Scrum teething problems: Trust Deficit

Scrum projects, especially in the early Sprints, reveal hidden problems and issues within the Scrum team. Imagine a Scrum Master on her first Scrum project just days after obtaining her Scrum Master Certification. All team members seem to be interested in her words of advice and are attending all the meetings she asks them to. One of the retrospective meetings appears to be running effortlessly when unexpectedly a senior developer complains about test engineers who would not trust the rest of the team members to provide adequate testing. He claims that more than two thirds of the User stories are therefore in the final stages of testing .The Test engineers retort that no one other than them is qualified to do proper testing and complain that Scrum ignores testing. Our Scrum Master sees this as a technical issue: testing needs to be automated to reduce the workload of testers. She even organizes the Scrum training adapted specifically for test engineers. As a result, the Scrum team seems to buy in into cross-functional teams and the need of automation.

Though the surface problem may have been solved, the actual issue is lack of trust. What her Scrum master training has not taught her is that when test engineers do not trust the rest of the team; maybe the reverse is also true. Team members are not honest and are afraid to talk about their mistakes and weaknesses. Consequently, the team engages in closed debates and resorts to indirect deliberations and shielded remarks. Eventually the problems bubble out of control, causing far bigger issues. In most organizations, before Scrum implementation, teams usually appear to be working smoothly while hiding their true anxieties from each other. A team that does not debate and engage in healthy conflict also lacks commitment.  Since team members are not expressing their views in open dialogue, they seldom commit to a resolution, although they may show agreement. Unfortunately, it starts a bigger problem: evasion of accountability. This allows the bullies to bulldoze their way through and leads to dissent and team members become more interested in their own results than in the project. When team members are uncommitted to and uninvolved in a well understood roadmap, they fail to confront fellow team members on activities and behaviors that are counterproductive to the project.

Before confronting team members and their lack of Trust, a Scrum master has to first ask self: Am I willing to be vulnerable? Lack of trust is usually caused by reluctance to be weak. When Scrum Masters fight the urge to constantly advertise how awesome they are and behave honestly, the team sees a leader they can relate to. Then Scrum Master can talk to the members and they will listen as a whole team. Next, a Scrum master can try group exercises where everyone shares details they otherwise would not. E.g. what was your worst moment in high-school? Scrum masters can also try to get the team together outside the normal work environment for this exercise. They should set objectives for the whole team and verify every team member is driven to achieve these objectives. There can be behavioral goals and individual objectives aligned with those team objectives. Making some of these changes may be a battle; Scrum masters may have to enlist senior management support to win. It’s the best way to avoid Trust deficit and the resulting breakdown in behavior.

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Cultural Challenges in adopting SCRUM Methodology

Scrum Methodology is being used as a successful Project Management or Product Management process in many organizations. It’s been gaining in popularity over the last 15 years, as more and more organizations realize the benefits of Scrum. But before a particular team/organization embraces Scrum or any other Agile process, the biggest hindrance comes from the management, which is generally resistant to change, even in the face of evidence. Let’s look at some of the cultural challenges and how to overcome them:

Independent Decision Making: Scrum encourages independent thinking and decision making, while in most corporate structure, a top-down process of decision making takes places. Also, larger the organization more will be the hierarchies, and independent decision making becomes that much more difficult. To overcome this problem, senior management buy-in is a must, and they have to be convinced of the benefits of religiously following Scrum as a practice.

Customer Relationship: Generally, a traditional vendor-supplier relationship between the organization and the client will not augur well for practicing Scrum. Customers have to get much more involved with the development team, and periodic feedback becomes the norm rather than exception. Here again, the client can appreciate the effort being put in by the development team, if they are closely involved in the planning the backlog and sprint items.

Quality Philosophy: In a traditional structure, quality teams focus a lot on metrics and charts and graphs etc., while Scrum lays emphasis on Collaborative Approach. What it means is that e.g. Testing is not done only by a Tester, but also by a Business Analyst or Technical Manager. Every member of the Scrum team takes the responsibility of bringing in Quality in the development process, and every member contributes to Quality and Process Improvement. Basically, this change of approach means delegating authority, which may face stiff resistance from QA and Testing managers.

Sustainable Pace of Development: In the traditional process, testing and bug fixing happens during the last few weeks of the project phase, wherein everyone from the developers to the technical architects to the testers work overtime and during weekends to complete the task. Agile on the other hand is all about sustainable pace of development, wherein every sprint, the code will be developed and tested. Although this process reduces uncertainty and hastiness, the fact that testers are not used to work in this kind of environment, and their acceptance will take time. To counter this issue, during the first few Scrum Projects, when everyone is new to Agile, testing should be handled by a team of tester rather than a single tester. They will collaborative and work on issues, which will make them comfortable in this process. Later on, they can independently handle different projects.

So, these were just some of the cultural challenges that teams face while adopting a SCRUM approach.

To know more : http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/cultural-challenges-in-adopting-scrum-methodology/