Podcast Ep. 155: Halloween Special: Scary Scrum Stories with Hal Hogue and Erica Menendez

Episode Description:

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Hal Hogue and Erica Menendez, colleagues and consultants at AgileThought.

In this episode, they are delivering a Scary Stand Up as a special edition for Halloween. Get ready for a unique, funny, and terrifying show where they are diving deep into how frightening certain aspects of an agile life can be, from Daily Scrum to Sprint plannings. Dan, Hal, and Erica share valuable examples and give great tips and suggestions to enhance the daily work and move towards the set goals in an authentic agile way.

Key Takeaways

Facilitating Daily Scrums can be scary!

When the Scrum Master is leading a meeting, people tend to just focus on them
Understanding the “why” behind the Daily Scrum is crucial
The Scrum Master needs to give the team space
Respecting the time box is necessary
Collaboration needs to take place throughout the day, not only during Scrum meetings

The chicken and pigs metaphor is outdated, stop using it!

There is a danger in using the chicken and pigs metaphor since it creates walls and barriers between collaborations
It has not been in the Scrum Guide for about a decade

Instead of too much chattering, a board can be used as a visual tool to help coordinate the plan for the next 24 hrs in a Daily Scrum.

- Remember that a board cannot replace a conversation

Scary Sprint Planning! Boooohhh!

Stop bulling someone for a task that is carried over, it is the whole team’s responsibility in the first place
The Scrum values should be embodied all the time
The team is really working towards the Sprint Goal. It is not a big deal if one task is carried over
Remember to define the “Why”, the “What”, and the “How”
Being remote makes the work even more challenging

Sprint reviews can be horrific!

A short Sprint Review does not mean it is a good one. Are you considering the reason behind it?
Sprint Reviews are great opportunities for feedback, don’t waste them
What is the increment like? Where does the team want to go next?
Everybody should be together in a Sprint Review

Embrace your scary stories, this is how you learn and improve!

Mentioned in this Episode

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition, by Lyssa Adkins

The Scrum Fieldbook: A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future, by J.J. Sutherland

The Reengineering Alternative, by William Schneider

Transcript [This transcript is auto-generated and may not be completely accurate in its depiction of the English language or rules of grammar.]

Intro: [00:03] Welcome to the Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought. The podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host, coach, and agile expert, Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann: [00:17] Welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host, Dan Neumann, and excited today to bring you our Halloween episode. We did this last year. It was the treehouse of Scrum horrors or something like that. And we’re back again. This year’s guests are going to be Hal Hogue and Erica Menendez. They are colleagues of mine and consultants here at AgileThought. So Hal, Erica, thanks for joining.

Hal Hogue: [00:42] Thank you, Dan. I am still amazed that I was allowed back on this podcast, so it’s great to be here again. Erica Menendez: [00:50] I’m excited to be here.

Dan Neumann: [00:53] Thanks. And Erica, this is your first time on the podcast. So maybe share a little bit about who’s Erica. Erica Menendez: [00:59] Yeah, so I finally signed myself up for podcasts. I’m excited to be here. I’m a Team-level consultant here at agile thought. I’ve been with AgileThought for around actually a little over four years now. Kind of weird to say that, but I’m excited to be here and excited to see what happens today with the scary episodes.

Dan Neumann: [01:19] And we’re going to be play with some sound effects too. So we’ll see how that goes.

Hal Hogue: [01:26] You can’t not play with sound effects on Halloween.

Dan Neumann: [01:29] We’re going to, we’re going to play with sound effects on Halloween. We’ll have a guest appearance by one of Hal’s critters. And yeah. And, and so we’re gonna, we’re going to try something fun. We haven’t done this before, which is we’re going to tell a story using some improv technique. Our, our theme is going to be a scary stand-up. And the mechanic that we’re going to use is each of us will say one sentence of the story. And then the next person will tell us the next sentence of the story. And so on. We’ll rotate through. And sometimes with teams, this is a good way to, to teach them listening techniques and how to yes, and each other. Cause it gets really non-sequitur. If, if I say one sentence and Hal’s second sentence has literally nothing to do with what I just said. Of course we’ve seen that in teams, I’m sure a lot where one team member just completely knocks a team meeting off, off camber. So we’re going to give it a shot. And if it’s a dumpster fire, well that’s how improv goes. Are you ready Hal?

Hal Hogue: [02:34] All the more entertaining. Dan Neumann: [02:36] All right, let’s go. So scary Standup. It was 9:15 in the morning and I had to work up my courage to go to the daily Scrum. Hal Hogue: [02:50] I wasn’t sure if it was even happening because the rest of the team was still at their desks.

Erica Menendez: [02:58] When I finally showed up the Scrum master yelled at us to stand up in a circle.

Dan Neumann: [03:03] I really don’t understand why they get so hung up on standing.

Hal Hogue: [03:09] Yeah. What is the purpose of standing up? Can’t I just sit down. Why do I even need to be here?

Erica Menendez: [03:16] When we finally started the Scrum master hid behind someone else and I couldn’t talk to them, so I didn’t understand what was going on.

Dan Neumann: [03:23] How am I supposed to get my status report if I can’t see the Scrum master

Hal Hogue: [03:27] And all I can think about is what I want to say, but other people keep talking and it’s really frustrating me. Erica Menendez: [03:37] We’ve been here for 45 minutes and I still have no idea what’s going on.

Dan Neumann: [03:45] I got jolted out of my multitasking when Sally the stakeholder finally started to say something about our project, Hal Hogue: [03:54] Then the Scrum master started kind of shouting at Sally and saying, you’re a chicken.

Erica Menendez: [04:08] Oh chicken and pigs always throws me off. I just continued in the background. And wait until the Scrum master said we were finally over and could go back to work. Dan Neumann: [04:28] I really hate going to daily Scrum.

Hal Hogue: [04:33] I am just so happy that this is over and I do not have to talk to anyone on my team for another 24 hours.

Erica Menendez: [04:42] Thank goodness. We don’t need to show up every day.

Dan Neumann: [04:49] Well, thank you. Thank you guys for participating in our first attempt at live improv in the podcast. And I think it went well. So have you guys ever been in or facilitated podcasts or podcasts, Have you been in or facilitated daily Scrums that kind of went like that where you just were awful? Hal Hogue: [05:17] Yes, there was, there was one that kind of, the kind of triggered me. I, I think it was Erica talking about hiding the Scrum master kind of hiding behind another developer to, to hint that this is not an update for the Scrum master or for anyone besides the rest of the developers to synchronize around their sprint goal. And I’ve done this before. I have tried hiding behind another person. Sometimes it works, but sometimes they will just keep looking through the person I’m hiding behind and just continue to talk directly to me. And it’s, it’s really, it’s really a tough habit to break sometimes. Erica Menendez: [06:01] And I think that’s one of the hardest things. When people look at it as a status meeting, especially when the Scrum master runs it is they just want to talk straight to the Scrum master and give them their status and get out. And there’s no benefit there or there’s very little benefit, I guess I should say.

Hal Hogue: [06:16] Yeah. Early on in my, in my kind of tenure as a Scrum master, I was, I was very heavy handed, very involved and I, I coached, things like the three questions being like a mandatory thing to do in a daily Scrum. And at that point I just, I didn’t, I didn’t understand the why behind the daily Scrum. I didn’t understand that it was an opportunity for the developers to, to organize and, and come up with a plan for the next 24 hours to get them closer to the sprint goal. None of that was running through my head. It was just get everybody together, make sure they talk about what they did yesterday, what they’re going today, and if they have any impediments and make sure things keep moving along smoothly. So over time I realized I should take a bit of a step back Scrum master doesn’t need to, to be, you know, whipping people like that or slave driving Scrum master needs to give the team their space, make sure this happens within 15 minute time box and just let the team synchronize on their, on their sprint goal. Dan Neumann: [07:36] I was, I went back to it was the agile project management with Scrum book at one point. And I was surprised to see, you know, the 2006 ish would have been when I read it. I was surprised to see references to chickens and pigs. And I might’ve even said standing up and, and some of these things that, that really now the Scrum Guide moved past, I was the Scrum master that made people stand up, right? Because by golly, that was going to help us get out of that time box in 15 minutes. You know, not my, not my highlight of my agile and Scrum career by any stretch. Sorry, you were going to say, Erica, Erica Menendez: [08:17] It’s just going to bring up the time box to people. I think some people are very militant about the time block sometimes and other people just completely forget that there is one. So making sure that people cut off conversation right at 15 minutes, even if they haven’t, maybe they need one extra minute or something like that. But also allowing it to go a full hour and not realizing that they probably just needed a separate meeting together and yeah, the daily Scrum, isn’t what they needed.

Hal Hogue: [08:45] And I think, I think another thing that can lead to extremely long daily Scrums and not adhering to the 15 minute time box is when a team thinks that the daily Scrum is their only opportunity to talk with each other about anything during the day. And, and when they’re not standing together looking at a plan, they don’t talk, they just go do their own thing. The rest of the day. And the reality is the teams should be collaborating throughout the day because they should, they’re a team. And a team is a group of people aligned toward a common goal. So the daily Scrum is a great opportunity to do that on a regular cadence and, and ensure that we are stopping and inspecting and adapting on our plan, but we should be talking throughout the day and, and making sure that those lines of communication and collaboration are open and strong

Dan Neumann: [09:46] Hal, you did some historical work for us, kind of going through some of the old Scrum guides. And one of the things we threw into our scary stand-up was the chickens and pigs part, and thank you to carrot your, your pig for, for being a voice actor for us in that

Hal Hogue: [10:05] You can tell carrot has done many voiceover gigs. He nailed it

Dan Neumann: [10:10] Carrots, a pro, but it’s still hanging on, I don’t know, Erica, if you’ve seen that as well. Are you guys still hearing chickens and pigs crop up? Hopefully not too much, but I’m guessing Erica Menendez: [10:22] I think I heard it last week or the week before, and I was a little bit shocked when I first heard it, because it’s probably been sadly a few months since I had heard it before that. So that’s fairly often considering it hasn’t been in the Scrum Guide for a while, and it’s kind of an older term. And also in my mind kind of a harsh term, or I don’t know, almost offensive. That’s probably the wrong word, but I hate looking at it that way because it means that other people don’t really have as much skin in the game quite literally. So yeah, I’m surprised at how often I hear terms like that. And I almost wonder if they pit people against each well, I know they do. They pit people against each other a little bit more instead of saying that everyone is in it together, which is the intention behind Scrum.

Hal Hogue: [11:06] Yeah. I think Erica nailed it with the danger of, of using that chickens and pigs metaphor. It, it, it creates, it creates a walls and barriers between collaboration and I still see hints of chickens and pigs even today. And in strange ways one day, one day I went into, into the office. I went to my desk and there was this big poster and it was a poster describing the Scrum framework. And in this poster, all of the Scrum accountabilities were represented by cute little pig characters. And you might not think twice about that if you, if you aren’t familiar with the metaphor, but it’s, it’s funny how, how that creeps into so many things. Never did figure out who, who put that poster on my desk either. Hmm. Dan Neumann: [12:00] Yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen similar posters, so it’s not been in the Scrum guide now for about a decade. So maybe trying to move past that right. Only a decade, a decade or so in this description of better stand-ups or better daily Scrums to use the Scrum term. I think standup was an XP term. I think that’s where it still comes from, but so daily Scrum using the Scrum term, the other thing that was alluded to was, was looking at a board, having some kind of visual to help the developers coordinate on what their plan is for the next 24 hours. I thought that was, would be a nice change to just the de blah-blah-blah 45 minute version that was in our scary story.

Hal Hogue: [12:41] Yeah. And, and as long as that visual isn’t, it is used and owned by the developers and isn’t used as some sort of tool to, or, or visual to check in on a team by management or somebody on the outside, because I’ve seen those, I’ve seen those tasks boards, you know, wielded or weaponized and, and, and not great ways. And I’ve seen the same thing out of burndown charts. If a team finds a burndown chart valuable then, okay, let’s, let’s, we can use that. We can use that to inspect our progress, but if a burndown chart is there for a manager to peek in and make sure it is on trend, then we should probably stop and have a conversation about that.

Erica Menendez: [13:35] Yeah. I hadn’t even thought of that before, but I can see that going very toxic, someone pulling up a burndown chart as their visual and saying, all right, so where are we in the sprint? And if the Scrum master is treating it almost like, or the team is treating the Scrum master like a status report, goodness, that would be extremely toxic.

Dan Neumann: [13:53] I’ve lived that literally. We had a functional manager, you know, the typical sprint burndown, not a prescribed artifact anymore in the Scrum guide either, but it can be handy. It had that ideal trendline in it, and this person we’ll call him Keith. Right. Cause that starts with a K and he just, it needed to be on the trend line or he would lose his mind at the team. And so what they, what does any smart team do when you beat them up? And cause discomfort is they just start lying, right? So by golly, that burned down was always on the line. They would manipulate backlog items to keep it that way. And that became known as K agile, the brand of agile that that person, that person had. And fortunately the organization saw fit to move that person on eventually, but it was taking that information that should be good for the team and using it as a weapon for management, very, very harmful behavior.

Hal Hogue: [14:53] Yep. Because anytime a team discovers or even thinks that a metric or a visual is being used to monitor them, they are going to, they’re going to gain that to death. They are going to make sure it looks good regardless of whether value is being delivered. And I don’t blame them.

Dan Neumann: [15:16] Well, let’s let’s transition over to sprint planning here. Scary sprint planning.

Erica Menendez: [15:23] Well, if you have a bad sprint planning you have a bad daily Scrum.

Dan Neumann: [15:31] Right? Yeah. It’s, you’re setting yourself up for a bad one to three or four weeks if you have an ineffective sprint planning. So, so what’s been some scary sprint planning you guys have seen. What, what are, what are indicators that things are probably lining up? Hal Hogue: [15:51] We just want to talk about it. Are we going to try the improv thing again?

Dan Neumann: [15:53] Oh, I think we might spare people the important as much fun as that would be. Yeah.

Hal Hogue: [15:59] That’s fair. Dan Neumann: [16:14] But actually we will give a nod. We were capturing some video here and Hal if you can see them has a very nice Mario hat on my, my plague doctor masks, the, the proboscis, the nose part was banging into the microphone. So, so we went with a smaller version.

Hal Hogue: [16:31] I wanted to make sure that I dressed up accordingly for this audio only podcast for the benefit. Dan Neumann: [16:40] And Erica.

Erica Menendez: [16:41] I missed the memo.

Dan Neumann: [16:45] You are you are the extreme telecommuter. I think that’s what you’re dressed as. Yeah.

Erica Menendez: [16:51] That’s I love that. It’s true.

Dan Neumann: [16:53] I love it. Which is awesome. So yeah. So sprint planning,

Hal Hogue: [16:58] Erica, did you have any, you want to start off with any.

Erica Menendez: [17:01] So probably starting off with one of the first things we’re going to look at and sprint planning is what we’re carrying over. I’ve seen people kind of bully in the beginning and say, oh, is this really carrying over? Can this not be finished this morning? And we’re not going to carry it over this isn’t going to happen. And when you start bullying each other on the team, because something wasn’t able to get done, which was the entire team’s responsibility, if it needed to get done, then you’re really starting off in a very toxic light

Dan Neumann: [17:30] And you highlighted something important that I, sorry, how I stepped on you, but is it a person’s responsibility or is the team’s responsibility to deliver on the sprint goal? Hell maybe that’s where you’re going.

Hal Hogue: [17:43] No, I, I agree with you. I was still going to mention the Scrum values as well. Like we should be embodying the Scrum values when we are having these conversations and we should have that, that respect for everyone. We should, we should have that overall team commitment to, you know, accomplish the sprint goal and, and work together on all of these things. It shouldn’t be a, a one-person show ever. So that’s a really good one. Erica.

Erica Menendez: [18:11] You guys are bringing up a good point too, though. A lot of people focus on the stories and the sprint and forget that you’re really working towards the sprint goal. Did you actually accomplish the sprint goal? If so, is it really a big deal if the story carried over? And are you planning your sprint around a goal or are you just planning your sprint and then going, oh, this might fit.

Hal Hogue: [18:31] That was going to be my scary story. Actually, it’s, it’s a team that comes into sprint planning and they just jump right into the backlog and maybe it’s ordered appropriately, which is great, but they, they go in, they plan however many stories. They feel they can accomplish in a sprint. And then at the end of the sprint, they say, oh, so what’s our sprint goal. And then they spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to summarize everything they just planned. And it is the most backwards thing ever. It completely invalidates the value of having a sprint goal. And it just makes everybody irritated that, that there’s a sprint goal in the first place. Dan Neumann: [19:31] It becomes an administrative thing to bolt on, as opposed to, like you were mentioning the Scrum values as a way to create focus. Here’s the perspective sprint goal at the start of sprint planning, what backlog items would help us take that step towards the product goal and then, and then confirming it at the end.

Hal Hogue: [19:49] Yeah. And, and looking back at, at Scrum history, if you read, if you read about sprint planning, it’s gone through some iterations over the years, it’s it started off as two separate time-boxed sessions. One is about what we’ll accomplish. And then one is about how we will accomplish it. A few years after that, they merged that into a single time box, still with the what and how, but more importantly in, I think the 2020 guide or the one before that they added a third key thing. And that’s the why. So it’s opening sprint planning by talking about why we’re even doing this. Why are we having a sprint? And that leads to our overall goal. And then we can talk about what things we should pull in to accomplish that goal. And then how will we, how will we dig into those? So it’s those three, it’s the why the what and the how and remembering how important the, why is? Erica Menendez: [20:59] I think people forget about the, the how to a lot a lot of people just jump into planning and go, all right, we’ve got stories on the board. We’ve got to go, we’re good. And then want to come back and think that they’re all on the same page by daily Scrum the next morning. Sometimes it just leaves that essential part of the daily, I’m sorry, sprint planning totally ignored. And I know it can be hard to task out or however you want to come up with your, how and planning, but it’s an essential part. It’s probably one of the reasons that the time box is so large because you really have to do some thinking there to set yourself up.

Dan Neumann: [21:38] Do you folks see being remote, being an even bigger impediment to getting an appropriate amount of thought put into how the sprint goal might achieve be achieved? I, I, it was challenging in person and for me, I think it gets even more challenging now that we’re remote. I’m just curious what you guys are seeing. Erica Menendez: [22:00] You can take this one. Okay. I have more experience than I do in person. So you probably are better for this.

Hal Hogue: [22:06] Oh, that is, that’s interesting. Actually, we should do a podcast on that. Yeah, I’ve been remote the past, I guess, couple of years since the pandemic started, but yeah, it’s definitely more difficult, but I think it all comes down to visualization and maintaining that level of visualization we have when we’re in person via something remotely, I’ve had tons of, of success working with teams, using a simple white boarding tool like Miro. It, it helps significantly when team members are remote, not standing together in the same room. It lets them see what everyone else is seeing. It lets them interact together in a digital way. Sure. They’re not, they’re not physically moving things around and shuffling to tasks and, and formulating plans that way, but they are still collaborating in a visual manner. And I think that’s the key thing, whether you’re all remote or all in person, or you’re some sort of mix, you need to have some sort of easy to interact with visualization to make sure that we are all on the same page and we’re all, we’re all working together effectively. So Miro is my tool of choice. There’s neural as well. And I’m sure there’s other tools, but it’s all about visualization.

Dan Neumann: [23:49] So Erica, in your in your experience then as a distributed team, are you seeing things like Miro and the remote collaboration tools help our people kind of just breaking apart and reconvening at some point later after they’ve had a chance to elaborate on the, how, what are, what are you seeing?

Erica Menendez: [24:06] Yeah. I actually use Azure we’re Azure DevOps teams for the most part. That’s what I’ve worked with. And I tend to use that and move around a lot and kind of really just facilitate that way. So that we’re visually looking at the board. However, I’m really curious how you use Miro now, because I feel like it’d be a different way to really spice it up and actually bring some extra to the meeting that I’m probably missing there. And that probably came from you working in person and knowing those different techniques. Hal Hogue: [24:36] Yeah. It’s, it’s interesting using, using Miro over a, another more, I don’t know, structured tool like JIRA or Azure DevOps because Miro, I feel gives teams more freedom to be creative and do things their way without having to adhere to the predefined structure of a tool like they can, they can plan, like they would plan together in front of a whiteboard. You can move things wherever you want. You can build your own little interface to work in. You can, you can literally see each other, doing things instead of having one person, you know, drive in, in JIRA or, or Azure DevOps and everybody else just watch and give instructions. It’s, it’s so powerful to allow everyone to go into this tool and use it at the same time together. And it’s just fun. It’s fun to watch these little cursors and names moving around and doing things and you can kind of see what people are looking at and what they’re changing. And it’s, it’s just so collaborative and so, so creative, or at least it allows teams to be creative.

Dan Neumann: [26:05] That’s, that’s good insights. So we talked about the daily Scrum. We’re not going to make it to retro cause our, our time box here. But when we talked about sprint planning, maybe we can just talk about rotten reviews. We will try and keep the Halloween scary theme going. Some, some stuff that you see in a sprint review

Hal Hogue: [26:23] Dan, I think you’ve just told a Meta scary story by saying, we’re not going to have time to make it to the retro. That’s sounds like a scary story, right?

Dan Neumann: [26:32] That’s also scary. No time for retro. We’ve got to deliver more stories. Yeah. That’s terrible. Don’t do that.

Hal Hogue: [26:42] Except except when we’re doing it right now. Erica Menendez: [26:47] Have you ever guys ever been in a review that essentially no one wants to attend and everyone’s falling asleep and not talking and no one actually understands why they’re there. Dan Neumann: [27:01] Hypothetically let’s imagine I’ve lived that experience recently. Yeah, strictly hypothetically, Erica Menendez: [27:08] I’ve never seen that before just going through the motions because it’s in the Scrum guide and not actually honoring the intention behind the meeting and collaborating just the developers talking or just the product owner presenting. And no one that actually did the work that truly understands how it was done and might want to collaborate on it with the clients or the stakeholders, I guess I should say. Yeah. Dan Neumann: [27:32] Yeah. So yeah. So no, well just strictly going through the motions, here’s, here’s what we worked on, blah, blah, blah. And thank you. Right. So that, that’s definitely a rotten way to do it.

Hal Hogue: [27:44] Yeah. I’ve, I’ve heard, I’ve heard teams right now. I’ve haven’t heard I’ve, I’ve been involved with teams that have had sprint reviews that last five or 10 minutes. And at the end of the review, they are so happy and proud of themselves that they did it that quickly. Like yeah, we’re nailing this. We got out of there and in five minutes, we’re so good at sprint reviews. And it’s, it’s again, it’s, it’s the coast Scrum mentality and it’s, it’s not understanding the why behind the sprint review of all the Scrum events. In my experience, the sprint review is the least understood. It’s called a lot of the time it’s called a demo and we go in there, we show stuff or we just talk about stuff briefly and then no stakeholder say anything and we’re done, excuse me, but we’re missing that key opportunity for feedback. Dan Neumann: [28:53] Yeah. I’ve one of the things that, something about the new Scrum guide or really looking at it again, a little more closely and Sam Falco would say this, like, he’ll, he’ll go back in and, and he’s, he was always kind of seeing a new thing, a new idea, or a little more of a nuance. And one of them was related to the increments that stood out to me and the increment isn’t just what was done in the current sprint it’s any and all of the increments up to that point too. So maybe in the sprint review to inform where people go, you might dust off something that was done three to six months ago for more inspection to inform where the team is going to go next. So that’s something that I’ve nudged some teams to do relatively recently. It’s not just, what did we do this sprint it’s what’s the increment like, and where do we want to go next related to that increment? Hal Hogue: [29:45] Yeah. And especially where do we want to go next? I’ve started, I’ve started referring to the sprint review as a forward looking event because I think that’s the bit that that teams kind of forget about, or don’t fully understand. They see it as a, all right, let’s look back at what we did. Let’s show what we did. Let’s make sure people are good with what we did and then we’re done. We’ll leave. We’ll, we’ll start, we’ll have retro start a new sprint. They don’t, they don’t take the time to look ahead and make sure that everyone is aligned because that’s, that’s a key opportunity. Everybody should be together in the sprint review, the Scrum team stakeholders, customers, and we should be having those conversations there about what’s coming up.

Dan Neumann: [30:38] So Hal and Erica, I wanted to appreciate that you joined and took a little bit of a leap, trying to do improv for the first time on a podcast. And that was awesome. So thank you for joining. And I’m curious if you have any closing thoughts on our topic of kind of scary Scrum stuff. And Erica, maybe we’ll start with you.

Erica Menendez: [30:55] Yeah. I mean, these are things that we honestly see every time and especially in probably less mature clients or less mature teams, I should say, I keep wanting to call them clients just because I’m used to the consulting world. But less mature teams that are, you know, reading the Scrum guide or in fact, actually probably not reading the Scrum guide and just going off of what they read in a book that tells them what to do and not actually really paying attention to the intentions behind things. So just a lot more thoughtful intention behind how we do Scrum can really help a lot of people get out of this scary state. Hal Hogue: [31:30] Yeah, absolutely. Erica, I second that final thought and, and also embrace these scary stories, have your own scary stories and understand that it’s okay to have these things happen because that’s how we learn. We’re all going to have scary stories and we’ll probably never stop having scary stories. But we should be taking those as an opportunity to learn and improve so that hopefully our scary stories will not become syndicated and read all the time. We’ll have, we’ll have different, scary stories and different opportunities to learn.

Dan Neumann: [32:16] Yeah, for sure. I know, like I said, I I’m entirely confident I was the Scrum master, that made people stand up back in the day and then I’ve done other things that I’m like, oh, that wasn’t my finest moment. So definitely, and, and share them and seek feedback if you, if people are experiencing something and it’s like, ah, doesn’t feel like it’s super valuable or useful. Maybe it’s the chance to stop and inspect. So thank you for that. Let’s let’s close. Like we usually do with what might be on your continuous learning journey. Anything that’s kind of got you curious or are learning Hal you want to start.

Hal Hogue: [32:54] Yeah. Right now I’m actually revisiting a a and you could probably call it a classic. I’m starting to reread coaching agile teams by Lisa Adkins. I actually, it’s not my copy. I think I accidentally stole this book from my, from my former boss and Brian, if you’re listening to this, I’m sorry I stole your book. It’s a great book. You can have it back if you want it, but yeah. Coaching agile teams is a fantastic kind of overall view of, of kind of what it’s like to come in to a coaching role with a team and, and gives all sorts of great insights. And I’m pretty sure I forgotten so many valuable things from that book. And I’m really looking forward to going through it again and picking up on things that I, that I might have missed out on the first time. So coaching agile teams by Lisa Atkins

Erica Menendez: [33:55] And I admittedly am very bad at reading I’m good at audio books, but I’m very bad at reading. I spend a lot of my time traveling and I actually spent a lot of my time researching and learning the history and traveling through people and kind of learning that way. But I’ve been trying to pick back up coaching the Scrum field book by JJ Sutherland. It’s been in my hands, have some flights coming up, so I will hopefully pick it back up where I left off and remember what I was reading. But yeah, that’s, that’s my next goal.

Dan Neumann: [34:25] That’s awesome. No, thanks for sharing that. And the one for me, I went back, it’s an older book from the nineties, the re-engineering alternative. Something came across our radar talking about this Schneider culture model and in his book is really about making your current culture work versus trying to change your current culture. And I find that to be a really interesting one thinking of how agility can thrive in a control culture, you can use the control to help build real good agility, a disciplined agility. And so I think that’s interesting a lot of times I think we want to change the culture change. Well, I mean, if you’re in, there’s a few thousand people in your org, that’s a heavy lift, so maybe there’s some ways to leverage what’s already there. Yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of, what’s got me thinking. So thank you to both for joining and I’m looking forward to having, having you back again. Hal Hogue: [35:19] Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Outro: [35:24] This has been the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast brought to you by AgileThought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of AgileThought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips for this episode and other episodes at agilethought.com/podcast.

Speakers

Dan Neumann

Principal Enterprise Coach

Dan Neuman is the Director of the US Transformation and Coaching practice in the Agility guild. He coaches organizations to transform the way they work to achieve their desired business outcomes.

With more than 25 years of experience, Dan Neumann is an experienced Agile Coach with a deep knowledge of Agility at the team and organizational levels. He focuses on achieving business outcomes by shifting both mindset and practices, resulting in a disciplined, yet practical approach to solving problems.

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Podcast Ep. 155: Halloween Special: Scary Scrum Stories with Hal Hogue and Erica Menendez

Intro: [00:03]

Welcome to the Agile Coaches’ Corner by AgileThought. The podcast for practitioners and leaders seeking advice to refine the way they work and pave the path to better outcomes. Now here’s your host, coach, and agile expert, Dan Neumann.

Dan Neumann: [00:17]

Welcome to this episode of the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast. I’m your host, Dan Neumann, and excited today to bring you our Halloween episode. We did this last year. It was the treehouse of Scrum horrors or something like that. And we’re back again. This year’s guests are going to be Hal Hogue and Erica Menendez. They are colleagues of mine and consultants here at AgileThought. So Hal, Erica, thanks for joining.

Hal Hogue: [00:42]

Thank you, Dan. I am still amazed that I was allowed back on this podcast, so it’s great to be here again.

Dan Neumann: [00:53]

Thanks. And Erica, this is your first time on the podcast. So maybe share a little bit about who’s Erica.

Dan Neumann: [01:19]

And we’re going to be play with some sound effects too. So we’ll see how that goes.

Hal Hogue: [01:26]

You can’t not play with sound effects on Halloween.

Dan Neumann: [01:29]

We’re going to, we’re going to play with sound effects on Halloween. We’ll have a guest appearance by one of Hal’s critters. And yeah. And, and so we’re gonna, we’re going to try something fun. We haven’t done this before, which is we’re going to tell a story using some improv technique. Our, our theme is going to be a scary stand-up. And the mechanic that we’re going to use is each of us will say one sentence of the story. And then the next person will tell us the next sentence of the story. And so on. We’ll rotate through. And sometimes with teams, this is a good way to, to teach them listening techniques and how to yes, and each other. Cause it gets really non-sequitur. If, if I say one sentence and Hal’s second sentence has literally nothing to do with what I just said. Of course we’ve seen that in teams, I’m sure a lot where one team member just completely knocks a team meeting off, off camber. So we’re going to give it a shot. And if it’s a dumpster fire, well that’s how improv goes. Are you ready Hal?

Hal Hogue: [02:34]

All the more entertaining.

Erica Menendez: [02:58]

When I finally showed up the Scrum master yelled at us to stand up in a circle.

Dan Neumann: [03:03]

I really don’t understand why they get so hung up on standing.

Hal Hogue: [03:09]

Yeah. What is the purpose of standing up? Can’t I just sit down. Why do I even need to be here?

Erica Menendez: [03:16]

When we finally started the Scrum master hid behind someone else and I couldn’t talk to them, so I didn’t understand what was going on.

Dan Neumann: [03:23]

How am I supposed to get my status report if I can’t see the Scrum master

Hal Hogue: [03:27]

And all I can think about is what I want to say, but other people keep talking and it’s really frustrating me.

Dan Neumann: [03:45]

I got jolted out of my multitasking when Sally the stakeholder finally started to say something about our project,

Erica Menendez: [04:08]

Oh chicken and pigs always throws me off. I just continued in the background. And wait until the Scrum master said we were finally over and could go back to work.

Hal Hogue: [04:33]

I am just so happy that this is over and I do not have to talk to anyone on my team for another 24 hours.

Erica Menendez: [04:42]

Thank goodness. We don’t need to show up every day.

Dan Neumann: [04:49]

Well, thank you. Thank you guys for participating in our first attempt at live improv in the podcast. And I think it went well. So have you guys ever been in or facilitated podcasts or podcasts, Have you been in or facilitated daily Scrums that kind of went like that where you just were awful?

Hal Hogue: [06:16]

Yeah. Early on in my, in my kind of tenure as a Scrum master, I was, I was very heavy handed, very involved and I, I coached, things like the three questions being like a mandatory thing to do in a daily Scrum. And at that point I just, I didn’t, I didn’t understand the why behind the daily Scrum. I didn’t understand that it was an opportunity for the developers to, to organize and, and come up with a plan for the next 24 hours to get them closer to the sprint goal. None of that was running through my head. It was just get everybody together, make sure they talk about what they did yesterday, what they’re going today, and if they have any impediments and make sure things keep moving along smoothly. So over time I realized I should take a bit of a step back Scrum master doesn’t need to, to be, you know, whipping people like that or slave driving Scrum master needs to give the team their space, make sure this happens within 15 minute time box and just let the team synchronize on their, on their sprint goal.

Hal Hogue: [08:45]

And I think, I think another thing that can lead to extremely long daily Scrums and not adhering to the 15 minute time box is when a team thinks that the daily Scrum is their only opportunity to talk with each other about anything during the day. And, and when they’re not standing together looking at a plan, they don’t talk, they just go do their own thing. The rest of the day. And the reality is the teams should be collaborating throughout the day because they should, they’re a team. And a team is a group of people aligned toward a common goal. So the daily Scrum is a great opportunity to do that on a regular cadence and, and ensure that we are stopping and inspecting and adapting on our plan, but we should be talking throughout the day and, and making sure that those lines of communication and collaboration are open and strong

Dan Neumann: [09:46]

Hal, you did some historical work for us, kind of going through some of the old Scrum guides. And one of the things we threw into our scary stand-up was the chickens and pigs part, and thank you to carrot your, your pig for, for being a voice actor for us in that

Hal Hogue: [10:05]

You can tell carrot has done many voiceover gigs. He nailed it

Dan Neumann: [10:10]

Carrots, a pro, but it’s still hanging on, I don’t know, Erica, if you’ve seen that as well. Are you guys still hearing chickens and pigs crop up? Hopefully not too much, but I’m guessing

Hal Hogue: [11:06]

Yeah. I think Erica nailed it with the danger of, of using that chickens and pigs metaphor. It, it, it creates, it creates a walls and barriers between collaboration and I still see hints of chickens and pigs even today. And in strange ways one day, one day I went into, into the office. I went to my desk and there was this big poster and it was a poster describing the Scrum framework. And in this poster, all of the Scrum accountabilities were represented by cute little pig characters. And you might not think twice about that if you, if you aren’t familiar with the metaphor, but it’s, it’s funny how, how that creeps into so many things. Never did figure out who, who put that poster on my desk either. Hmm.

Hal Hogue: [12:41]

Yeah. And, and as long as that visual isn’t, it is used and owned by the developers and isn’t used as some sort of tool to, or, or visual to check in on a team by management or somebody on the outside, because I’ve seen those, I’ve seen those tasks boards, you know, wielded or weaponized and, and, and not great ways. And I’ve seen the same thing out of burndown charts. If a team finds a burndown chart valuable then, okay, let’s, let’s, we can use that. We can use that to inspect our progress, but if a burndown chart is there for a manager to peek in and make sure it is on trend, then we should probably stop and have a conversation about that.

Erica Menendez: [13:35]

Yeah. I hadn’t even thought of that before, but I can see that going very toxic, someone pulling up a burndown chart as their visual and saying, all right, so where are we in the sprint? And if the Scrum master is treating it almost like, or the team is treating the Scrum master like a status report, goodness, that would be extremely toxic.

Dan Neumann: [13:53]

I’ve lived that literally. We had a functional manager, you know, the typical sprint burndown, not a prescribed artifact anymore in the Scrum guide either, but it can be handy. It had that ideal trendline in it, and this person we’ll call him Keith. Right. Cause that starts with a K and he just, it needed to be on the trend line or he would lose his mind at the team. And so what they, what does any smart team do when you beat them up? And cause discomfort is they just start lying, right? So by golly, that burned down was always on the line. They would manipulate backlog items to keep it that way. And that became known as K agile, the brand of agile that that person, that person had. And fortunately the organization saw fit to move that person on eventually, but it was taking that information that should be good for the team and using it as a weapon for management, very, very harmful behavior.

Hal Hogue: [14:53]

Yep. Because anytime a team discovers or even thinks that a metric or a visual is being used to monitor them, they are going to, they’re going to gain that to death. They are going to make sure it looks good regardless of whether value is being delivered. And I don’t blame them.

Dan Neumann: [15:16]

Well, let’s let’s transition over to sprint planning here. Scary sprint planning.

Erica Menendez: [15:23]

Well, if you have a bad sprint planning you have a bad daily Scrum.

Dan Neumann: [15:31]

Right? Yeah. It’s, you’re setting yourself up for a bad one to three or four weeks if you have an ineffective sprint planning. So, so what’s been some scary sprint planning you guys have seen. What, what are, what are indicators that things are probably lining up?

Dan Neumann: [15:53]

Oh, I think we might spare people the important as much fun as that would be. Yeah.

Hal Hogue: [15:59]

That’s fair.

Hal Hogue: [16:31]

I wanted to make sure that I dressed up accordingly for this audio only podcast for the benefit.

Erica Menendez: [16:41]

I missed the memo.

Dan Neumann: [16:45]

You are you are the extreme telecommuter. I think that’s what you’re dressed as. Yeah.

Erica Menendez: [16:51]

That’s I love that. It’s true.

Dan Neumann: [16:53]

I love it. Which is awesome. So yeah. So sprint planning,

Hal Hogue: [16:58]

Erica, did you have any, you want to start off with any.

Erica Menendez: [17:01]

So probably starting off with one of the first things we’re going to look at and sprint planning is what we’re carrying over. I’ve seen people kind of bully in the beginning and say, oh, is this really carrying over? Can this not be finished this morning? And we’re not going to carry it over this isn’t going to happen. And when you start bullying each other on the team, because something wasn’t able to get done, which was the entire team’s responsibility, if it needed to get done, then you’re really starting off in a very toxic light

Dan Neumann: [17:30]

And you highlighted something important that I, sorry, how I stepped on you, but is it a person’s responsibility or is the team’s responsibility to deliver on the sprint goal? Hell maybe that’s where you’re going.

Hal Hogue: [17:43]

No, I, I agree with you. I was still going to mention the Scrum values as well. Like we should be embodying the Scrum values when we are having these conversations and we should have that, that respect for everyone. We should, we should have that overall team commitment to, you know, accomplish the sprint goal and, and work together on all of these things. It shouldn’t be a, a one-person show ever. So that’s a really good one. Erica.

Erica Menendez: [18:11]

You guys are bringing up a good point too, though. A lot of people focus on the stories and the sprint and forget that you’re really working towards the sprint goal. Did you actually accomplish the sprint goal? If so, is it really a big deal if the story carried over? And are you planning your sprint around a goal or are you just planning your sprint and then going, oh, this might fit.

Hal Hogue: [18:31]

That was going to be my scary story. Actually, it’s, it’s a team that comes into sprint planning and they just jump right into the backlog and maybe it’s ordered appropriately, which is great, but they, they go in, they plan however many stories. They feel they can accomplish in a sprint. And then at the end of the sprint, they say, oh, so what’s our sprint goal. And then they spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to summarize everything they just planned. And it is the most backwards thing ever. It completely invalidates the value of having a sprint goal. And it just makes everybody irritated that, that there’s a sprint goal in the first place.

Hal Hogue: [19:49]

Yeah. And, and looking back at, at Scrum history, if you read, if you read about sprint planning, it’s gone through some iterations over the years, it’s it started off as two separate time-boxed sessions. One is about what we’ll accomplish. And then one is about how we will accomplish it. A few years after that, they merged that into a single time box, still with the what and how, but more importantly in, I think the 2020 guide or the one before that they added a third key thing. And that’s the why. So it’s opening sprint planning by talking about why we’re even doing this. Why are we having a sprint? And that leads to our overall goal. And then we can talk about what things we should pull in to accomplish that goal. And then how will we, how will we dig into those? So it’s those three, it’s the why the what and the how and remembering how important the, why is?

Dan Neumann: [21:38]

Do you folks see being remote, being an even bigger impediment to getting an appropriate amount of thought put into how the sprint goal might achieve be achieved? I, I, it was challenging in person and for me, I think it gets even more challenging now that we’re remote. I’m just curious what you guys are seeing.

Hal Hogue: [22:06]

Oh, that is, that’s interesting. Actually, we should do a podcast on that. Yeah, I’ve been remote the past, I guess, couple of years since the pandemic started, but yeah, it’s definitely more difficult, but I think it all comes down to visualization and maintaining that level of visualization we have when we’re in person via something remotely, I’ve had tons of, of success working with teams, using a simple white boarding tool like Miro. It, it helps significantly when team members are remote, not standing together in the same room. It lets them see what everyone else is seeing. It lets them interact together in a digital way. Sure. They’re not, they’re not physically moving things around and shuffling to tasks and, and formulating plans that way, but they are still collaborating in a visual manner. And I think that’s the key thing, whether you’re all remote or all in person, or you’re some sort of mix, you need to have some sort of easy to interact with visualization to make sure that we are all on the same page and we’re all, we’re all working together effectively. So Miro is my tool of choice. There’s neural as well. And I’m sure there’s other tools, but it’s all about visualization.

Dan Neumann: [23:49]

So Erica, in your in your experience then as a distributed team, are you seeing things like Miro and the remote collaboration tools help our people kind of just breaking apart and reconvening at some point later after they’ve had a chance to elaborate on the, how, what are, what are you seeing?

Erica Menendez: [24:06]

Yeah. I actually use Azure we’re Azure DevOps teams for the most part. That’s what I’ve worked with. And I tend to use that and move around a lot and kind of really just facilitate that way. So that we’re visually looking at the board. However, I’m really curious how you use Miro now, because I feel like it’d be a different way to really spice it up and actually bring some extra to the meeting that I’m probably missing there. And that probably came from you working in person and knowing those different techniques.

Dan Neumann: [26:05]

That’s, that’s good insights. So we talked about the daily Scrum. We’re not going to make it to retro cause our, our time box here. But when we talked about sprint planning, maybe we can just talk about rotten reviews. We will try and keep the Halloween scary theme going. Some, some stuff that you see in a sprint review

Hal Hogue: [26:23]

Dan, I think you’ve just told a Meta scary story by saying, we’re not going to have time to make it to the retro. That’s sounds like a scary story, right?

Dan Neumann: [26:32]

That’s also scary. No time for retro. We’ve got to deliver more stories. Yeah. That’s terrible. Don’t do that.

Hal Hogue: [26:42]

Except except when we’re doing it right now.

Hal Hogue: [27:44]

Yeah. I’ve, I’ve heard, I’ve heard teams right now. I’ve haven’t heard I’ve, I’ve been involved with teams that have had sprint reviews that last five or 10 minutes. And at the end of the review, they are so happy and proud of themselves that they did it that quickly. Like yeah, we’re nailing this. We got out of there and in five minutes, we’re so good at sprint reviews. And it’s, it’s again, it’s, it’s the coast Scrum mentality and it’s, it’s not understanding the why behind the sprint review of all the Scrum events. In my experience, the sprint review is the least understood. It’s called a lot of the time it’s called a demo and we go in there, we show stuff or we just talk about stuff briefly and then no stakeholder say anything and we’re done, excuse me, but we’re missing that key opportunity for feedback.

Dan Neumann: [30:38]

So Hal and Erica, I wanted to appreciate that you joined and took a little bit of a leap, trying to do improv for the first time on a podcast. And that was awesome. So thank you for joining. And I’m curious if you have any closing thoughts on our topic of kind of scary Scrum stuff. And Erica, maybe we’ll start with you.

Erica Menendez: [30:55]

Yeah. I mean, these are things that we honestly see every time and especially in probably less mature clients or less mature teams, I should say, I keep wanting to call them clients just because I’m used to the consulting world. But less mature teams that are, you know, reading the Scrum guide or in fact, actually probably not reading the Scrum guide and just going off of what they read in a book that tells them what to do and not actually really paying attention to the intentions behind things. So just a lot more thoughtful intention behind how we do Scrum can really help a lot of people get out of this scary state.

Dan Neumann: [32:16]

Yeah, for sure. I know, like I said, I I’m entirely confident I was the Scrum master, that made people stand up back in the day and then I’ve done other things that I’m like, oh, that wasn’t my finest moment. So definitely, and, and share them and seek feedback if you, if people are experiencing something and it’s like, ah, doesn’t feel like it’s super valuable or useful. Maybe it’s the chance to stop and inspect. So thank you for that. Let’s let’s close. Like we usually do with what might be on your continuous learning journey. Anything that’s kind of got you curious or are learning Hal you want to start.

Hal Hogue: [32:54]

Yeah. Right now I’m actually revisiting a a and you could probably call it a classic. I’m starting to reread coaching agile teams by Lisa Adkins. I actually, it’s not my copy. I think I accidentally stole this book from my, from my former boss and Brian, if you’re listening to this, I’m sorry I stole your book. It’s a great book. You can have it back if you want it, but yeah. Coaching agile teams is a fantastic kind of overall view of, of kind of what it’s like to come in to a coaching role with a team and, and gives all sorts of great insights. And I’m pretty sure I forgotten so many valuable things from that book. And I’m really looking forward to going through it again and picking up on things that I, that I might have missed out on the first time. So coaching agile teams by Lisa Atkins

Erica Menendez: [33:55]

And I admittedly am very bad at reading I’m good at audio books, but I’m very bad at reading. I spend a lot of my time traveling and I actually spent a lot of my time researching and learning the history and traveling through people and kind of learning that way. But I’ve been trying to pick back up coaching the Scrum field book by JJ Sutherland. It’s been in my hands, have some flights coming up, so I will hopefully pick it back up where I left off and remember what I was reading. But yeah, that’s, that’s my next goal.

Dan Neumann: [34:25]

That’s awesome. No, thanks for sharing that. And the one for me, I went back, it’s an older book from the nineties, the re-engineering alternative. Something came across our radar talking about this Schneider culture model and in his book is really about making your current culture work versus trying to change your current culture. And I find that to be a really interesting one thinking of how agility can thrive in a control culture, you can use the control to help build real good agility, a disciplined agility. And so I think that’s interesting a lot of times I think we want to change the culture change. Well, I mean, if you’re in, there’s a few thousand people in your org, that’s a heavy lift, so maybe there’s some ways to leverage what’s already there. Yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of, what’s got me thinking. So thank you to both for joining and I’m looking forward to having, having you back again.

Outro: [35:24]

This has been the Agile Coaches’ Corner podcast brought to you by AgileThought. The views, opinions and information expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and the guests, and do not necessarily represent those of AgileThought. Get the show notes and other helpful tips for this episode and other episodes at agilethought.com/podcast.

Agile Podcast: Agile Coaches' Corner