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Episode 05  The Last Day of the Sprint

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(HINWEIS: KANN UnBEABSICHTIGT KONFUSE, UNGENAU UND/ODER lUSTIGE TRANSKRIPTIONSFEHLER ENTHALTEN)

“Q”
Welcome to the scrum sessions podcast from Dallas, Texas. I am que always here with my friend Gereon in Berlin.

Gereon Hermkes
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show.

“Q”
Good. So carry on. I had a rough week, you kind of look tired to be honest. What’s when I do look guy, I do look down, you know, I normally don’t work as a as a team culture, I normally work as an enterprise coach. But later I have been helping out because we don’t have enough coaches and all that stuff. And I have a few teams I’m coaching. And as you can imagine, Tuesday was the last day of the sprint. And then that’s when things get really bad. And that’s why I’m tired too, because I had to kind of act like the helpline for a bunch of different teams. Weird, but it happens.

Gereon Hermkes
And so is it. What’s behind it? Is it that it’s too many teams? Is it because it’s the end of the sprint? What’s going on there?

“Q”
Now, actually, if it there’s no such thing as too many teams, as long as the teams, as long as the teams get their act together, right? Oh, which takes time, people teams and all those integrations and etc. They take time, people mature at different rates. And of course, it’s there’s multiple people in our team, the maturity in in adopting Scrum and in following the process, and, and adapting to the framework and its utter extent. But the problem is, I think a lot of times, teams do, voluntarily or not, they do this thing to themselves. And all these teams, they had one thing in common, the last day of the sprint was like a nightmare, because there’s too much stuff to do. And they’re under the gun to finish that stuff. Because the sprint review, it’s coming. And then they have to plan for the next sprint and all that stuff. And I had lots of conversations. And that’s why I’m tired, because I have to actually help them get stuff out. The first thing I noticed is, of course, this is the last day of the sprint. They were still finalizing stuff. The product owner didn’t see the work yet, therefore is not really done. Right? product owner didn’t didn’t see it. And they’re pretty much an hour away from doing a sprint review. So you asked me, how did that happened? Well, that’s what it took me two days to figure it out. Right? First thing I noticed this, all the teams, invariably, they like to bring this huge pieces of stuff. I know, I’m not even called them user stories, because that data product backlog items, they can be user stories, they can be spikes, they can be bugs, it can be anything, but they love to bring this big 18 Wheeler kind of stuff to the sprint. And the problem is is not even that they bring one big 18 Wheeler, the problem is they bring a bunch of 18 wheelers into the sprint. And you know where this is going right? Big things have a high probability of not getting done really quick. On top of that, there is the risk of having multiple big things, big things that you have to channel through the process. And you will get them done. And they can be used and people can start using it and providing feedback and all the stuff that we all know. So first problem, I noticed is the big thing. Instead of bringing a small item, they bring a big one. So obviously wisdom.

Gereon Hermkes
Yeah, can I jump in here? Because that’s so funny. Because, you know, for example, if you teach scrum to beginners, this is always an issue, right? They always ask, Well, why do I need to slice down the user stories, the product backlog items, right? And it’s there’s always like a little bit of a lack of understanding and like questioning, is it even worth it? Right? And you know, my answer is always yes, it’s worth it. Because what happens if you don’t do it? You’re gonna like you said the 18 Wheeler, right? And I always have this image of, you know, this South American jungle snake this huge one, like a boa constrictor, or something like that. And it’s eating a wild boar, right? And you see this cartoon image of the, of the snake on the ground and then you see the silhouette of the wild boar right? Because you cannot do anything with it. It’s just too big. And the snake what is it going to do? It’s going to hide somewhere for probably two weeks and try to digest that that wild boar right? And as a scrum team, you cannot do that you’re just biting off more than you You can actually chew right the 18 Wheeler, as you were saying, and so yes, of course, if you’re in a refinement, if you’re supposed to slice down your PBIS, that’s gonna take a lot of not a lot of a little bit of energy, right? So you’re going to have to invest in that it’s going to take some more time and refinement. But the question is always what happens if you don’t do it. And then at the end of the sprint, you run into exactly the problem you’re describing, instead of like, let’s say, splitting up this 18 Wheeler into 18, smaller product backlog items, right, you might have already finished 16 of them and have two small ones left. And even if you don’t make them, it’s not a big deal. But you have 118 Wheeler in there. You’re almost begging for a lot of stress, a lot of problems at the end of the sprint, and you might not have anything ready, right? And then you’re going into the rear and you’ll say, sorry, guys, we didn’t quite finish it yet. But it’s like 87.9%. Done. Right. And that’s, that’s sorry, but that’s nothing. That’s just

“Q”
fine. There there is there is that there is that there is the thing that they don’t seem to spend enough time refining and stuff. And I mentioned to them, I actually had a team last year. And I was doing a gimble walk under refinement just sitting there. Paying attention, right. So they spent one day it was a Thursday, they spent 56 minutes discussing one item, and Q How do you possibly know that they spent 56 minutes because it was actually tiny. And they couldn’t finish anything? Okay, let’s reconvene on Monday on Monday. They went back to the same item. And the um, their timing again. 66 minutes. So 53 plus 66? Well, it’s two hours. Okay, let’s be serious. There’s two hours they spent in one item. And it didn’t go anywhere. So I finally said, Okay, that’s it. They were calling a third meeting and said, Okay, fine, go do it. I called the product owner called the scrum master and said, Guys, we need to talk. I don’t know about you guys. But here’s what I’m seeing. There’s almost nothing ready. State. There’s been already two hours on this thing. And you guys keep going. So I’m going to do something that technically I shouldn’t do as a coach, but I’m going to lay down the law. This is what you guys are going to do. Okay, I’m gonna try this tomorrow on Tuesday, five minute discussion. Scrum Master. Can we vote? No, we’re not ready. Okay, another five Scrum Master, can we vote? No, we’re not ready. Okay, you know what, stop this item. We’ll figure it out with this next. Okay. Let’s bring the next one. Let’s bring the next one. And another thing I did is as soon as you they do the voting, they size the stuff. Scrum Master goes to the definition of radian Check, check, check, check, check, check. Right there. Right there. Before we even did the checks. They went from two hours discussing one item to doing five in one hour. And then is the kicker, they found out that every time they run through the definition already, oh, we forgot to this thing. I could swear we talked about that. To make a long story short, we did this for a couple of weeks. Now they’re doing about six an hour. And they were spending two hours in one item. But it was studying into a design meeting it was turning out well I think this way is better than you then that way. And so okay, we get to those Okay, fine. Put that on hold, set up a meeting to discuss that stuff. And let’s go to the next one to the next one to the next one. Because the whole point of the refinement is to create flow is to have stuff ready, so we can grab it. But just by breaking up the items, it’s not going to resolve their last day of the sprint?

Gereon Hermkes
Well, I think it certainly helps, right? Because first of all, you give them the opportunity to finish something yet like to have the flag going right? If you don’t break up stuff, if you don’t slice it up, you’re not even going to get the chance. And I personally, as you know, coming from the Scrum Master Site, I actually kind of needed right I want to assure the team forward, right, I want to make sure that the tickets are flowing. And so I need those little items and so I can say okay, guys, we’ve already spent 50% of the sprint Shouldn’t we like start to finish some of this stuff first, right let’s let’s look at one of the ones that is almost done. Can we move it over the finish line and kind of this is not only about actually getting it done, which is very important but also instilling this mindset right? So if I have let’s say we do three weeks sprints and have just one large item, I’m exaggerating, but you’ll get what I’m trying to say in a minute, is, you know, like, how often do we get the chance to actually nudge them forward right to to give them that experience to, to make sure they they get that feeling of moving over the done line, right? If I just had once, that’s not enough, every three weeks, I need those little moments where I can praise them for getting it done for making sure Okay, guys, do you see now now that we finished it, especially if we can already deployed, we can already save some money, we can already make more money, we can already profit from the new features that or capabilities that we have finished here. And so it’s all about moving across the finish line, because that’s what generates value, right? Everything up to that line is, I don’t want to say waste because it’s not waste. But it’s not there yet. It’s not creating the value that we actually intend to receive. And so it’s not enough, but it’s very important, not only for actually physically enabling them to digest this thing, but also for me as a scrum master to keep the team to nudge them on that path to flow.

“Q”
Yeah, there is even one more thing, that’s a great point that you mentioned is there is the psychological, that perception thing, right? Because if you bring the big 18 Wheeler, with lots of packages in there, and all that stuff, and you treat as a single package, there is another thing, every day, you go to the daily scrum, and people gonna say, Oh, I’m still working on this. And then tomorrow, I’m still working on this. And then tomorrow, I’m still working on this. So five days into the sprint, and I’m still working on this. And at that point, I don’t know why it went five days. And nobody asked why you’re still working on this. But that’s, that’s another question. Right? But the point is perception. When you work in the smaller things, odds are, there is one thing that gets done every day. And that I didn’t even meet definition of done done, but done to the point that you can show to the product owner, you know, and the things are moving, things are moving. And product owners are always busy. I remember when I was one, I mean, you are always running 27 different directions, right? So if somebody comes with something really, really small, you can take a look and say yeah, that’s what I want seems to be working great. Yeah, check. No, it yeah, check your order. And then if you wait to the last day of the sprint, when you have all these 18 wheelers lined up, and the product owners trying to prepare all this stuff for the sprint review and say, Hey, can you take a look at the stuff before, we have 15 minutes until the review should be an off right. So they they do this things to themselves. And it’s really funny that people keep doing this. He kept doing this. And I’m not going to get into the discussion that the scrum master should act a lot earlier. But you also have the problem that SCRUM masters are Greenhorns, sometimes the scrum master and the product owner Greenhorns, the whole team is basically free. And who is checking, right? I mean, they don’t have experience.

Gereon Hermkes
Yeah. And I think you’re pointing out something that a lot of team members aren’t quite aware of, right? Because you’re really putting your product owner on the spot in that situation, right? Especially if you have the review as it as it’s supposed to be right with stakeholders or customers there, right? And if you come up to the product owner, who’s already super nervous, because he has to get up in front of an audience in a bid, right? And she’s nervous, because this, this one, or these few large items aren’t even finished yet, right? And then, like 50 minutes, 45 minutes, even two hours before you come in and say, Here, it’s finished now, right? And she has to take a look at first of all, she might not have the time or the bandwidth in that moment. And also, what if she’s not quite happy with something, right? You’re taking away the liberty from her to actually reject this stuff? Or have to have some rework done, right? And this is actually super unfair if you’ve ever been in that situation, because you’re like, Okay, so what’s my choice? Now, I can either reject it, and off the few very few things we pulled in the sprint, right? We’re not getting it done. So I’m gonna have to show that in the review, right? Or I can accept it with a quality that normally I wouldn’t have accepted if I had more time to, you know, like, think about it, and maybe send it back for some minor revisions. And this is actually very unfair towards the product owner in my mind.

“Q”
It is, it’s unfair for the whole team, right? It’s a team sport thing yet, but you are overloading the product owners stuff the day that the product owner has the least amount of time to do stuff. And then the team gets frustrated. Well, you know, the product origin look at that stuff and we have the review coming. Do you know if the product owner is going to approve this? Do we demo this or not? So it creates a lot of things that people have to understand that’s again, is that team sport. One thing doesn’t fall in place an order 20 dominoes get messed up right and there goes your your beautiful one domino fall a thing just, it’s going in all the directions that you don’t want to go. But one of the funny things is, besides that, besides the big 18 Wheeler thing, which we can fix, we’ll fix. Just about two weeks ago, I was again, doing another gimbal walk. And for people not familiar with the term, term gimbal walk, it’s in Japanese gamba is the place where the work is being done. Sometimes it’s translated to the factory floor, sometimes it’s translated as a shot, but it’s the place where work is being done. Nowadays, where remote etc. So the game was more a virtual concept than anything. But I was there observing. And I see this, somebody in the team came and said, I’m done with my work. If you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna go grab another card. And nobody said anything. And I look at the board. And there’s a lot of stuff in the board that there are multiple things that need to happen with those things until they can be called done, even including the product owner looking at it. But there are multiple things that need to be done to get to done state. And here’s this person, going basically to go grab a new work. And don’t get me wrong. I’m all for putting in more work inside the sprint. Great, yeah, we’re gonna do some extra stuff. Great, right? Teams that finish early, accelerate faster. Here’s one problem. It says teams that finish early, accelerate faster, not one person in the team that finishes early doesn’t accelerate anything faster. So classical example of local optimization. What is best for me? I don’t really care. That’s another five people in the team and they’re swamped. I’m done with my work. So what do you see this? There is the silo mentality. It it’s me, me, me, me. There is the local optimization again, which falls back in the silo mentality, me, me, me, me. And, again, a lot of these people are greenhorns. And I called the scrum master. And they said, Ian, we need to talk about this stuff, because this is what’s happening in etcetera, you should the other person to first see if they can help the team doing other stuff. And then the scrum master turns to me and said, but cue, I did that already. And I said, Wait a minute, when did you do that one of those days or not? There, it was the same thing. And I asked a can you help the other people on the team? And the same person said, Well, you know, what, I don’t know how to do their stuff. And not I have any interest in doing their stuff. Then the thing gets even uglier, right? Because it’s the silo mentality, the local optimization, and the really bad attitude that, hey, I’m not going to learn anything. I have no use for anybody other than the stuff that I do.

Gereon Hermkes
So yeah, and you know, like, one part of it is sometimes cherry picking, right? People are actually good teammates, they are real team. And the person just doesn’t care about the topics, right. And maybe something is in the product backlog, that’s super enticing. And I totally get that, right. But you still as a scrum master, you have to make sure to finish the stuff that’s on the board. And if there’s, you know, if there’s already a couple of people on each of the items, let’s say there are two items left, right, and one is being swarmed by two people, and one is being from as one by three people. And if one person left, and it really doesn’t add any value, of course, I’m going to be relaxed about it, right? Because I’m seeing that the team is taking care of it. And if one person wants to go ahead, I’m actually okay with it. But, you know, apart from the cherry picking, I was thinking like, just now, the one time I really had a lot of trouble with the last day because I actually find the last day to be very invigorating, right? It’s always stressful, but it like focuses your your energies and your attention because you now need to get something done right? No matter what’s been going on. So far in the sprint, you need to get stuff ready for the review. And this is one of the mechanisms at work, right. But in the one team that it was really painful every single time what was behind it, it was still this conception of I have my technical role. I’m a tester I’m a developer, I’m this and that nobody was T shaped right? They didn’t even have the understanding and what happened. Well, at the beginning of the sprint, you know, maybe the design was done. So typical waterfall inside of the sprint right? So designed for the first one two days, then development and then the test is at the very end. And this is where it gets really, really painful because the testers don’t have enough to do in the beginning. And then at the end of the sprint, waterfall inside of a sprint, right, they are getting all this stuff. And if there’s any problem, they need to send it back to the developers time is already running out, they have to do overtime in the evenings. And you’re just setting yourself up to fail, right? And so especially in teams that are not as mature, I think this is one of the big issues when people come in with their fixed roll mentality and say, I’m a tester I’m this, I’m that, right? And in Scrum, frankly, we don’t care about it. Like you said, it’s a team sport. And we care about moving the items. And, you know, I often am swarming on stuff. I was just swarming yesterday with two very smart developers, right. And they were talking about the database table. They were trying to solve something I didn’t understand anything. Last time I was doing anything was 20 years ago in university, right? I didn’t understand anything, but it was still present, to answer the couple of questions that they had and to learn some stuff, because our intention was to get this last item over the finish line, and not missing. Oh, I’m a business guy. I’m so clever. I’ve done my job. You guys figure it out, right? Because that’s not the mentality of Scrum, our mentality is to do it as a team. And if they had to, you know, work in the evening to get this done, of course, I’d be there, I would never get the idea to not be there with them if they’re suffering, right. It’s our team effort. And so we did it together. And this is the way it’s supposed to be done.

“Q”
Yep, I know. And the interesting thing about this is, when you suggest things like swarming, I get that swarming the first time you do it. It’s not the easiest thing. But you can start with Barry, and then people say, but Q. I’m not going to spend the whole day with another person said, Well, nobody said you have to do pairing for the whole day or even swarming for the whole day. You do when you need. But I think people tend to adopt this all or nothing thing. If you tell them to swarm the swarm on everything, it doesn’t matter if, oh, you know, we have, we have to change the label, when in something on a web page takes five minutes, right? No, but how can we swarm on that I see stuff like this. Or if you don’t say anything about swarming, each one of them picks up an item. And then you know what happens? Right? Somebody gets sick, somebody slows down because of something. And then stuff is impeded, and all that stuff. So I don’t know what happens that people tend to have this all or nothing mentality, instead of taking every technique, every every opportunity, etc. As a way to use different things that you learn different things that are in your experience and expertise, and try to see what fits better for the place, right? As much as I think that duct tapes pretty much solves everything, right? I mean, if you have a pair of pliers, I screwdriver and duct tape, you can do a lot of stuff. Yeah, I mean, you can use the screwdriver as a peeker and use the and use the pliers as a hammer. But it doesn’t quite work. If it’s a life or death situation, I get it. But it’s the same thing. You cannot swarm on everything. You cannot pair on everything. But you also cannot work alone all the time. And when it comes to the G shaping, I always tell them listen, get real, you have one skill. Okay, you’re great at that, I get it, you’re great. You’re the best at it. But you have one skill. So first of all, you can’t help anybody because you have one skill. Second of all, let’s talk about this considering that probably today they’re laying off half a tweeter. Let’s think about this, when there is a situation that we have to unfortunately lay off people am I gonna lay off the person who has one skill or the person who has multiple skills. Even if the skills are not totally in depth, you have three skills, but they’re not in that summer brother. You’re more valuable to me, to the team and to yourself when you have multiple skills. So when people get this attitude, well, I’m good at this. And that’s it. Okay, fixed mindset. There’s no growth mindset in there. And as much as I hate buzzwords like growth mindset, fixed mindset, it explains that you can either something as an use something as an opportunity, or you can complain about all the time and say, Hey, I’m gonna go get another card, because that’s all I can do. In the meantime, the rest of the team is done, you have to get stuff done.

Gereon Hermkes
So if we zoom out again, so the issue was, you know, last day of the sprint is it’s invigorating, but at the same time can be really frustrating. And we said so if you’re in that situation, the first thing to look at are you slicing your items down enough, right because if you do I have in the 18 Wheeler, it’s probably going to clog up the system. And the second one was take a look at, you know, the the role understanding is everybody just, you know, like focusing on their old traditional role or are they actually T shaped or trying to get T shaped right? Are they helping each other even? You know, me yesterday? I didn’t really help them all that much. But you know, at least trying to do it. Is there anything else that we should think of, to mitigate that last day stress? Or is that about it?

“Q”
No, it was more items. Try to become T shaped. As soon as you can, right? You’re not going to it’s not that you go there and flip a switch, right? You’re the one is think about pairing to start with them swarming. swarming, you can go one item, or maybe two items maximum, invest a lot of time refinement, right, because a lot of these things can be solved in refinement, that it’s for another time. But the fast the more is timing, refining, the less time in planning, the less time getting stuck in a sprint. I think 1/3 One thing that we normally don’t mention is when you are planning, which can be very quick. Try to have an initial discussion how we are going to attack the stuff on the sprint backlog. Try to create a a plan of attack, hey, let’s go do this one first. So that one first and it says doesn’t need to be an elaborate discussion. But at least is better than just getting the first day of the sprinters say where do we start? Actually, because you may actually spend half a day trying to figure out where to start if you didn’t do

Gereon Hermkes
so actually, I was just thinking the last point I wanted to make is the Scrum Masters, please make sure there’s flow right? Always not nudge people don’t put them under pressure. Don’t let them all of this stuff. No. But try to nudge everything along. Right. You’re the master of flow, you’re supposed to make everything work. And I think that’s a very good incident, right? Instance, right? So of course, the team can like self organize around this stuff and can prioritize inside of the sprint. But if you see the tendency that you know, they’re not getting off to a quick start, right, so then maybe they go to lunch after sprint planning and then I’ll yell at them, you know, slowly start know, give some energy into it ask okay, what are we going to work on first right to to get things moving, because this is like part of your job description, the psychological aspect of getting people out of their seats, getting them to move and to get the starter flow started.

“Q”
Absolutely. Couldn’t have said it better myself. So I hope you guys take some of those steps. You know, we understand that for some people, what we said may not be big news. But for a lot of people, it is something that you’re learning, right? We all mature at different, different speeds, right? We all learn a different pace. There’s always the risk of being a green horn, scrum master or a Green Hornet product owner. And like I said, I have teams that everybody is getting more. So this tips are really good. And even if you’ve been doing this for a while, remember there is all this stuff that you forget after a while when you didn’t come into that situation before. So feel free to get in contact to Gary on myself. We’re always looking for suggestions. We’re always looking for feedback. And from Dallas. I’m going to close Episode Five Garryowen as always you have the last word.

Gereon Hermkes
So thanks everyone for listening and watching to us. Hopefully we’ll see at episode six. And have a great time until then, bye bye.