welcome to the scrum sessions podcast here in Dallas I am Q and over there in Berlin my good friend Gereon hi everyone good to have you back okay he never says a lot when we start you know then he starts talking after that yeah I know I know he never he never says much when we start okay guys so we were talking before we started the the podcast recording and uh one of the topics that’s coming to my mind a lot is do we need a scaling framework do we really need a scaling framework for weekend scale teams into multiple teams and multiple organizations do we need a scaling framework um now I’m gonna start with the German guy what are your thoughts do we need a scaling framework because I am not sure so before I answer that I actually just want to bring up something so today we had a training class q and I together um on scrum at scale and there was a participant very cool guy and he said hey guys I really like the podcast so much I listened to it when I cycle and um you know who we are when you listen to this and you know it’s so funny gerion seems to be the level-headed guy and Q is q and I was like yeah Q is Q right yeah okay okay so I’ll take the ref right I’ll I’ll take the rap on the Loose Cannon you know I’m the guy who has no brakes no filter no nothing which is true but in my mind my friend I don’t know if we really need this thing called the scaling framework are we just looking for a scaffolding for stuff that we don’t know how to do are we over complicating so I am I’m not there that we really need one so okay let’s talk about it yeah okay so heart disagree because I think we absolutely need scaling Frameworks because what happens if you don’t have them right everyone is going to constantly reinvent the wheel and you know when we use this expression to reinvent the wheel we act as if it was simple right so let’s assume the wheel was invented in ancient Egypt I don’t know where it was and then let’s say it was invented there right and you’re in China is it simple to come up with a wheel again no of course not it’s a tremendous invention and it’s very difficult to arrive at it if it hasn’t been invented yet and this is actually what I’m seeing at a lot of customers they are not familiar with a scaling framework and then they try to do it by themselves and usually it doesn’t look all that great and that despite the fact that often the scrum practitioners doing it are quite experienced right they’re very good scrum masses they’re very good product owners or agile coaches but because they don’t have the specific training and skill set in how to scale and know which pitfalls to avoid they will actually then reinvent the wheel but it’s not going to be nice and round it’s going to be one of those crazy wheels that we sometimes see in cartoons and stuff where it’s actually uh you know has four sides to it and it’s like super bumpy and stuff and so in my opinion we absolutely need scaling Frameworks because otherwise people will just reinvent and reinvent and reinvent the wheel and not in a very good way yeah but you see maybe I’m going from the point of view somebody who has a lot of experience with that right but in the end if you’re gonna talk specifically scrum right Skilling scrum is basically scaling all the events right and uh scaling is basically communicate coordinate and synchronize right you have to communicate with everybody else you have to coordinate with everybody else especially if you have dependencies right and even if you don’t you have to exchange information hey we learn how to do something you guys should know about that and then you have to have a synchronization so everybody deliver things when they’re supposed to do so when you look from my point of view it’s basically just doing all the events scaling so you have a scaled version of The Daily scrum you have a scaled version of Plenty you have a scaled version of retrospective and you have a scaled version of Sprint review right and the Sprint itself is scaled because there are multiple teams in there so from my point of view maybe because I done this so many times in the end is just scaling everything so if you know how to do one thing you know how to bring it up on level maybe you agree maybe you disagree but that’s the way I see it so I agree with one point which means I basically disagree is I think you’re a master in this field right so you’re an SPC and say if you’re a scrum at scale trainer and you probably have a ton of certificates and experience in the other scaling Frameworks as well and so I think um it’s it’s easy for us because this is our specialty to be able to break it down to very simple terms and I really like what you just said but was it uh coordinate synchronize and communicate maybe not in that order right I think that’s that’s a very smart way to look at it and I think you’re probably right um but this is kind of like very high level principles thinking right if if you already know all the techniques then you can move on to the principles and then you can boil it down to that and and I think you’re totally right but the the problem is the people that are doing the scaling in the real world on the front lines they don’t have your experience right and so what comes to mind for me is this shoeha rethink where well yeah you’re already on that re-level where you can like look at it and you can immediately see it you can probably look at the different scaling Frameworks and immediately see the strength and the weaknesses and see like where they align and so on but the problem is that the people out there doing it are usually beginners at least at scaling right and so if we don’t give them the scaffolding they are probably just going to go crazy and they’ll build something that’s really strange and to give you one example um and this is actually a very minor thing I think it’s it’s very natural that this happens and this is not a big problem but so let’s say you have two team two scrum teams right you’re just at the beginning of scaling what organizations will often do is say okay so now we have two scrum masses into product owners so why don’t they basically do the meetings together right so they might have something like a scale daily and then all of them come together because it’s just for people and it just makes good sense for all of them to talk together right and this works as long as you have two teams and maybe three teams and it’s innocuous enough right people will do it it’ll work because you’re on this high level you’ll immediately know where I’m going with this and that is the question what happens if I have 10 teams right and so if I have 10 teams and well let’s just say eight like somewhere there and I put two scrum masses and two product owners into the scale daily already I have like 16 to 20 people then add another coach maybe add um somebody from management because you want to resolve impediments immediately and suddenly this thing stops to scale right so at the very beginning at The Beginner’s level putting all of them together into a meeting it worked well but as soon as you truly start to scale things will break and my my assumption is or my thinking is because you know this you you see this immediately you know exactly where I’m going with this and where this is going to go um you know when to amend the system a little bit but the problem is those are not as experienced As You Are they will not notice it they don’t know what is a good way to do it and then they’ll be sitting there in their scale daily for example have 10 product owners there 10 scrum Masters maybe even 10 developers three people from management to coaches and they’re going to be surprised that nothing is working right and they’re going to say oh well 15 minutes is not enough actually 45 minutes is not enough and most of the people are just sitting around and don’t know what to say or do okay I I wouldn’t put something else in there I think one of the requirements for scaling and whether you’re not use a framework you know and I’m still not convinced on the framework stuff right is you have to understand the basics and you have to be very good at practicing the basics you need to understand the principles behind it you have to understand how to apply those principles with practices right so one of the things that fails miserably scaling framework or not is people tend to go into oh it’s very simple hey somebody gave me a cake recipe to do scaling you do this you do that and another pinch of this a pinch of that a little bit of nutmeg here a bit of cinnamon and all that stuff and then it doesn’t work and every time he didn’t work and I was called in there with my my red suspenders and fire fighting gear right it’s because people forgot to first get really good at the basics because the reason I I always say well you don’t need a framework is think about this right if you do a scale if you do a daily scrum and you’re really good at doing that yeah six to eight minutes right normal seldom you go to 15 right six to eight that’s what most teams really good teams do they bang bang we need to organize discussions later and we need to pay attention to this say can I help somebody I need help bang you’re done but then when you scale you have to have the same thing in mind right you’re gonna have representatives of each team on that thing that you may call whatever the framework called but it’s a scaled version of The Daily scrum is the same principle you have to add exactly adopt the same principle so if you don’t know how to do a team level the moment you have 40 people in the room and the 17 teams or something like that it’s not gonna work it doesn’t matter what’s gaming firmware work you’re using so yeah but you have to master the basics that is true in my opinion to a certain extent but I think that’s easily said looking backwards right if you’re like trained almost over trained in scaling Frameworks it’s easy to look back at a lower level and say well um it’s kind of obvious because um two things the first one is I’ve seen a lot of experienced and really good coaches like scrum line CCS make exactly this mistake right and they were actually good coaches and you know as soon as scaling uh became part of the equation they did exactly that mistake and had like everyone in every meeting and the scaling just didn’t work it was just completely wasteful and the information that needed to be communicated wasn’t communicated so like if I look around myself to people that at least at the time were more experienced than I was and they still committed that error and so it seems like it’s not totally obvious even to experience people and if I’m if I’m truly being honest I’m quite arrogant about my skills as a scrum master I think I’m a damn good scrum master and could I have you know in my fantasies of being the best scrum Master ever in the world could I have developed a scaling framework let’s say like scrum at scale I’m so arrogant I would actually like to believe it but I think it would have taken me 20 or 30 years of experimenting and failing and like then realizing at some point of time well actually if I want to do it really right I have to use the principles that you’re saying that are true for Team level scrum and have to apply them to scaling and I think it would have taken me forever despite the fact that I’m actually pretty good at this stuff and if I look um it’s safe for example and it absolutely has its use cases but they’re not doing that right they’re not using the principles of Team level scrum and then just expanding them to the whole organization they’re building a lot of other stuff around that right and so I’m not saying this doesn’t work but people in in practice don’t come to that conclusion I think it would have taken me forever if at all to come to that conclusion and it would have created so much chaos on the way to figure it out and it would actually much rather consume the result of somebody very smart in this case Dr Jeff Sutherland who has like created it and then consume it and then see well does work or does not work in my specific context and lastly there’s actually different approaches to that right so save does work in some contexts and so there’s actually there seems to be more than one solution and so this is like for me personally this is too tricky for me personally and then also I think people don’t have the time scrum practitioners don’t have the time to like create this stuff and you’re just very good at this so I think this is really the thing yeah I I may be I may become a believer in what you’re saying for one reason when we first did scrum this was back in 2006 there wasn’t a lot of information around was because you see Q is the loose candle so Q decided Well you have a couple teams anyway so let’s try this thing right and they did the work and it did work a lot of people got surprised that it worked but it did work and then we had multiple teams so we had to have some kind of communication coordination synchronization mechanism and

probably somebody told me hey there is all these things in here that you should be aware of which I have to learn the hard way because I had no freaking clue what I was doing I don’t know if I can say freaking on the podcast but anyway you can uh yeah I can I had no clue what was doing and the first one to admit that but I found ways to do that with my teams right now I will tell you if somebody had told me a few things that I didn’t know I had of time yeah I would benefit from that I still not sure if I need a formal framework from that what I need is the knowledge and the awareness of some things for instance you know we we’re having this conversation that’s come sessions today right well you have this line manager you have this kind of Masters and where one ends one what the other one begins right and I was mentioning it I had a situation where we got a chief scrum Master II a coordinate a group of teams each one of their own scrum master and the person freaked out because suddenly they have two DOA I have to buy Hardware somebody lost a laptop I have to get another one a uh two people just quit now we have to hire another two people right and uh all these things I don’t know if scanning Frameworks actually address those and those are things that need to be dealt with right so yeah I I see a lot of good things about safe and scrum at scale and others right everybody has good ideas in there but I don’t know if you need to follow those things by the book and I don’t know if even if you follow those things by the book they actually teach the people sort of running the show things that are we can call administrative right Staffing budgeting and all that stuff that suddenly people get faced into debt is like what do I do now does a scaling framework solves that I don’t know does it that’s true however I would say scrum doesn’t solve all these practical problems for on on the team level either right and I personally actually don’t want my scaling framework to solve everything this is actually why more um my more on the side of scrum at scale than save for example like I said I see some use cases for it but for me there’s too much stuff in there right and then they’ll say it’s a toolbox yeah it’s nice but I actually don’t need like a myriad of tools I need a very condensed set of things that are offered to me that I can use and then the Practical stuff I’ll figure it out along the way right and because you could you know you could start adding more specific stuff let’s say to scrum at scale but at some point of time you’re probably going to overload it and I think it would be very difficult to figure out where to stop and what to include and what not to include and I actually think safe is like nearing that point where you know for some people it’s really good to have this complete set of things but at some point of time it can become too much yeah there are arguments proven there are pros and cons about that right for instance in my view was safe right if you come from a very traditional organization where people trying to figure out what this agile thing is yeah these are cake recipes a black box you can follow it and you get stuff done right yeah and it’s much better than what you had before there’s no question about it right we always talk about twice the work in half the time right it’s much more than that you know because you didn’t have anything however and I’ve been to piles of safe shops and worked in many of them I’m telling you a year and a half two years inside that if you are still doing exactly by the book by the recipe you are actually not benefiting as much as you did in the beginning now I also hear the counter argument from leadership about scrum at skill that you look at scrum at sales site and there’s nothing in there that’s too thin right so I agree that safe has too much stuff it’s coming skill who’s too few things even kanban now I just looked today and the kamba now is talking about okrs right and uh because they need something to align the teams and the kanban doesn’t really provide that right so there are some practices that you’re going to end up needing whether or not you have a framework no can you put every single practice on a box probably not a good idea because people are gonna be confused to what they really need and what and when they need it and if you don’t put anything maybe it’s a bit too thin and when you don’t put a lot of things again it goes back to my point that you need to have a lot of knowledge of the basics on how things work because otherwise you may not actually adopt that really well because there isn’t uh the soul called perfect recipe or at least a startup recipe so I’m starting to agree with you that I think we need some sort of framework I get really worried this is it too much or is too little where where’s the balance in there that somebody who doesn’t have a lot of experience can actually take advantage of that and somebody who has a lot of his experience say well I can use something in here but mostly we being done this and doing this some other way and has been working you know so let me think about it so I am not too much against the framework anymore the idea of having a framework it’s what’s in there and how much is in there yeah let me just still pile on with the Frameworks because I think they provide two additional things that we haven’t touched on yet and the first one is okay so you’re a master at this right and so if people know that you’re a master in this they can hire you but if you get run over by a car tomorrow for example you’re not going to be available anymore and your knowledge is going to be gone right and by having a framework that means somebody has to put it into paper or some some form of expression right they have to put it on to share it with others and so suddenly it’s not in your head anymore it’s not in my head anymore it’s not in Jeff’s head anymore it’s out there right and so first of all it’ll survive us first of all and the second thing is as soon as it’s out there it goes from subject from being in us to object and somebody can manipulate it right somebody in Japan can look at it and say this is so stupid you guys didn’t think of that and that and that right and then we can have a discussion about it and so then we not only take it outside of ourselves and make it possibly live for a much longer time but also we can increase the capability right and maybe even though you’re a master you haven’t thought of everything and then somebody points it out and you’re like oh yeah never had this in my situation this actually makes sense I’m gonna change that too right and I think this is really critical also um it’ll make it live longer it’ll increase the quality because you have a lot more eyes on it and also let’s not forget it’s much easier for people to access it right so if they don’t know that you’re the expert in it because you have done this for 20 years by yourself without a framework and have actually achieved a high level with it um where do they go but if I have a framework I can go to the website I can read some material I can book a class and suddenly I’m already on a certain level with very minimal effort right even if you have to pay for two day class right it’s not for free but then still you’re already a good level if it’s not there basically my only the only way I can achieve a decent level of knowledge is if I start scaling and repeat all the mistakes that everyone else has done

yeah well they can they can learn from the scrum sessions or you can watch the podcast to give them my my experience being there I I for once I’m gonna agree with you yes everyone please mark this yeah there is there is that one there is that one time they agreed with him we actually agree on a lot of things we’re being we’re just joking around yes but that the the thing is I have to I I think people have to be careful with Frameworks right I criticize a certain framework because it fails to acknowledge that kanban teams exist right scrum is not the solution for everything and I had people telling me but Q we cannot mix compound and scrum teams I said I’ve been doing this for God knows how many years right well but kanban teams don’t have a Sprint I said so what every two weeks they tell the group what they got done in the past two weeks you know and we are planning they know they are there in the planning event they know what they have in mind they they try to tailor their flow to the things that people are doing Etc and they come to the scaled version of they describe every day they say hey guys your stuff is being done is done it’s not done yet or is it that’s why so it doesn’t prevent from known scrum teams to be part of scale and the some Frameworks take this hard-nosed approach that is this way and that’s the only way right and we have to think that agility is about being flexible right and adaptable if you’re just gonna say well it’s not gonna work because these people are not doing a scrum that’s a really bad way to go about things right and scrum is not the solution for everything and neither is compound the solution for everything some people think you tend to think that one thing resolves all the problems that would be at best wishful thinking right so I I will buy into the framework but I think the framework has to serve purpose which is communicate coordinate and synchronize if you just say if you’re not doing a Scrump you are no good you are probably going to have a little bit of a problem down the road don’t you think well this is actually why I like scrum and scale right and so if people listen to me in the context of being a scrum at scale trainer it might seem like oh well here’s the trainer he’s trying to sell a system or whatever but um I actually did Nexus which is one of the other Frameworks before I ever heard of scrum at scale right and I was actually certified unless another system before I ever heard of scrum Med scale and so I actually see advantages in all of the systems and all disadvantages as well but there are a couple of things that really pulled me towards grommet scale and which I actually think it is the best system and which it is the system that I implemented customers and I always like when I do it I always feel like well this goes so seamless I wonder why not everyone is doing it right and so one of the things is and I mean we’ve been teaching this for so long and we’ve talked about it in the book and so on is that it’s actually fairly simple to attach kanman teams into a scrum at scale system right you just have to make sure the interface is working right and so you have to do it via service level agreements and this is actually so like before scrimate scale what I would often encounter is if you go to a larger organization they usually already have a couple of different implementations right they might be kanban and they might be scrum and they’re like in competition a little bit there might be some part of the organization that has chosen to scrum to scale scrum with less and another part that has chosen to scale scrum with Nexus this usually happens because you have agile bubbles all over the place but now with scrum and scale I actually find it much easier not to get into these Brava Wars right where the Angelus that are actually trying to make the organization agile start instead fighting each other right instead of turning the organization Edge on because you can subsume like different parts really easily so there are five teams and they want to work with less fine I don’t care let’s sync them up and we can just attach them to scrum at scale or we have like kanban being used in in HR for example in people Ops cool I don’t care it fits in very nicely we have to make sure that it feeds the system right that there’s no no problem at the interface but I actually think this is the big advantage of scrum and scale that you can like add so many different ways of working of course ideally I want to have everyone work in scrum if that’s feasible in their context but usually it’s not and I’m surely if people are working successfully with kanban I’m surely not going to go there especially on me as a kanban Trainor right I’m surely not going to go there and say Hey guys you’re working successfully with kanban but you need to change to scrum which you know don’t know anything about it’s awesome they’re being agile let’s integrate it into the whole system and this is actually what I like about scrum and scan yeah I know I totally agree with you there you know I think the scrimmage scale ID is very simplistic and it’s very easy to understand because it’s very simple right and I had situations on the place that we had people scrummit skill safe and less right in the bubbles and we had a bunch of compound teams too the only thing we had to do was to harmonize the language right so scrum at scale has this awful name called scrum of scrum’s Master words yeah I mean it’s awful right and so we just called everybody rtes and that’s it regardless if they’re using save or not because we’ll see I had other kids we just called them Chiefs Grand Masters yes I prefer because we have Chief product owner we have Chiefs grammaster there’s parallel release me in there and everybody gets it but one of the things I absolutely is the first thing I change and when we’re teaching I mean you you are not in that segment I told I said guys I don’t use this name scrum of scrum’s Master and then it gets worse scrum of scrums of scrum’s master I mean that takes half an hour just to try to explain who you’re talking to right so I like I like to change the name right that’s the first thing I do but when you have different Frameworks we can adopt just one term and everybody knows what it is okay that’s that’s the person who coordinates a group of teams what they’re gonna call it oh let’s call it RT is the is the term that we most people use it anyway let’s not do that

thank you I I honestly don’t care what it is for me what matters is saying do people understand what the role is supposed to be doing right Jokes Aside about calling RT or not I prefer Chief scrum master I prefer Chief scrap master I think I think is the easiest way to understand because of the chief product owner right so regardless of the framework in the end is the same thing right somebody has to coordinate the product owners somebody has to coordinate the scrum Masters right again that’s part of it so what you call it I don’t care I think everybody can work together because in the end is about coordination communication and synchronization now I’m gonna give you that unless you have a lot of experience like some of us do you probably need guidance in how to do that what I don’t want is the scaling framework to become some sort of untouchable think that oh we cannot deviate this much because the book say so and there is one from working particular that it tries to brainwash everybody to never change anything no names and it’s not true because even long-term trainers of that framework told me the same thing I knew after a year and a half or two years you need to start tweaking things because you know better you don’t need you don’t need those crutches you know to keep you propped up and all that stuff so in the end I can accept the concept of a framework as long as it doesn’t become a crutch yeah awesome all right I think that’s it for today and uh I’m gonna do my usual thing from Dallas I am q signing off and then the guy in Germany signs off at the end he always gets the last word and he hates me because I always do that yes so goodbye everyone thanks to you thank you for um tuning in remember you can find us on all the podcast platforms on YouTube and so on if you’ve just listened to this episode as your first one um there’s already quite a few episodes out there and we produce one of them each month and there’s also the scrum sessions that Q was referring to they happen on every first Thursday of the month and it’s a live session it’s free it’s q and me and you can just come in for an hour and just ask questions or if you are a little bit shy and don’t want to do that in the beginning you can just come in and listen to other people ask questions and then we debate that stuff so stay tuned for the next episode pretty soon and take care guys bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] um