welcome to the scrum sessions podcast I am Kyo as always here with Gary on hi everyone my name is carrion and we are really happy to bring you this first episode of the scrum session podcast and we have a real Banger for you because we have Dr Jeff Sutherland’s co-inventor of scrum and inventor of scrum at scale in our very first episode and we actually decided to split it up because it was so good and there was so much good stuff that you’re going to enjoy the first episode now and the next one will come out soon on any platform that you use to consume your podcast thank you Gary on and let’s go to Dr Jeff Sutherland’s interview I’ll give Klaus the first question of the day oh I’m honored thank you very much and Jeff thank you very much for taking your time to guide us so um here’s the first question and it is uh about the scrum Master mandate I’ve been working as a scrum Master for five years and what I have experienced is that the um Mandate of a scrum Master might differ from company to company the scrum guide doesn’t mention anything about this mandate but in case a team member is not performing and the other team members are not willing to speak about it in public what is your take on any mandate that a scrum Master might have in that situation to move him or what are your thoughts on the Mandate of the scrum master in that situation well first of all scrum is very uh effective at making visible the performance of everyone on the team so I’ve worked with years with bench Capital groups and one of our companies in Australia were working with they booted up scrum at the end of the first Sprint we met with a the product owner of the scrum master and the manager and they said what we found is that two people on the team got nothing done and we think they’ve got nothing done for the last year but we couldn’t see it when we were doing waterfall but now that we see scrum in the very first Sprint we know exactly who if it gets anything done and they said what should we do and I said well initially don’t do anything because the teen scrum is set up so the team can take care of a lot of the problems and uh and so they they waited a Sprint and that is the next spread they actually have to be in Boston we actually met face to face and we talked about what was going on they said well at the end of the second spread one of the people was you know working well with the team and and contributing just like everybody else but the other person still was doing nothing and uh so we decided what to do and the manager decided that he was going to go back and actually fire the person so this is the kind of model that really works you know the scrum Master tries to get the team performing it’s going to be obvious where the problem is uh tries to get the team to help fix the problem by making it visible having a reasonable discussion about it uh maybe personally coaching the person but then if there’s no traction on the part of the scrum master that needs to be a man a person in a leadership position there I was going to say manager but it’s come with we don’t have managers but we do have an Enterprise action team which will deal with this stuff we do have a scrunch Masters that will effectively uh work with someone on a scrum team that that is a real problem and figure out what to do uh so the manager has to step in and figure out what to do do I move this person off the team do I move this person out of the company is there something else that this person could do that would be constructive rather than uh hurting the team’s performance right and managers have to do that that’s my message to managers you do not want to be having weekly meetings with your employees that’s that’s over you don’t need to micromanage them what you do need to do is create a vision make sure they’re trained make sure they’re motivated make sure they’re happy but if there’s one person that’s blocking team performance then it’s your responsibility as a manager to intervene and if you don’t you will be like a you know like a soccer team uh manager who’s going to be losing all the games and you don’t want to do that you have to take responsibility for the team for getting the right scrum master in place the right product owner in place you know servant leadership and green good to great uh it’s it’s all about what is the one thing that makes CEOs of companies great and great means their stock price goes up like a thousand times and and the one thing that makes them great is servant leadership and if you listen to these CEOs what they will say is our job is to get the right people on the bus give them a vision of what we want to see and that is for them to figure out how we get to where we need to go but there’s a corollary of that if you have the wrong person on the bus then that servant leader has to move the wrong person off the bus and the same thing is true of a scrum master and because the scrum Masters weren’t doing this can in Alaska God wanted to take servant leadership out of the scrum guide he said it’s not working the scrum Master is aren’t doing the job they’re not understanding the role and the whole agile Community screamed no we have to have this German leadership it took a year to of arguing until we decided okay we’re going to change the order of the terms we’re going to have a scrum Master that’s a leader who serves so that we get the right way of working for the scrum Masters to improve team performance and then figure out what to do with the assistance of the leadership of the company if there are individual problems that answer your question partly but I’ll I’ll wait with further questions very good okay let’s Bounce from Europe to America and the question that kind of those things in that one Mark you go next for the uh taking the time really appreciate it um my question has to do with uh organizational structure and so as some organizations are oriented around their products and services but others may still be a matrix organization or even see their I.T as a separate entity and this can create friction when the organization wants to make changes to the ways that they’re delivering the product or service and when they want to use the scrum framework so I was wondering what recommendations do you have for organizations that are starting from an organizational model where they see the business in it as separate entities and how do you coach those organizations through the transition into scrum foreign well first of all we’re working most of the organization we’re working with an RIT companies they have an I.T group but first thing we do is come at scale is say okay where in the organization do we want to prioritize first and usually that’s not I.T I.T may be slow but they’re they’re not the blocker blocker for production and revenue in the market right so for example our latest John Deere case study which is public it’s on our website it was written by John Deere uh when we when we they had been doing safe for like nine years and they did get some improvement but it wasn’t enough that wasn’t what they needed so they started implementing scrum at scale and where did we start they said the thing that is blocking us right now is the system that delivers the tractors and the farm equipment to market the order management system the tracking of the orders the purchasing people uh the the people managing the supply chains uh that is where the block is and by focusing there we set up scrummus firms there and that enabled them to implement improvements 10 times as fast and deliver 15 times more tractors and made the stock price go up three to four hundred percent okay so so how do we do that we said okay and that piece of the company we want teams that are fully agile and we’re going to have scrum Masters and product owners we’re going to have sets of teams scrums of scrums we’re going to have a scrum team that’s the leadership team the Enterprise action team we’re going to have a meta scrum that’s a forum where the product on a team meets with a Senior Management on a regular Cadence and gets the Senior Management agreeing to support the agenda of the agile piece of the organization and that means the senior manager is going to ride shotgun for any part of the organization that’s slowing down delivery of tractors and they’re going to go out and shoot anybody that’s getting in the way so once once that message gets to the organization then that scrum implementation and Order management can really function right because it’s just totally scrum it’s run by agile leadership that is a scrum team and Senior Management is doing the blocking and tackling outside the little agile bubble right that’s that’s the way to start it and then you want to expand that bubble but in that agile bottle there there are no departments there may be a something like uh and when Henrik nieberg implemented the Spotify model he created this idea of chapters where the people that had story about managers like a QA manager would have a bunch of QA people that he would hire that he would train that he would motivate but day to day they would be deployed to the teams and he would have no day-to-day management responsibility he would have responsibility to regularly bring them together and agree on you know standards tooling you know to make sure there was a quality program throughout the organization uh so the structure needs to be set up different if you allow those Department hierarchies to affect the scrum structure then you have what what people call the hybrid agile right which always sucks so uh you know it’s from my point of view it’s not worth my time to fix hybrid agile it is worth my time to try to figure out how to get an agile piece of the company that really works so if they try to do that I’ll try to get a smaller and smaller piece until I can get one that’s actually a cohesive agile structure we’ll Implement that that we’ll get twice the work in half the time and then we’ll show that to management so do you want more of that right and more means we pull in more teams into this new structure so most companies will continue to have old structures but they need to be kept separate from the agile bubble and if you read Professor Carter’s book uh accelerate he says in that book he has never seen a successful agile transformation where waterfall management has been involved in managing the agile bubble that means if you allow that hybrid management structure you will get a hundred percent agile transformation failure we already know that worldwide 53 percent of agile Transformations fail and when they do fail 67 of them go bankrupt or they’re acquired they’re out of business and so you know once you know that uh you know that this company is in real trouble if they try to enforce any any hybrid management structure they’re going to fail and they’re likely to go out of business so you either want to fix that by starting small or you want to get out of there and go to another company it’s going to be successful right because today things are happening so fast and uh particularly the covet situation made thousands of companies go bankrupt even some of the biggest companies in the United States went bankrupt because of covet they could not respond they had those hybrid management structures that could not work remotely could not you know could not prioritize and work with teams all over the world they just went under and I can tell you looking at what’s going on in the world and the pace of change is accelerating it’s going to get even more demanding and even more risky for these old structures that try to maintain themselves right
okay very good so back back to Europe Michael you go for you are next you should hear me now um my question is different from the other ones because I always like the product owner um if you have a team levels from and you have a product owner that seriously failed that is he didn’t have a prioritize backlog it was not ready then the outcome of the whole team would be well pretty much lower because of him so but in a in a scale situation what would the crucial part to be in that case would it be the product ownership again would it be somewhere else and it could probably be different on the short term and the long term as it is on a team level where I could see a different outcome along the term than short term well I understand your comment if you have a bad product under the team will fail yeah but what what would the situation be on the scaled let’s see what would be the most crucial yeah we have a cheap product on it that doesn’t know what she is doing and the whole company’s going to fail right so who’s responsible for fixing that the CEO right yeah so at scrum Inc we have multiple business units and we booted up a new business unit this past year for online training we already had online training but we wanted to significantly focus it and expand it we added a product owner it wasn’t working Within within within several within three months I think the executive action team fired him and we got a second product owner who was much better but he was badly behaved he wasn’t treating people right so this past month he was fired summarily by the CEO he actually the CEO said he actually didn’t fire him actually the executive action team had already decided to fire him but the CEO and called the company meeting and said this second product owner has been fired today because of the way he was treating people he wasn’t living the scrum values and we’re not going to tolerate that all right so agile leadership means they actually lead they have a vision they know where they’re going and they don’t tolerate the wrong people in the wrong position particularly products they are the most critical for business success now I used to spend time almost every month in Denmark for years so I’m very familiar with the you know ad the agile movement really got started in Denmark Sweden the Scandinavian companies in terms of Europe expansion of the agile framework so well one of the things I noticed about the Danes is they like to work by committee and they don’t like anybody to be able to make a decision which the product owner has to make so every culture is different but the Danish culture has the problem that they won’t give the product owner the responsibility for ordering that backlog for everyone following that backlog and then the product owners held accountable for success so you know I think I want to add that on to the answer to the question because in your culture you have to get a person that is competent that can actually make the decision with the input of other people but at the end of the day that one person makes the decision that’s the product owner and the other people follow that decision and if the product owner fails then that product owner is held accountable for that failure otherwise things don’t work if you build stuff by a committee instead of a horse you get a camel right thank you so much for your time today Jeff um so my question is that in my opinion uh the Sprint review has been the most challenging of the scrum events to do in a successful way and I think partly that is it’s hard to get time from the key stakeholders often and it isn’t often collaborative it tends to fall into more that demo than the collaboration um so my question is what have you done in the past to try to ensure that you have a more successful and sort of fully robust Sprint review well I remember uh she reminds me I was in Ireland and around 1990 this was before the first scrum team was formed but they brought me in because Guinness Pete Aviation who no longer exists so I could talk about them uh turned into Ryanair but back then it was the largest aircraft leasing company in the world and they had hired I think they had when they brought me in 67 Consultants topping their field from everywhere in the world to uh to take their whole I.T or the whole not just their I.T but the whole way they worked which was largely driven by I.T automation uh into the future and the mission of the CEO in every Sprint review was like all singing and dancing we have to wow the people and he would not tolerate any boring Sprint reviews as a result uh Guinness people waited ran into trouble uh in the uh in the early 90s it was a cutback in aviation worldwide so the leasing companies got into trouble and they had to cut back and they cut all the way back to a team which I led that was building a a system they would buy 747s by the Dozen so at every 747 had to be outfitted and when it hit the assembly line there were a hundred different vendors that had to come in with the seats the radios the kitchen and they had to come in at the right time and our system managed all the contracts and created a visualization on the assembly line of these 747s moving the line and it had some AI in it managing the contracts and it was It was a unbelievably cool system to the end users so the reason we survived with everything was else was cut back was the users were actually fantastically interested in in this system and every Sprint review they saw new features that just blew them away and uh at the end of the day they actually had to restructure the company because the business turned around and they brought in a senior vice president from uh I think from Accenture who came in and he said and he met with he said Jeff I have to fire your whole team but we the business will not let this application go uh so we have to have a team that actually will maintain this in the future and he said this this project is one of the best projects we’ve ever seen so but even so even though we’re going to fire you we’re going to have a really huge party one of the best Irish pubs and celebrate uh the success of this project so anyway that’s a long story to say if your scrum reviews are boring nobody’s going to come all right that’s a fair point it’s all about the show right you have to put a good show in there okay so now we go back to Europe where at least as much as the Brits don’t like to say they’re in Europe so Joey and you go next what’s the a additional value that you were torn between or where you set with the openness courage respect [ __ ] came from the I think it was chapter seven and the first scrum book that was written by Ken schwaber and Mike Beetle I actually did some contribution but Ken was observing a company where I was Chief technology officer called patient keeper and he was trying to figure out why this firm work so well because it was one of the still still one of the fastest sets of teams I’ve ever seen these guys could install and and a new hospital system in major hospitals uh multiple times a Sprint I’ve never seen anybody be able to do that I I don’t even think Google can do it but they would do it every month for years at least for brand new hospitals like Mass General and Boston are or or Johns Hopkins one of the biggest hospitals in the United States and Ken wanted to know why did that work and he said it’s really because he thought because of the Valiant system that was set up and then he came he came up with the five values in that book and then as we went through scrum guide iterations with about the fifth iteration it was from God where a lot of the scrum Community had prioritized getting the values into this from God and so then they went into the scrum guide uh exactly as they were in the book uh now the way I think of them it really the values are all about generating uh better performance of teams and organizations because one of the things about people in the organization sometimes developers have trouble understanding this uh they’re only going to be happy they’re only going to be paid they’re only going to be promoted if the organization is successful so to make the organization successful the first thing you need to have is an open information because if you don’t have open and clear information people will make the wrong decisions and that will undermine the value of the organization okay so to get all the data on the table you people will not speak up first of all you have to have everybody able to speak and people will not speak up unless you respect them and you listen to them and you treat them as equals a good example of this was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Boston we were asked to come down and help with surgery because the speed of surgery and the number of surgeries they can do in a day in a hospital is dependent on how fast you can clean the room and set it up for the next surgery and for decades it’s it’s taken them an hour or more to turn that room around and no matter what they tried to do they couldn’t shorten it so they brought us in to implement scrum we implemented scrub at scale uh for initially we started small with three surgery units and the scrum team was the chief surgeon uh you know the head nurse it was a scrum Master uh the the other staff that was assisting with the surgery and the cleaning people that were training around the world and the first thing we noticed is the head surgeon is treating the cleaning people like dirt right no respect and we told the chief surgeon you are never going to shorten the turnaround time unless the cleaning people figure out what to do and you support them so in this from meetings you had me to treat them as equal and they need to speak as much as you do and once he understood that within two weeks we cut the turnaround time to 30 minutes surgery is half of the business of a hospital and Brigham and Women’s is a seven billion dollar operation and by cutting it in half we increase surgery by 20 that’s 700 million dollars direct to the bottom line along with reduced cost for surgery it’s an unbelievable amount of free money right so these things have huge implications and it requires the chief surgeon to treat the lowest person cleaning the room as a real person who is an equal in making that surgery successful okay so respect to get the data on the table though it needs more than respect the the people need to have the courage to speak up you know I can’t tell you how many scrum Masters uh and even more senior people have told me you know Jeff if I if I tell the truth I could get fired and then they have to make a decision are you just going to be another ineffective person I I found that in the U.S military yeah a general said to me you know I said I know scrum can solve your problem and here’s how it could solve it and the general said you’re right and I said well why don’t you implement scrub at scale and she said I’d have to fire most of my Commanders and I said well you need to decide whether you’re just going to be an administrator filling a seat you know making no waves trying to get promoted in three years when you’re gone or you’re actually going to be a leader and do what generals are born to do you have to decide so courage comes in many ways both at the top and at the at the at the team level and for the cleaners in the hospital so once you get that openness respect and courage things come into Focus and it becomes clear to everybody what needs to be done next and when you have that focus and then everybody agrees then you get the commitment and once you get real commitment uh there’s a great uh poem by our mountain climber about commitment once you commit amazing things happen the Universe moves to try to assist you in totally unexpected waves and you achieve fantastic things that you thought were impossible so you’re asking me what I would add to that there might be something but that’s a that’s such a good set all by itself uh I think the things that really need to be put around that or the things that create the right behaviors so that people don’t block those values and uh as I mentioned earlier at scrum we fire people who violate the values we don’t we don’t tolerate um you know if it’s bad performance we’ll try to work with a person but if it’s a a really bad violation of values they’re gone but we can’t tolerate that this was part one of the interview with Dr Jeff Sutherland I hope you guys liked it I certainly did was a great episode and guys just make sure you hit the Subscribe button on whatever platform you use to follow a podcast to not miss the second part of this very exciting interview and of course many more episodes with q and me that will follow afterwards take care