Category: Scrum Concept

Who do you really work for?

If you work in our organization, this is the question I ask my team members:

The Answer,

Alasdair Says, “Yourself!”

I like that.

I ask again, “Who do you really work for?”

Boss, Customer …..

at last … he says, “could be a your Team members”

…..

that is what I was aiming for.

Why?

This is a fundamental shift in mindset:

Why do you work for the Team?

He says, “Because, the Team is working together to serve the customer”

Yes, that’s right, but, …. That’s not what I was aiming for!

Here’s a clue:

Because …. the Team decide who to put on the rota, …. the Team decides who goes on holiday, ….. the Team decides who can have a day off, …… the Team decide if a team member is eligable for a raise, …… the Team decides…… t’s a fair system for everyone and the Team decides the rules of being a Team member.

No manager or boss to please here!

Notes from a discussion between Riccardo Mariti and Alasdair McWilliam, 28th October 2022

This is How We Run Our Daily Scrum Meetings

First, we let everyone know that we are about to hold the meeting.
Second, we play this video

This is the world record Formula One pitstop, which is four wheels changed and a refuel, all done in UNDER TWO SECONDS!

While it’s playing, I ask, “How can we become more like this?”, “Where is the manager here?”, “Do you see anyone telling someone what to do?”, “Do you think they just turned up today and figured this out? Or do you think they might have practised?”

We have a discussion for a couple of minutes and see if we can come up with a small improvement that we can try during the next shift today as a little experiment.

At the end of the shift we have a very quick retrospective and if the improvements worked we find a way to share it with the rest of the Team.

This is normally done in one of two ways, either a quick note on the group WhatsApp page, or one team member will be instructed to write it up and make sure that each team member is informed/trained/educated. (For this we use our accountability document. Here’s our latest version. Everything starts in red, and as a drop-down which turns the field green when somebody has had the information/training/education.)

We then go through the daily checklist as usual.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

How many post-its

Fresh back from an amazing week with Joe Justice at the Bosch Engineering headquarters in Germany.

Just thinking about post-its and the scrum board.

The purpose of a scrum board is to MAKE WORK VISIBLE.

Therefore, the level of information should be enough to keep all team members and other stakeholders informed about what is happening, but not so much that the board is hard to read.