Promoting Agile Team Growth Through Experiments And Small Focused Changes | Robert Finan

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode: Promoting Agile Team Growth Through Experiments and Small Focused Changes | Robert Finan
Host: Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner
Release Date: January 2, 2025

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Overview

In this insightful episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte sits down with Robert Finan to explore effective strategies for promoting Agile team growth. The conversation delves into the use of experiments and small, focused changes as catalysts for enhancing team performance and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Through practical examples and thoughtful discussions, Robert shares his experiences and best practices as a Scrum Master dedicated to driving meaningful transformations within Agile teams.

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1. Introduction to the Episode

The episode kicks off with Vasco Duarte announcing the exciting news about the upcoming Global Agile Summit in Tallinn, Estonia, scheduled for May 18-20, 2025. He highlights the event's focus on real-life Agile practices, emphasizing the opportunity to learn from global Agile practitioners and thought leaders.

Notable Quote:
"This isn't just another conference. It's a chance to connect with the people that are shaping the future of Agile."
— Vasco Duarte [00:04]

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2. Success Thursday: Defining Scrum Master Success

Vasco welcomes Robert Finan back to the podcast for a segment they call Success Thursday, where they discuss pivotal questions about achieving success in the role of a Scrum Master. The primary focus is on understanding what success means for a Scrum Master and how it can be measured effectively.

Notable Quote:
"I see myself like the product owner of team improvements, maintaining a backlog of changes that can elevate our performance."
— Robert Finan [08:09]

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3. Favorite Retrospective Formats

The conversation begins with Robert sharing his favorite retrospective format: the Sailboat Retrospective. He appreciates its simplicity and effectiveness, especially when working with new or unfamiliar teams. The sailboat metaphor helps teams assess their current situation, identify what's working and what's not, align on common goals, and recognize potential risks.

Notable Quote:
"The sailboat retrospective is simple and straightforward. It helps us see where we're going and the risks that might steer us off course."
— Robert Finan [02:58]

Robert elaborates on his unique approach by reversing the traditional orientation of the sailboat and island, placing the future (island) on the opposite side to better capture the team's alignment and direction.

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4. The Power of Visual Metaphors in Retrospectives

Vasco delves into the importance of using visual metaphors in retrospectives. He explains how metaphors like the sailboat unlock creativity and abstract thinking, which are often constrained by the concrete nature of engineering backgrounds commonly found in Agile teams. This shift in language and perspective leads to more engaging and interactive sessions.

Notable Quote:
"Metaphor-based retrospectives unlock creativity that isn't there otherwise, making teams more happy and interactive."
— Vasco Duarte [05:04]

Robert agrees, highlighting that metaphors help teams develop a shared language, making it easier to communicate complex ideas succinctly. This shared language fosters deeper understanding and collaboration within the team.

Notable Quote:
"It's a visual reframing that surprises the team with new perspectives."
— Robert Finan [07:27]

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5. Defining and Measuring Success as a Scrum Master

The discussion shifts to what success means for Robert as a Scrum Master. He views himself as the "product owner of team improvements," maintaining a backlog of potential enhancements aimed at boosting team performance. Robert emphasizes focusing on one or two key changes at a time to ensure effective implementation and impact.

Notable Quote:
"I maintain a backlog of changes that can elevate our performance, focusing on one or two key improvements at a time."
— Robert Finan [08:09]

Robert shares examples of successful interventions, such as introducing estimation practices to teams struggling with predictability. He underscores the importance of grounding teams in Scrum and Agile principles and fostering self-sufficiency, where teams eventually internalize these practices without external prompts.

Notable Quote:
"When teams start making decisions on their own that align with Agile principles, that's a real win."
— Robert Finan [12:56]

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6. Celebrating Wins and Fostering Autonomous Teams

Robert discusses the importance of recognizing when teams adopt Agile practices organically. These moments indicate genuine understanding and internalization of Agile principles, leading to sustainable improvements. He shares anecdotes where teams began self-regulating their scope and deliverables, demonstrating their growth and commitment to Agile methodologies.

Notable Quote:
"It's a real win when teams start making Agile-aligned decisions without needing constant guidance."
— Robert Finan [13:32]

Vasco emphasizes that such wins are significant because they reflect the team's ability to sustain improvement independently, reducing the Scrum Master's role as the "Agile conscience."

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7. Practical Insights and Takeaways

Throughout the episode, Robert Finan provides actionable insights for Scrum Masters aiming to foster team growth:

• Use of Metaphors: Incorporate visual metaphors in retrospectives to enhance creativity and engagement.

• Focused Improvements: Concentrate on one or two key changes at a time to ensure effective implementation and measurable impact.

• Measure Both Tangible and Intangible Factors: Assess not only concrete practices like estimation but also team dynamics and communication.

• Foster Autonomy: Encourage teams to internalize Agile principles, leading to self-sustaining improvements and reduced dependency on the Scrum Master.

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8. Conclusion

Vasco concludes the episode by thanking Robert for sharing his valuable experiences and insights. He reiterates the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in Agile practices and encourages listeners to implement the discussed strategies to enhance their teams' performance.

Notable Quote:
"When teams internalize Agile principles, it leads to genuine and lasting improvements."
— Robert Finan [12:56]

Vasco also invites listeners to rate and share the podcast, highlighting it as a vital resource for Scrum Masters seeking to refine their craft and drive meaningful team growth.

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Key Takeaways

• Sailboat Retrospective: A simple yet effective format for retrospectives that fosters team alignment and risk identification.

• Visual Metaphors: Utilizing metaphors in team activities can unlock creativity and facilitate better communication.

• Focused Improvements: Implementing one or two key changes at a time leads to more significant and measurable team improvements.

• Measuring Success: Success as a Scrum Master is gauged by both tangible enhancements in practices and intangible improvements in team dynamics.

• Fostering Autonomy: Encouraging teams to adopt and internalize Agile principles leads to sustainable and autonomous improvement.

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Further Engagement

Listeners are encouraged to attend the Global Agile Summit for an immersive experience in real-life Agile practices, featuring workshops and sessions led by industry leaders. Early bird tickets are available at a discounted rate until the summit agenda is announced.

Website: globalagilesummit.com

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Thank you for tuning into the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast! If you found this episode valuable, please rate us on Stitcher or iTunes and share it with fellow Scrum Masters. Your support helps us continue to provide actionable insights and inspiring stories from the Agile community.

Transcript

[Vasco Duarte]

Hey, how are you doing? I'm Vasco Duarte, your host on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And I've got some exciting news. So right now, as I record this, I'm holding in my hand the signed contract for our very first Global Agile Summit. We're all in and I couldn't wait to share this news with you. So mark your calendars. May 18th, 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. We're gonna have a transformative experience. We're putting together an event that is all about real life Agile. It's not theory or buzzwords. It's practitioners sharing what's working, what's making an impact, and how they've overcome challenges that you too will have to face, or maybe even facing. Right now, we're bringing together the best stories in Agile. From product leaders to engineering wizards to business visionaries, these will be stories that will inspire you to action. This isn't just another conference. It's a chance to connect with the people that are shaping the future of Agile. And here's the best part. Right now, we're in our super early bird phase. And that means you can grab tickets at just 25% of the final price. Look, that's not just half off, it's half off of the half off. It's an incredible deal for our dedicated community members, just like you listening to this right now. So at the summit, day one will be all about hands on workshops. And days two and three, we'll dive into leadership, product strategy, coding, testing, and everything that makes Agile thrive in organizations. Right now remember, these are all first person, real life stories. Now whether you're a leader, a developer, or part of a consulting company, this event is built to take your Agile game to the next level. So don't wait. Go to globalagilesummit.com and grab your ticket. Today, let's all make 2025 the year agile truly transforms your teams, your business and our industry. I'll see you all in Tallinn. And Remember, go to globalagilesummit.com and get your super early bird ticket right now. It only be available until the agenda is announced, so don't wait. Grab it right now. Right now that that's out of the way, onto the episode.

[Robert Finnan]

Hello everybody.

[Vasco Duarte]

Welcome to our Success Thursday. This week we have with us Robert Finnan. Hey Robert, welcome back.

[Robert Finnan]

Hi Vasco.

[Vasco Duarte]

Success Thursday, the big question of the week. Before we dive into that though, Robert, share with us, what's your favorite retrospective format and why?

[Robert Finnan]

I hope this isn't a complete cliche, but I love the sailboat. I know it's really simple and straightforward. I'm sorry, I'm sorry if everybody sort of comes up all the time. But it's the one I particularly if I'm asked to come in and work with people who I don't know. So if I've been asked to come in and do a retro for people I don't know, I really like this because we have the. The is situation. Like what's happening at the moment. We've got what's working well, what's working bad at the moment. But you've got this looking into the. And in particular, I love that. Do we have a common goal? Are we as a team, Are we actually doing common view of where we're actually going or where we're not going? So this idea of the island that we're heading towards, is this something that we're actually aligned on? Do we have alignment about where we're going? And then the risks thing. It's funny how the risks very often kind of wander between being risks and stuff that's not working. But you get so much information, so much more than just like, what's working, what's not working. You've got this bit into the future. What I really like about it, I've actually started to draw this the other way around. So I use to have the island on the left and the rocks on the left. And I was thinking, no, that's the future. The future should be on the other side. So we have a situation going into the future and I can get. Using that. I can get so much information, you know, that's my favorite.

[Vasco Duarte]

Yeah. And one of the things. Of course you draw comics so you're probably attuned to the importance of visual thinking. But one of the things that I really like about this metaphor based retrospectives, you know, whether it's sailboat or climbing up the mountain or whatever you want to call it, it unlocks some sort of creativity that isn't there otherwise. And that's one of the things that, I mean, many of us work in it, are engineers or have an engineering background. And we're very concrete thinkers. Probably many of us are very pragmatic by nature, but the training we go through makes us very concrete thinkers. It makes it hard to think abstractly and the metaphors kind of unlock that aspect. And I often see teams are happier, they're more creative, they're more interactive. When they're using a. Do you see the same.

[Robert Finnan]

Yes. It's good to get them going. But I mean, I will also, I have to admit, I'm not a great. You know, I believe retros. We're trying to do something concrete and rec. I want an improvement at the end of the retro. In the end of the day, it always boils down to the same thing that we're looking at, what's going on and what's not. So I will invest a little bit into that. But. And, but I don't want it to become a novelty that every two weeks I'm trying to think of something madly exciting. And so I go to the sailboat every week and I think it's important to vary it a little bit, but I do. I, I'm not, I've. I'm not going to go in and ask them to build a LEGO model of last week's Sprint. That's. But that's just my type of. Maybe this is. I want to get them talking, but I feel like I can generally get them talking. You might have noticed, I can get them talking anyway.

[Vasco Duarte]

I think that the get them talking is part of it. But I'm also thinking that we very often are. And I'm a student of philosophy, or I should say I'm a curious of philosophy, not really a student, I should be honest with that. But I am interested and I explore this. And we even have a couple of episodes on the podcast about philosophy applied to our role as scrum masters and agile coaches. And one of the key things for me from that curiosity about philosophy that has come out is the importance of the mental models and the languages we use. And for me, the sailboat is about switching the language. It's about switching the language from the things we can name to the things we can relate. And the relate part is very important, right, Because I can relate something to a rock or a shark or the sun or the island that I would not come up with if I'm thinking about the exact actions that happened in the last sprint. What do you think about that, Robert?

[Robert Finnan]

No, no, I agree there. I think that it's useful sometimes to put it to this context switch or this, this visualized reframing of things in a different. In a different kind of different words that then you're kind of surprised by what comes out afterwards. And they start to use the words that. They start to use the words that you're using for the metaphor. So whatever that might be, whether it's sailing, there's a hole in the boat, or, you know, our anchor is massive, our, you know, we need a bigger sail, whatever it Might be that those rocks are massive, whatever it's going to be. And they. And it becomes, you know, they, using the imagery that you put up there, starts to become the words that they're using to convey their thinking and they'll.

[Vasco Duarte]

Even refer to that in the future.

[Robert Finnan]

Right.

[Vasco Duarte]

Oh, remember that rock?

[Robert Finnan]

It hit us. There's a hole in the boat. We're going down.

[Vasco Duarte]

Yeah. And that becomes kind of powerful because it conveys so much information in so little or in so few words. Right. Because it has all the whole background of the visual metaphor that we were using before. But that was a tangent.

[Robert Finnan]

Freeze people. Yeah, yeah. Frees people up a bit in their thinking. Yeah, absolutely.

[Vasco Duarte]

Obviously, we do all of this because we want teams to succeed, and that also means we succeed as Scrum Masters. So, Robert, let's explore that a little bit. When you think about your success as a Scrum Master, what does it mean for you?

[Robert Finnan]

So I think I mentioned this in the previous episode that I sort of see myself when I'm a Scrum. So I see myself coming as a Scrum Master. I see myself a little bit like the product owner of team improvements.

[Vasco Duarte]

This is.

[Robert Finnan]

This is sort of in my visualization. So quite often if I'm asked to come in now, sometimes I'll come in a team has been running for a while. Sometimes you're starting a team up. Okay. In different situations. But in general I would have a backlog of what I would consider to be improvements in my head. Or sometimes it's a physical one where I literally have it in Excel sheet or something like that. Just a. Just to keep a track in it are written down in my notebook basically where I think, okay, here, this change, we need to bring this in because I think this is going to have the most effect on our performance. So if we say that a Scrum Master is accountable for high performing teams or the effectiveness of the high performing teams, like what change? If I can make one change, what's this one change I would like to see happen that I think would bring the greatest step forward? Now, I'm a fan of focusing on one or two things, so work in process limits. Okay? One or two things at a time. So when I'm considering improvement, what's actually happened? Generally speaking, I have something that I'm aiming towards them seeing. Are we actually getting there or not getting there. For instance, I have gone into teams where they were completely against estimation. Estimation is a waste of time. Okay. I could see though that they weren't delivering on any of their sprints. There was no predictability about when something would be finished. Okay, so I'm looking, I'm a fan of estimation because generally speaking I want to know we're going to hit this deadline, this release date or not. That's why we're doing this actually less so than you might think about getting it right between two or three points. Can we deliver this on time for the company or not? And this is the kind of thing where, you know, I'll go, we really need to get this sorted out now. There's several steps maybe to get that estimation done. I had to do is, you know, basically give them a grounding in what Scrum and Agile actually is. Quite often that's missing. Surprising how many people have never had any kind of training about Scrum or Agile. Don't understand why we work this way and then trying to get them to experiment, can we do a few weeks drop where we actually do some estimation and stuff like that. And in the end, at the end what they call success, success was about four or five sprints later where they used to print out the burn down chart and leave it on my desk. They'd say look, we got it, you know, we got it done. We're, you know. And also what we were able to do with that, we were able to, we had two or three teams working on a bigger project. We were able to do a release burn down across the three teams and take a look at it and start descoping if needs be really early, way earlier than not. Not like at the last minute going oh, we're not going to be able to deliver that. We would just keep scoping way earlier saying we're not going to make this, we can make it, maybe we can add something to it or not. So I've, so how do I judge the improvement? There's things I see and there's things I put emphasis on. I am hoping to see those things change now. Sometimes it is, it's not always something as concrete. Maybe it's estimation, it may be the atmosphere in meetings, it may be about the way they talk to each other. It may be about the kind of finger pointing that might be going on or something that, where you think, oh we've got a, you know, we have a trust issue here. I'm going to have to work at a much lower level or on the personal level rather than let's say on the practice level which can also be the case. So this is how I would, you know, I'd be looking for, looking, looking to see what's happening. And the other thing maybe to add to that is I love it when I don't. So if I'm sitting there and I'm thinking something like, stop putting stories in Sprint. You're not going to finish it. And then they say it and then I go, ah, we're getting to the point where, you know, the mind, it's great to be the agile conscience, but it's great when you don't have to be the agile conscience anymore. Okay.

[Vasco Duarte]

Yeah. When it's already inside of their own thinking. Right.

[Robert Finnan]

Mentally, these are the wins when they say something like that. But like I had like the developer saying, no more. We don't do any more than that. I'm not going internally. I'm just going, yes, yes. And then there was another time, another time, the product that not the stakeholders said to each other they wanted to bring in some. Some kind of something like electronic signature. And they said, oh, so we're not going to be able to. We're not going to be able. Or we're not going to be able to do XYZ because we want to bring electronics. No, no, no, no. We've got to decide whether we do this and if we do, we can't do the other. We have to swap things out. We can't. And I was like, oh, God, yes, thank God we have capacity. And they're the bits where I go, ah, there's the mindset. I didn't have to say anything. They're the, they're the win.

[Vasco Duarte]

Those are the big wins. I totally agree.

[Robert Finnan]

I had some guys recently do magic estimation and I looked at them do the magic. I was helping them and I looked at them and said, guys, you really think you're going to deliver this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll be okay. We'll be okay. We'll get it done. They didn't. Okay. And then I heard they went and did magic estimation for the next set of features they should release and immediately realized they weren't going to make it and they were going to scope some stuff. And that for me is a win when I wasn't even there. But they went and did it on their own. And I think, great, you're spreading the virus of thinking like this, basically, and people are going, oh, we need to.

[Vasco Duarte]

They're the kind of things when the ideas live on their own. I think that's a great way to. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Finnan]

That's a lovely way of seeing it. Yeah, yeah.

[Vasco Duarte]

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that, Robert. We really hope you liked our show and if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes? Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.