. In the Scrum world this has commonly been called ScrumButt, drawn from “we’re doing Scrum, but…” as well as the frequent desire to kick such teams in the butt!

Martin Fowler, one of Agile Manifesto signatories has blogged recently on “flaccid Scrum” (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html). FWIW, I agree with him.

We must constantly remind ourselves (and those whom we seek to influence) that:

• Scrum is silent on which “software engineering” practices to use, but not on their use.
• We must continuously assess our way of working against the Agile principles.
• Undone work (aka technical debt) will continue to cripple delivery of value as long as we continue allow it to accumulate.
• Scrum is just a tool to expose deficiencies and dysfunction in the team and the organisation – the problems remain ours to tackle and solve.

So while we continue to battle our demons, how about honestly calling some Scrum implementations SINO (Scrum In Name Only)?

Right now I’m sitting at the back of the class while my good friend André is conducting an introduction workshop on ITSM (IT Service Management) using the ITIL framework at a major retailer.

He tells a story to illustrate the difference between incident management and problem management. The latter requires a root cause analysis. The aha! moment for me is when he says that root cause analysis is the start of a CM (Change Management) process.

I realise that Scrum is an ongoing change management process. In every daily Scrum meeting, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective the team (and stakeholders) inspect their work and their process and make adaptations to improve.

Scrum rules!

Being Agile includes working at a sustainable pace. That means we have time for important things outside of work. Like our family, our health, our faith and our planet Earth.

I invite you to invest an hour together with a billion more people in our planet Earth. Sign up at:

http://www.earthhour.org.za/?refer=16c79cd9c309f09dda3606abfaedcff

The Cape Town chapter of the Scrum User Group of South Africa held its second event on at 18:30 on Thursday 6 November.

We took advantage of Boris Gloger’s presence here to host a panel discussion with Boris, Steve van der Merwe and myself. Sue Bramhall facilitated and her company, 24.com kindly sponsored the venue and refreshments.

The audience of around 40 varied from people curious to know what Scrum is to those practising for a couple of years and looking for some therapy <g>. We had some lively discussions. Boris asked one person from a large enterprise what was preventing her from starting to apply Scrum in her team. Another outcome I recall is we all said we didn’t trust architects who don’t write code!

Steve got people to write down what they want from future events, which should help the organising team to tune future events.

Sue threw the laggards out around 21:00. Sorry, Dan, that I asked you so many awkward questions about your team’s journey with Scrum.

Last night Mike and I ran Boris Gloger’s “ball points” game for the monthly Cape Town SPIN meeting.

We had a group of twenty-something IT professionals who got off to a flying start by immediately organising themselves into the classic concentric circle formation. Yet their score in sprints 1 and 2 were pedestrian. In the reflection after sprint 2 they shed one member to make their number even (illegal?). In sprint 3 the team ‘gelled’ and the score raced up to 60! They asked what the record is. We said we thought it was eighty-something.

Then they made an adjustment to their process that Mike and I had not seen in perhaps 20 times we’ve done this exercise: they threw the balls two at a time. Not exactly throwing, mind you; more like dropping from one person’s hands into the next. To my surprise it worked brilliantly with very few ‘bugs’ (dropped balls). They managed 93 and 103 points in their final sprints and were justifiably pleased with themselves.

Is this a new world record?

Welcome to the Scrum Sense blog-cum-website!

This will be the place where you can find out what’s going on in our little Scrum coaching and training world based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Soon our domain url http://www.scrumsense.com will bring you straight here.

Peter & Mike