14 Wow! Moments from my Scrum MasterClass

…so that’s how Scrum works!

In my Scrum Performance MasterClass Workshop, the participants reflect on how their teams and organisations do Scrum. Then we review Scrum and its values, principles and practices so the participants can create a plan to improve their teams and organizations. Along the way, the participants experience moments of enlightenment – Wow! Eureka! — in which they suddenly understand essential concepts, relationships and implications for their organization.

Here’s a list of findings that caused my participants to say ‘Wow!’

1. Inspect and Adapt: Everybody inspects. Who really adapts? I haven’t. This needs to change.
2. We need to raise the percentage of done stories closer to 100% of the team’s forecast.
3. The Implementation Team selects the number of stories to implement in the sprint.
4. Technical debt is an important issue – we have to do something about it
5. Test effort accumulates if not automated – this is ‘technical debt’
6. How-to-Demo is not the same thing as the Definition of Done.
7. Our stories are too finely specified — too much of the ‘how’ is predefined
8. Limit stories in progress to 1/2 the number of team members.
9. Create security so people can speak freely
10. Understand the problem before looking for solutions
11. Define and stay within your timeboxes
12. ‘Remembering Heaven‘ as an approach to gain support for change
13. Pattern for Change: ‘Fearless Change’ by Rising and Manns
14. I should have come with my team and/or management

Inspect and Adapt: I’m haven’t been doing it. — That recognition came to me a few weeks ago. Rather embarrassing actually, because I have been teaching inspect and adapt for years. But for years I have been collecting feedback forms after each course with high points, low points, puzzles and suggestions. Mostly I just looked at the score to pat myself on the back. Beyond that, I hadn’t really done anything with the results.

Last September I started teaching CSM courses after a long break. To my horror, the NPS scores were much lower than I wanted. So I decided to apply my own teachings. I decided that after every course, I would implement at least one or two suggestions from each set of feedback forms. The results were spectacular! My NPS went from +10% to +90% in about 5 courses. Hey, this stuff really works! Inspect and Adapt. Listen to the customer. Strive to delight the customer.

So let me add one more Wow!-Moment, mine:

• Scrum is easy and Scrum is hard. It is always a challenge to maintain the passion to do it well!