Large Scale Agile and Scrum vs. Waterfall: Agile is 6X More Successful, 1/4 the Cost, and 10X Faster Payback!

A pair of recent findings from the Standish Group confirm the astonishing success and cost savings of Agile approaches over waterfall.

In the “Chaos Report 2015“, Standish found that large Agile projects are 6X more successful than waterfall projects.  While Standish doesn’t get specific on what is a “large” project, it’s worth noting that “Large” is the biggest size category for projects and their data encompasses over 10,000 software projects.

In a new report called  The Money Pit, The Standish Group studied two very similar large software projects, done at two very similarly sized, mature companies.  One project was done with Agile, and one with Waterfall.  The astounding results they found:

• The Agile project was 4X cheaper than the cost of the equivalent waterfall project, AND
• The Agile project was “delivered with high user satisfaction,” while the waterfall project “had a watered-down critical function and the high-value feature was not part of the delivered application.”, AND
• The Agile Project’s payback was “At the end of two years the application costs were fully paid back and the users were highly proficient” while the waterfall organization estimated the system payback would “break even in 20 years”

 

* Note that the activities depicted on the graph were done sequentially via waterfall, but iteratively via Agile.

It should also be noted that a survey from Forrester Research showed that of all companies attempting Agile, some 90% are using Scrum.

Just to re-iterate — 6X more successful, cost payback 10X faster, and 4X cheaper.  How is that for Better, Faster, Cheaper?

At AgileSoftwareTraining.com, we provide coaching, consulting, and training solutions to help your company achieve the astounding success of Agile and Scrum approaches.  Contact us today for a free consultation.

So, if you’re an organization that is doing waterfall or struggling with Agile, what are you waiting for?  The research is overwhelmingly in favor of Agile and Scrum approaches.  Get on the road to millions more in profit and cost savings.  No seriously, what are you waiting for?

The New New Product Owner: The Product Visionary

In my previous post, I discussed the New New Product Owner as The Product Marketplace expert.  In this post, we explore the “Product Visionary” focus area.

The Product Owner is the chief product visionary. The PO should be able to clearly articulate the product vision to the Scrum Team and key stakeholders, and how that vision aims to maximize the value of the product and of the work the Scrum Team performs.
The PO should communicate and re-iterate this vision early and often, reminding all involved of how to help maximize value.

For a high quality class that focuses exclusively on the Product Owner role(the course is also great for key stakeholders!), see our Professional Scrum Product Owner class and contact us if you’re interested in one.

Utilizing the underlying empirical product planning features of Scrum, the PO should also be ready to make strategic pivots for the product vision whenever there are significant changes in how value can or likely be captured. This vision is brought to life in a more tactical way, via the Product Backlog and iterating towards that vision every Sprint.

In my next post, we’ll discuss the New New Product Owner as the Release Decision Maker.

A Response to Mike Cohns Comments on 64% of Software Features Rarely or Never Used

I have a saying.  “Scrum Trainers usually agree on 99% of Scrum, but they spend a lot of time debating the other 1%.”

Let me say this first.  I’m a huge fan of Mike Cohn.  I teach Scrum and Agile classes all over the country at Fortune 50 companies, and it is very rare for a class to go by that I won’t mention at least one of his awesome books on Scrum.  I also recommend him on my list of favorite Agile resources on one of our web sites.  In addition to all of this, I’ve had numerous personal interactions with Mike one on one, and he’s always been extremely nice to me, traded professional practice opinions/advice, and he even offered to let me attend one of his classes at a “trainer courtesy” discount one time.  Great guy!  In summary, I like the guy a lot personally, and I highly respect him professionally.  He’s done a ton for the software and Agile industry, and no one should forget that.

So, with that said, let’s get back to that 1% debate.  🙂

In his recent blog post, Mike reveals some little known details about the oft cited 64% of features that are rarely or never used in software systems.  His information is factual and likely true.  I’m ok with all of that.

What I don’t understand is, why bother broadcasting this?

This is one of the most credible studies available on the subject.  If you think hard about this data for a minute, you’ll realize why it is incredibly difficult to obtain… No company wants to admit that there is a TON of bloat in their software!  But, what percentage of Microsoft Excel/PowerPoint/Word features do you use and benefit from?  What percentage of Rally features do you actually use and benefit from?  Bloat bloat bloat, negative value, negative value, negative value.   In my recent articles on the New New Product Owner, I’ve talked about the need for the New New Product Owner to be a marketplace expert, so that they can maximize the value and profits from software development for their company.

Now, the value equation is way more complicated than “rarely or never used”, but still, I think we all know that there is a TON of negative ROI functionality in any non trivially sized application, and there is a TON of software teams with far too little focus on value and profits.  Anyone who has worked on the front lines of software development knows that.  The oft cited study just helps confirm some of our suspicions.  One of our Agile Metrics consulting services at AgileSoftwareTraining.com is helping to give company leaders even more transparency into how to extract more profits and cost savings out of all of their software development efforts, whether they be internal or external systems.  Give us a call if you’re interested.

What makes that limited study useful as a teaching tool is it gets people to think about value, and think about low value, low ROI features, and realize that value delivery is important, far too important to ignore.

Newer Study confirms the same idea!

Further, Standish again re-iterated this point in 2014, ostensibly from wider data: https://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research_files/Exceeding%20Value_Layout.pdf — “Standish Group research shows that 80% of features and functions have low to no value.”

There are other “studies” cited in our industry that are totally bogus, software leprechauns if you will, and I’m totally against relying on those.  Things like the “Cone of Uncertainty” and the so-called “Weinberg study” on task switching have shown to be totally made up.  However, the Standish Group study is real, with real data, and it is highly credible, even if somewhat limited in its scope.

So, Mike wants us to stop citing the study, or for us to caveat it with “in the weeds” details.  Of course, that will just confuse those new to Scrum and the teaching value would be lost.  And people would focus less on software value and profits.  I don’t think that’s good.  I’m totally open to hearing about a more credible public study, but I’m unaware of one. 

With all due respect to a friendly colleague, and one of the best Scrum trainers on the planet, I think ignoring or caveating the 64% study is bad for the industry.  Let’s just put this in the 1% bucket that we as Scrum trainers will agree to disagree on.  🙂

If you’d like to disagree with my contrarian view, feel free to sound off in the comments below!

Scaling Agile and Scrum to multiple teams: Great Overview of LeSS and Large Scale Scrum

If you’re like many companies out there, you’re trying to figure out a way to effectively get multiple Agile teams to work together to deliver more with less.  Well… Let me introduce you to LeSS — Large Scale Scrum.  Large Scale Scrum has been in practice since 2005.  The co-creators of LeSS, Certified Scrum Trainers in their own right, have just released a kick arse chapter from their new book on LeSS.  Their chapter, in my opinion, is the best introduction to LeSS for those who are not familiar with it.  I highly recommend you give it a read!

If you’re interested in learning more about Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), check out the LeSS class being held in Denver in late September. (Includes certification, SEU’s, etc)

Here is the link for the chapter introducing LeSS:  http://less.works/less/framework/introduction.html

The New New Scrum Master: Two Main Focus Areas

I’m going to take a break from talking about the New New Product Owner to talk about the New New Scrum Master now.

Preface:  In the last 4 years, the Scrum Guide has had two very significant updates, including updates to the Scrum Master Role. In this article and the series that follows, I attempt to describe “The New New Scrum Master” role in Scrum.

The Scrum Master role has not changed as much in recent Scrum Guide updates as much as the Product Owner.  In many ways, however, what has changed, is the number and higher frequency of misconceptions about the Scrum Master role.  This is, in my opinion, due to late adopters to Scrum who don’t take the time or money to attend proper and professional Scrum training.  Yes, this appears to be a completely self serving statement since I’m a Scrum Trainer.  However, the bigger, and more important reason this statement is true, is because Scrum is a much deeper topic than people think.  We often use the metaphor of the difference between a Chess player who knows how the different chess pieces move, and a Chess player that has extensive experience and knowledge about how to be excellent at the strategy and techniques of Chess.  There is a vast difference between those two ends of the spectrum, between knowing the rules and being able to excel at winning.  With Scrum, people and organizations vastly underestimate just how long that spectrum is.  All you have to do to confirm this is to witness or hear about a Scrum adoption that is horribly painful or not working.    So, my hope is that we can clear up some misconceptions for the New New Scrum Master and help reduce some pain and increase some profits!

The two main focus areas for the New New Scrum Master are:

• Teaching and coaching the organization on how to achieve the benefits of Scrum, and
• Removing impediments that are beyond the reach of the Development Team.

For brevity’s sake, we will shorten these to “teach/coach” and “remove impediments.”

All of the other Scrum Master focus and duties derive from the above two focus areas.

For a high quality class that focuses exclusively on the Scrum Master role(the course is also great for management), see our Professional Scrum Master class and contact us if you’re interested in one.

Teach/Coach

One of the main focus areas for the New New Scrum Master is teaching and coaching the organization on how to achieve the benefits of Scrum.  Let’s talk about how this might be done.

The New New Scrum Master knows the “Why’s” behind Scrum.
In my experience, Scrum Masters would do well to understand the benefits of Scrum on several levels, before worrying about specific teaching or coaching techniques.

First and probably foremost, the Scrum Master should understand and *be able to succinctly communicate* the *business* benefits of Scrum to the organization. It is important to to be able to communicate these benefits succinctly because, in the wider organization, the Scrum Master will very often be given 5 minutes or less to convey them.

Each Scrum Master should have their own such list of benefits memorized, but certainly some of them should be:

• Faster time to market
• Quicker ability to pivot to market opportunities and competitor threats.
• Higher Customer Satisfaction
• Higher Productivity
• Higher Transparency
• Better Predictability
• Better alignment between the business and software teams
• And the list goes on…

A good study of the 11 key metrics in “Evidence Based Management” will help you to be aware of some of the business benefits, but come up with some of your own.  Make it yours!

Being able to rattle a good handful of these off, and then being able to *explain succinctly* how different sub parts of Scrum support these goals should certainly be in the New New Scrum Master’s toolbox.  When facing an organization that has not been to proper Scrum Training, be sure not to use too much Scrum speak — keep it very simple and mostly devoid of Scrum terminology.  Also, definitely focus on the business benefits of Scrum that align with organizational desires and goals.  The more you can point to those higher organizational desires the more buy-in you’ll likely get from those higher in the organization!

The New New Scrum Master should also be able to communicate the benefits that will appeal more to those on and around the team, such as:

• Benefits to Development Team members
• Benefits to Business Stakeholders
• Benefits to Product Owners

Again, the same advice as above, be ready to rattle off a list, be ready to explain how different parts of Scrum support each of the list items, and be ready to avoid Scrum terminology for those who haven’t had proper training.

Knowing the “Why’s” behind Scrum will help convince others of “why” to pay attention to your teaching and coaching.  Notice I said “help convince” — it will likely take much more than that, but knowing these benefits is a “must have” for those conversations.

Knowing the “Why’s” behind Scrum is just one aspect of “teach/coach.”  Don’t misunderstand me, teaching and coaching is actually more than just teaching and coaching — using those two terms is simply a way to oversimplify this focus area.  You might also want to mentor, advise, and facilitate at times.  But even those things can fall under “teach/coach.”  We’ll explore this more in future posts.

Removing Impediments

The second New New Scrum Master focus area is removing impediments that are beyond the reach of the Development Team.

There is a common misconception that the Scrum Master is responsible for removing *all* impediments for the Development Team.  While the Scrum Guide is a little vague on this subject, it is somewhat hard to articulate the fine balance between the Scrum Master’s duty to remove impediments, and the Development Team’s responsibility to self-organize. This misconception drives a lot of failure in Scrum implementations.  We’ll explore this more in future posts.

The metaphor I like to use here is “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”  When respecting and coaching on the Development Team’s obligation to self organize, it is important for the New New Scrum Master to realize when is the right to time to give the fish, and when is the right time to teach to fish.  The answer is usually the latter, but sometimes the former.

Remember:  Teach/Coach, and Remove Impediments

I have thought about this a lot, and have even conferred with my fellow Scrum coaches on this.  Pretty much all of the responsibilities of the New New Scrum Master boil down to the two focus areas of “teach/coach” and “remove impediments.”

In future articles, I will go deeper on each of these two focus areas.

In the meantime, do you think any Scrum Master duties cannot effectively fall under those two focus areas?  If so, what are they?  Sound off in the comments below!

User Stories – Focusing on Conversations instead of Writing – Gojko Adzic’s New User Story Book

In my recent article on telling user stories instead of writing user stories, I mentioned that many Scrum Teams focus way too much on documentation and way too little on good collaborations.

More support for this concept comes from the first chapter in Gojko Adzic’s new User Story book, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories.

User stories imply a completely different model: requirements by collaboration. Hand-overs are replaced by frequent involvement and discussions…. If requirements are just written down and handed over, this discussion does not happen. Even when such documents are called stories, by the time a team receives them, all the important decisions have already been made…. Try telling stories instead of writing down details. Use physical story cards, electronic ticketing systems and backlog management tools just as reminders for conversations…Engage business stakeholders and delivery team members in a discussion, look at a story from different perspectives and explore options. That’s the way to unlock the real benefits of working with user stories.

Gojko has been nice enough to publish the “Tell stories, don’t write them” chapter available completely free here!  It is also important to note, that this chapter is tip #1 in his book, as it really sets the stage for the best use of the User Story practice.

The User Story practice was always intended as a very close, verbal collaboration between the Dev Team and the PO/Customer. In modern times, you can achieve this very easily with good Product Backlog Refinement practices.

Anyway, it’s totally worth another five minutes of your time to read Gojko’s free chapter, and be sure to share it with your teams and organizations too!

To maximize your Scrum and User Stories practice, bring us into your company to deliver coaching or our User Stories Class.

In Scrum, Who are the Key Stakeholders that Should be Attending Every Sprint Review?

The Scrum Guide requires that the Product Owner ensure that “key stakeholders” attend the Scrum Sprint Review, but who are these “key stakeholders”?

According to the Scrum Glossary, a stakeholder is “a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that is required for incremental discovery. Represented by the Product Owner and actively engaged with the Scrum Team at Sprint Review.”

Typically, they fall into one of three broad categories:

• The Users – The human people who actually use^1 the software product under development, to help them or the organization make more money or save money.

  • This could include a human compliance officer within a company, who is responsible for making sure that the software systems comply with government or financial regulations.
  • This could include the humans who support the operations or production support for the product.
  • Upstream/Downstream systems could also be considered “users” so long as we don’t forget the human end users of those systems. Don’t forget the humans!
    • Downstream reports are a good example of a downstream system” where you should definitely not forget the “human end user”, but there are other examples.

• The External Customers (doesn’t exist for internal products — see below) – The people responsible for paying to use the software product.

  • Only applies to externally sold or externally developed products
    • By external here, we mean, outside the company doing the development.
  • In a “software development for hire” arrangement(externally developed product), the client who engages the team would be the External Customer.
  • Sometimes the External Customers and Users are the same people — take TurboTax as an example, or a software product whose human users also make the decision to purchase said product.

• The Internal Customers – The people responsible for making the funding decisions for the software product development effort.

  • This is usually someone in Product Management(usually for external products) or someone in management in the Line of Business(usually for internal products) that is supported by the software product.
  • It could also be the CEO or CIO or similar roles at times.

There are probably exceptions to the above three broad categories. Also, don’t assume that the Product Owner can only consider “key stakeholders” as sources for requirements or good ideas. The Product Owner can work with anyone any time (possibly during Product Backlog Refinement and other activities) who can supply good ideas to capture more value for the product. Our discussion of key stakeholders here is just to understand how the “stakeholder” role in the Scrum Guide can be interpreted.

The key stakeholders are the people that receive a direct financial^2 benefit(helps them or the organization make more money or save money) from using the software.

One could also think of the management of the development organization as a stakeholder who should attend Sprint Reviews, certainly in replacement of any and all status reports and any and all other progress reporting for the Scrum Teams. If any Dev management asks for these things, the answer should almost always be something like “In Scrum, that information is communicated in Sprint Reviews, so let me get you on the invite list for that.” For Scrum “key stakeholder” purposes though, I’m not sure I’d call Dev management “key stakeholders.” or think of them as being “required” to be present(unless of course, they request status/progress reports).

In some cases, you’ll have so many “users” that it is not possible to have all of them in your Sprint Reviews. In those cases, try to get a representative sample of human users into your Sprint reviews(some companies pay for this kind of feedback from human users), and also utilize other feedback gathering mechanisms. (See “One PO Can Do it All!” in this product ownership article.)

Parting Words

I’m sure that there are exceptions to the above three broad categories, so feel free to let me know if you can think of some noteworthy ones, or maybe see if you can effectively place them under one of the three broad categories above. Talk to the Product Owner and make sure that they are ensuring that key stakeholders are are attending your Sprint Reviews, as their input is absolutely vital to the success of the product.

For a high quality class that focuses exclusively on the Product Owner role(the course is also great for key stakeholders!), see our Professional Scrum Product Owner class and contact us if you’re interested in one.

———-

Notes:

^1 Rare exception — note that sometimes a software development team acts as a “Production Support Engineer” user, but this should only apply to features actually in the product(support logging might be a good example) that help with production support. However, the modeling of a human user who is on the software development team should not become a guise for so-called “technical stories” or technical practices. That’s not a real “user”.

^2 Rare exception — If the organization developing the software is a non profit, government entity, or charity, then instead of “financial benefit” or “money”, we might say “the societal benefit” instead.

Helping Scrum Masters Improve: What would be on your Scrum Master Canvas?

I see a lot of Scrum Masters who focus on the wrong things. I was having some conversations with some Scrum trainers recently, and the conversation inspired an idea in me: The Scrum Master Canvas.

The Scrum Master Canvas

The Scrum Master Canvas, similar to the Business Model Canvas that we teach in our Product Owner courses, focuses on the things that a Scrum Master should be thinking about, in order to help her team get better at delivering more value, sooner.

So, I’ve started with some initial section ideas that might be useful to have on such a canvas:

• “Long term Impediments”
• “Short term Impediments”
• Service to the Organization
  • “What are my next steps in coaching the organization to get more benefits from Scrum?”
  • “Which audiences require the different Coaching Stances?” (A table with “audience” and “coaching stance” column headers)
  • “What is on the radar of the wider Scrum Master Community of Practice?”
  • “Organizations (and sometimes me!) tend to incorrectly assign duties to the Scrum Master. What are my next steps in re-focusing those duties to where they really should be directed in Scrum?”
• Service to the Development Team
  • “What are my next steps in helping the Dev Team become more Self Organizing so I can ‘Let the Team Decide’?”
  • “What is on my Dev Team’s Improvement Backlog right now?”
  • “What are my Dev Team’s next steps for achieving a higher degree of technical excellence?” (A table with “Next Steps” and “How can I support that?” as column headers)
  • “What things should I NOT do, so that the Scrum Team can become more Self Organizing?”
  • “What are my next steps in teaching/coaching the Dev Team to understand and enact Scrum?”
• Service to the Product Owner
  • “What are my next steps in helping the Product Owner to understand and enact Scrum and associated Agile techniques (User Stories, etc)?”
  • “What are my next steps in teaching/coaching the Product Owner to optimize value?”
• Service to myself, the Scrum Master
  • “In order to help my organization grow its’ Agility, what are my next steps for me learning and self improvement?”
  • “Am I working at a sustainable pace? Do I need to coach others on what that means?”
  • “What things should I NOT do, so that the Scrum Team can become more Self Organizing” (repeated for emphasis!)
  • “What else do I need to focus on, that’s not covered in a different section?”

The Scrum Master would initially create this canvas, put it on a rather large piece of paper (Information Radiator!), and likely hang it in their office in a place that is highly visible to those who walk by. In this way, in addition to focusing the Scrum Master on their role, it would also educate others in the organization on what a Scrum Master should focus on. Often times the wider organization also encourages the Scrum Master to focus on the wrong things. Maybe having this canvas would help them change their expectations of the Scrum Master, too. Anyway, you get the idea.

The Scrum Master would also probably want to schedule a calendar reminder, say every Sprint or so, to review their Canvas, edit it, and make sure they are staying on track. Then, maybe another set of calendar reminders every month or every quarter, to create a fresh copy of the canvas.

For a high quality class that focuses exclusively on the Scrum Master role, see our Professional Scrum Master class and contact us if you’re interested in one.

So, what would be on your Scrum Master Canvas?

New advanced Scrum certifications!!

Happy New Year!!

I’ll post more updates on this exciting development as the new assessments and credentials go into service!

http://blog.scrum.org/scrum-org-professional-series-updates-2015/

We will be providing PSM II courses later this year for those who want to take their Scrum skills — literally — to the next level.

Should I use hours to estimate my tasks in Scrum?

My new recommended “starter” “complementary practice” for new Scrum teams is to simply create tasks and use the “number of tasks remaining” for a burndown.  (I also usually recommend that they try to make it such that the vast majority of their tasks are roughly 1 day or less) I encourage them more to focus on PRI (potentially releasable increments), Sprint Goals, and achieving a moderately consistent level of skill at meeting their Sprint forecasts (used to be called “Sprint commitment,” it’s been re-named in the Scrum Guide).  I also caution heavily against trying to achieve perfect forecast accuracy as that’s a fool’s errand in complex domains.

Using hours for tasks can lead down some really bad roads, most notably:  Former PM’s turned SM’s and other organizational members who try to apply PMI tactics (100% utilization, tracking actuals, etc) tactics to complex software development.  By preferring “sticking to the plan” over “responding to change”, they are completely violating Agile and Scrum.

This same bad road can also lead companies into think that “schedule/scope/cost” is an optimum model for software development.  As far as I’m concerned, schedule/scope/cost is a dead, failed model for software.

Now, using hours for tasks doesn’t have to lead down those bad roads — but in my experiences, they usually do.  Let’s not forget, Scrum used to require hours for task estimation, many years ago, but the Scrum experiences of the wider community over 20 years has spoken on the topic — hours is not always optimum.  I would go farther than that and say, at the Sprint task level, it’s usually NOT optimum.

Given the above, I’ll leave it as an exercise to others to describe where using task hours might not lead down those bad roads.

_____
Charles Bradley
Professional Scrum Trainer
Scrum Coach-in-Chief
http://ScrumCrazy.com

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• Scrum For Executives
• Agile Requirements: Product Owner and Team Collaboration Techniques
• Scrum Product Owner: Techniques for Success
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