I recently made the trek down from Downtempo’s San Francisco office to Palo Alto and attend Tobias Mayer’s “CSM Day 3″ workshop. An extension of Tobias’ WelfareCSM classes, where he provides low-cost training for people wishing to be Certified ScrumMasters, I was curious about what Tobias was up to.
Tobias has a fascinating take on Scrum — he feels that it can “offer a creative leap for people in any industry – or people in no industry at all: loners, thinkers, inventors, street corner philosophers, maybe you.” This is a change from the idea I sometimes hear that Scrum and Agile are Yet Another Software Development Process, and instead is in line with the more disruptive principles of Scrum.
Here was the introduction that Tobias sent out describing the class:
“If you are coming to the CSM Day 3 session please show up … between 8.30 and 8.45. Lunch will be brown bag with a view to sharing. There is a fridge and microwave and coffee-making facilities on the premises. Lunch will be around 12.30-1.30 and the day will end at 5pm.
The vision:
A 5-6′ span hanging mobile on the theme of tropical rain forests.We will build this from various raw craft materials, no pre-built pieces. You will have to coordinate the architecture and the individual features of the mobile between the 3-5 Scrum teams we’ll have. I am the customer, and each team will have a PO to represent me.
That’s all for now. Bring any materials you feel might be suitable
for this project. I’ll supply most of what you’ll need.”
How could I resist?
Besides the fun of building the (decidedly unique) deliverable, the ideas of using emergent behavior to solve the architectural challenges, having multiple Scrum teams integrating with a “Scrum of Scrums”, and experiment with Scrum in a fairly consequence-free environment.
The class itself was a great mix of both technology and non-technology folks, and I always enjoy a chance to see and participate in group dynamics at work. (If you haven’t read a good book on group dynamics and facilitation, I highly recommend picking one up from Amazon and having a read. My class on Group Decision Making in undergrad was one of the non-tech courses that has continued to be useful even years later.)
One of my favorite parts about working with Tobias is seeing how he embraces change, rather than fighting it. It’s all too easy for us to deny people the chance to contribute, or to not adapt their own suggestions into the process. My own modest contribution was asking Tobias if there was a better way to model the Scrum process than having him play the roles of both Customer and Product Owner, and after some questions to the group at large to explore the idea, he promptly recruited a volunteer from our group to act as the Product Owner for our session.
As for the teams themselves, the group broke down into parallel Scrum teams to write up the initial user stories, and then for the initial sprint, the teams took on different subsets of stories required for the final mobile (having the Product Owner decide whether or not to accept a giant tissue-paper bird won points for my favorite surreal moment). My own Scrum team, Constructive Chaos, took our own set of stories, and soon I was collaborating with my teammates on creating hanging ferns and leafy vines to satisfy some vegetation-related stories. (Luckily my teammates were better at craftiness than I was!)
I ended up leaving early for a personal commitment, but I really enjoyed the chance to have fun and play with Scrum. It’s all too easy to not take enough (or any!) time to reflect on our own development process, and I found this to be a fun use of a day, and a great chance to look at the many forms that Scrum could take. While I may not be using the Scrum process to generate the world’s next piece of fine art (although of course, our mobile totally rocked), I felt my own practice of Scrum benefited from the chance to try out Scrum with new people and a novel goal.
If you’d like to see more photos of that day, you can see my photos on Flickr and Tobias’ photos on Photobucket. And if you’re thinking about checking out one of Tobias’ WelfareCSM classes, I highly recommend checking the WelfareCSM workshop calendar and seeing when the next one is in your area.
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Hi Andy,
Thanks for writing up this session. Yes, i was both chaotic and creative — just like real Scrum, perhaps
I especially liked the way the design emerged over time, and how the development team offered me (the customer) ideas for features, e.g. the school of fish, that I hadn't envisioned when I came up with the design. It showed how teams working in collaboration with the customers provide the most satisfactory solutions. I also liked the way the teams figured out the whole Scrum-of-Scrums solutions as appropriate to the maturity of the product, without any guidance from me. And the POs idea to color-code themes for immediate visibility on the task board was also a neat touch.
The final product now hangs in the nursery school next door to the church. A captioned slide show of my photographs is available here: http://bit.ly/7EP8MN Thanks to everyone who participated in theis experimental workshop.
Tobias
Thanks Tobias! One of the thing that impressed me was how quickly the group self-organized productively. Each team focused nicely around their talents, and our PO was a definite rockstar.
Thanks again for another great perspective on the Scrum process. Hope we get a chance to work together again one day!
- andy
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For me, two aspects are memorable take-aways (and, to be honest, I was a bit skeptical as we were getting started).
1. It highlighted the incredibly important role the product owner holds for the team. I say this, because in real life, it will not always be possible to have constant interface with the customer (If that was possible, who needs a PO, right?), but the team benefits from the continuous feedback and clarifications. The PO can/should take on that responsibility, when the customer is not accessible.
2. Making the first prototype(s), and having them reviewed and critiqued by the product owner and customer was INDEED powerful. And possibly more practical than spending countless cycles planning. Tobias deliberately pushed us toward "doing" rather than "talking about doing", and I think it was precisely to experience the rewards of the tangible, real feedback.
Cheers, Robi
Tobias' exercise reinforced the importance of the ScrumMaster’s role in coordinating, communicating, and pulling PO and team efforts together to develop a product that delights the customer. POs who communicate changing requirements clearly and timely, and work closely with the ScrumMaster(s) are valuable, as ours was. I also agree with Robi that we learned by doing, not talking. Actual work, along with the time boxing made for an effective Scrum simulation, since frequent failures quickly helped refine goals and contributed to the product's acceptance.