Interview with Mike Cohn

 

Recently, I asked some questions about Scrum to Mike Cohn, one of the premier Scrum and Agile authors and practitioners in the world today. Mike managed his first Scrum project in 1995, and is the co-founder of both the Scrum Alliance and Agile Alliance. I wish to thank him for his wonderful contribution to our Scrum community, and the Scrumptious blog.

1. Why do you believe Scrum is the most popular framework for delivering Agile projects?

I think there are two reasons. First, in many ways it’s the most widely applicable and the least prescriptive. Unfortunately, though, many have been slowly making Scrum more prescriptive over the past handful of years.

2. In your book "Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum" you wrote that one of the attributes of a good Product Owner is that they are available. What are some ways to handle an absent Product Owner who is also an influential stakeholder?

I think the issue is that the more a product owner can be available to the team, the better. So it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. Some product owners do things like tell team members to put some phrase (like [Urgent] or [Today]) in email subject lines, and they’ll reply that day no matter what.

Even better are product owners who make sure they go sit in the team’s area for an hour or two pretty much each day. This type of product owner may sit with the team from 1–3 every day when in the office. And they’ll just do their normal work, but within arm’s reach of the team. Even if the team doesn’t need the product owner some days, the team benefits from knowing it won’t be hard to get time with the product owner.

3. One of the biggest problems with the implementation of Scrum is apathetic middle-management, even when Scrum has been sanctioned at the Executive level. Can you suggest ways for organizations to overcome this issue?

In Succeeding with Agile, I wrote about how about organizations and people move through a cycle of awareness, desire and ability. Managers at any level need to become aware that agile is a better way of working. Then they need to have the desire to make the change. And finally, the ability to make it happen. That book covers very specific ways to make each of those happen.

4. Many of the benefits of Scrum are associated with reduced time to market which increases profits. How do you view the benefits of Scrum in the not-for-profit sector?

All organizations have financial objectives. Often a not-for-profit organization’s financial challenges are more difficult because they have fewer raising of generating money. A not-for-profit should gain all the same benefits of becoming agile as any other organization.

5. You are a well-known proponent of the stand-up meeting. What's your advice for those Scrum teams who still sit down for the Daily Scrum?

I actually don’t think sitting down is that big of an issue as long as meetings remain short. But if your meetings seem to be taking longer than they should, stand up. Any meeting will almost certainly be shorter when you do.

6. Scrum professionals debate over the use of UAT and when it should be performed. Many suggest it should be done at the end of the Sprint, some suggest just after the Sprint has been completed, while others prefer it during the Sprint Review. Ideally, when is the best time to perform UAT and why?

Ideally a team should perform user acceptance testing within a sprint. But it’s usually not up to the team. Yours may be an absolutely amazing agile team running one-week sprints and creating prodigious amounts of high quality work. But if your customer or stakeholders say they can’t be bothered looking at the product more than once a month, you don’t really have any choice.

The best a team can do in those situations is make the issues with infrequent UAT visible to the stakeholders. Often the stakeholders will eventually start to test the system more frequently.

7. What do you enjoy most about assisting organizations transition and succeed with Scrum?

It is, of course, satisfying to see an organization once they’ve really become great at product development. But the most satisfying for me is the time when the ideas first start to take hold. Employees become more engaged and start to love their work. And leadership starts to embrace their role of helping to create the culture rather imposing deadlines or ways of working. To me, this is like the moment a roller coaster is just cresting the top of an incline. Up until then it’s been hard work but things are about to get fun.

8. Where do you see Scrum 5 years from now?

I suspect exactly where it is right now. But what I hope we see is an end to methodology wars; Scrum vs. Kanban, SAFe vs. LeSS, Disciplined Agile, Enterprise Agile and every other scaling framework. Instead of arguing about methodologies, we need to focus more on agile as a large set of practices, some of which work well in combination. Ivar Jacobson has been promoting this idea for a few years and I’ve written about it as well. I’d like to see more debate and discussion on the practices of agile and less fighting among the major frameworks.
  

Thank you for your interest in the Scrumptious blog. If you have any ideas for Scrum topics, please message me here. Until next time, remember, projects can be Scrumptious!