Top 10 Mistakes Scrum Teams Make

Imagine how great (and maybe mildly spooky) it would be if, every time you were about to make a bad decision, someone would materialize out of the mist and say, “Whoa, there, let’s stop and reconsider this.” Thanks to Gilberto Urueta Sanroman and his article at Scrum Alliance, you may not need such supernatural assistance to avoid mistakes in scrum. He compiles a list of 10 scrum mistakes for your team not to make:

Scrum Process

1. Too many tasks in progress
2. Behavior-oriented management
3. Not having a clear goal
4. Making decisions for the team
5. Focusing only on efficiency
6. Trying to centralize control
7. Missing visualization
8. No team-building activities
9. No environment in which to fail
10. Forgetting about quality

Heeding the Mist

Whether because stories have not matured enough or the deployment system is not ready, tasks can pile up, and if you proceed into the next sprint taking on new stories while the old stories are largely incomplete, you can bet no one is going to be happy in the end. Sometimes, counterintuitive as it may seem, the most efficient thing to do is wait, but “waiting” can take the form of pair programming or testing, for instance. A second mistake is to try and manage people’s individual behavior, such as in trying to measure the time they take to do things. This can quickly devolve into micromanagement, so you would be better advised to just measure more directly important things like customer satisfaction. This logic applies to the mistake of only focusing on efficiency as well.

The goal a team sets for a sprint should be clear, measurable, and testable, yet just open-ended enough to allow more than one way to achieve it; this keeps creativity at the forefront. If you want to maximize the team’s autonomy, allow them to have their say in decision-making as much as possible. Making decisions for the team in the interest of time will only inhibit team growth in the long run. In that same vein, one person or group attempting to centralize control over multiple teams on complex projects is likely to just result in frustration, because one person probably cannot grasp the hugeness of all the moving parts. Trust teams to communicate their needs to one another punctually instead.

Missing visualization is a simpler mistake by comparison—boards and diagrams plainly help teams understand where they stand faster. Forgetting about team building is another basic mistake:

Do you remember when you first introduced Scrum or Agile inside the company? Maybe you gave some presentations, prepared a few games, and even prepared some team-building activities. As time passed, it looked like everything was going well, and the number of activities was reduced to the point that you just stopped doing them. It is true that you cannot give a presentation every day, but in my experience, you should continue with them. Holding team-building activities once in a while helps the team stay motivated and increases team spirit.

While you are it, do pepper in the occasional reminder that failure is okay and even expected on occasion. Maybe build in a monthly “experiment” that is evaluated in the end for its success or lack thereof. Higher levels of achievement within your team are always possible, no matter how greatly it might already be excelling.

You can view the original article here: Scrum Alliance