The Scrum Time Machine

 

In the 1970's, I was captivated by the Doctor Who TV series, mainly through its third and fourth "regenerated" main character. My favorite episodes were always the ones involving the Daleks who were "violent, merciless and pitiless cyborg aliens, who demand total conformity to their will, bent on the conquest of the universe and the extermination of what they see as inferior races". Battling such heartless galactic fiends required Doctor Who to come up with his usual ingenious solutions. But when the odds were stacked against him, he always had that ultimate trump card: the Tardis.

The Tardis allowed Doctor Who to travel in time. The best way to solve a problem is to be transported to the time and place of the conflict or issue. In Scrum projects, we can also do this. We have our own Tardis to see back in time, and into the future.

Expert Judgment
PMBOK 6 defines Expert Judgment as "judgment provided based upon expertise in an application area, knowledge area, industry, etc., as appropriate for the activity being performed." While the definition and expectation are that these experts are human, I like to think "experts" can include AI, research literature, best practices, etc. These knowledge experts can take us back in time when certain issues were tackled and resolved by the implementation of knowledge applicable to the context. When we engage expert judgement, we are in fact engaging knowledge, skills and experience gained in the past, and can apply it to the future.

Lessons Learned
Lessons learned in traditional waterfall projects are gathered at the end of the project. This is all well and good when we find past lessons learned that relate to our current project. But what better lessons learned are there than the ones we discover on the project we are working on right now? In Scrum, we capture these lessons learned in each and every Sprint, not just at the end of the project. Further, we analyze these lessons learned and see what we need to change to improve the current and future states. This goes to the heart of the inspect and adapt nature of Scrum projects.

Retrospective Timeline
Continuing the theme of inspect and adapt, the Scrum Team meets at the end of the Sprint, for their final meeting inside the Tardis: the Retrospective. Think of this meeting as an opportunity to take the team's lessons learned throughout the past Sprints, and create an action plan for implementing improvements in the future. An interesting exercise during the Retrospective can include the Timeline technique, to "diagnose the origin and progression of a single problem or a number of problems". First, we define our time range, quite often the past Sprint but could also be the past release. Then the team plots the good, bad and any significant events that occurred during the timeline. Colored sticky notes are used to categorize each of these three states. Creating this graphical timeline gives the team the opportunity to discuss, recall and uncover issues and causes that perhaps would not have been identified by just looking at a lessons learned register, or even discussions during the Retrospective meeting.

Remember the Future
A popular team and stakeholder collaboration game. The team is asked to imagine that the future release (or the project) is already complete and everything is perfect. Each member of the team creates a list of everything that was completed and delivered to make the release so successful. These are written on sticky notes. The team then take their sticky notes, removes all the duplicates, then groups the sticky notes into similar categories. By doing this, the team is creating a memory of the past, by transporting ourselves into the future, and sequencing the steps and events required to get us to that imagined future state.

Project Pre-Mortems
These are, as Mike Griffiths calls it, a "pessimistic view of Remember the Future". Instead of transporting ourselves into the future and imagining the release or project success, we imagine its failure, and then brainstorm the steps that may have led us to this failure.

A Scrum resistant culture, management or staff is analogous to the Daleks. Doctor Who represents the Scrum Master or Coach battling the traditional mindset, and coming up with innovative ways to achieve a transformation. One of the tools used is going back to the past and looking into the future, as Doctor Who often did in the Tardis. If we never look back or into the future, our Scrum projects may end up hearing that dreaded familiar sound that Doctor Who feared so much: "Exterminate! Exterminate!"

References
Griffiths, M. (2015) PMI-ACP Exam Prep. RMC Publications, Inc.
 

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