The Scrum Clinic Coaching Workshop

We have trained hundreds of Scrum teams. We have also talked to hundreds of other teams using Scrum. We have found that many Scrum teams start out with great success only to plateau. This stagnation occurs for several reasons. For mid-size to large organizations (>200 developers) these reasons include:
  • The challenges the teams are hitting are not directly addressed by Scrum. Hence, it is difficult for teams using Scrum to solve them.
  • The problems being solved are fairly complex and, since Scrum is a framework, many teams are not armed with the concepts they need to solve their problems.
  • Scrum requires a particular structure (a cross-functional team) but, for many organizations, the required structure is far from optimal.
While smaller organizations are much more likely to have success with Scrum, they still may have their own challenges that result in a similar stagnation of improvement. These include:
  • Using estimation methods that are popular but inefficient
  • Not using methods like Acceptance Test-Driven Development or Behavioral-Driven Development
  • Having too much technical debt
  • A lack of understanding of why Scrum works and therefore a lack of insight on how to improve their method
These challenges, of course, also affect larger organizations. Our work with teams facing these challenges led us to create both the Scrum Clinic and the Scrum Tuneup Coaching Workshop. The Scrum Clinic is a set of resources available, for free, online, that are designed to help virtually all teams using Scrum to get better. The Scrum Tuneup Coaching Workshop is designed to improve a company’s implementation of Scrum by providing a Net Objectives coach to work directly with the team. A typical workshop would be four days, depending upon team size. A four-day workshop is organized as follows:

· Day 1: The coach works with the team to see where they are – what’s working well and where their challenges lie. This overview includes requirements, design, code, test, integration, support and operations. Some basic principles that underlie Scrum but are usually not taught in CSM classes is presented.

· Day 2: Continues what was started in Day 1. The coach works with the team focusing on the process aspect of using Scrum. This includes reviewing how to plan Sprints, complete stories at the end of the Sprint, the relationship between development and test during the Sprint and more.

· Day 3 & 4: This is not a set agenda but depends upon what has transpired in the first two days. The coach works with the team to help them in as many of the following areas, that are relevant, as is possible in the time allowed:

Scrum practices that we’ve found useful
  1. i.Better methods to do estimation
  2. ii.How to better manage the work during a Sprint
  3. iii.How to improve your retrospections
  4. iv.Running Daily Stand-Ups better
Other practices we’ve found to be useful
  1. v.How to write a Vision Statement and why it is useful
  2. vi.Improving Stories (including how to split them up into smaller chunks when valuable but difficult)
  3. vii.Acceptance Test-Driven Development. We have found a short overview of this to be invaluable to most teams and often leads to comments like – “after understanding the rationale for defining acceptance tests before writing code we had our best Sprint ever.”
Technical practices we’ve learned to be useful
  1. viii.How to improve the team’s integration
  2. ix.Exploring whether Test-Driven Development would be worthwhile
  3. x.Selected technical practices from Net Objectives’ Essential Skills for the Agile Developer: A Guide to Better Programming and Design
  4. xi.Insights on doing Agile design
Lean methods that assist Scrum teams
  1. xii.Why avoiding delays in your workflow is essential
  2. xiii.Why discussing your workflow amongst your team members can greatly prove the rate at which you learn
  3. xiv.How Scrum can be thought of as a partial implementation of Lean-Flow and if there are other parts of Lean you should adopt
  4. xv.Should you consider moving to Kanban?

What To Expect

Most teams that undertake the Scrum Tuneup Coaching Workshop experience an immediate improvement in methods as well as a renewed interest in continuing the improvement on their own.

Why we do this in a coaching format and not a training format?

We do offer courses that teach Scrum. However, the Scrum Clinic Coaching Workshop is intended for teams already doing Scrum. Since each team is different, having a set agenda would not be efficient. Therefore we start by discerning what is needed and then addressing that. Coaches who do the workshop are also instructors in our Scrum training and Technical Team training – so they can provide on-the-spot training that is needed during the workshop.