For Organizations and Team Members who are new to Agile and Scrum, sometimes it’s easier to explain how a Scrum concept works in relatable, real-life ways. This also fits right into the mindset that you need to BE Agile, not only DO Agile.
Here are some real-life analogies that make the Scrum framework easier to understand.
trying to do too much in a sprint?
The Overflowing Glass
A timeboxed Sprint is like a glass—the Team’s capacity is the volume that the glass can hold, and the liquid is the amount of work. If you pour more water into the glass than the glass can hold, then the water will overspill and create a mess. If the Team is pushed to do more in a Sprint than there’s time for, you’ll end up with a mess of unfinished work.
The solution: Know how much the Team can complete in the Sprint and prioritize accordingly.
Unrefined requirements?
Stew versus Stew
Let’s say that you would like to have a nice stew for a dinner party. You are looking for a cozy home-cooked meal that you know that your guests will love. However, you don’t have time for shopping and cooking, so you ask your family members to get the meal ready. They happily agree, excited to try a new recipe. The only problem is that you never communicated with them what kind of stew you’d like cooked.
You entice your guests with promises of a nice classic American stew with all the trimmings (stewed meat, carrots, potatoes, and wonderful, buttery biscuits). At the same time, your family members are proud to show off their cooking skills with a beautiful creamed curry stew complete with coconut highlights. When dinner is served, everyone is disappointed. The cook does not receive the compliments they were expecting, you have made promises that are not accurate, and your guests are not getting that home-cooked American stew their taste buds were salivating for.
The Solution: Talk with your Team regularly to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Addicted to reporting?
Just Quit
Google Sheets, Excel, Documents, PowerPoint slides addiction? You are not alone in this. Many of us have been using these tools for reporting for most of our professional lives. However, different types of documents pile up, causing frustation. Besides, was that document ever updated? Do you have the time to create another document? There’s a better way, but it takes a mindset shift.
Almost all projects these days are managed with some sort of tool, whether it is a Jira board, Azure DevOps, Trello, Asana, etc. In almost every instance, you can cut out that extra documentation and use your Team’s chosen tool for real-time reporting.
This excessive documentation is like quitting a bad habit. Imagine that you are a smoker, and you understand that smoking is unhealthy and that you should quit, but it is painful to go through withdrawals. The same holds true for an excessive documentation habit. It will require a withdrawal from the bad habit and your dedication to learning the tool. But after learning the tool and quitting excessive documentation, you will have a fresh and real-time reporting system where all inputs come from one source!
The Solution: Learn the tool and ensure the Team updates in real time.
Will you just work on this quick effort, please?
Destination Wedding
Have you ever been in a situation where your Team commits to a Sprint, but then someone from Leadership drops by and asks them to help them out really quick on this one little thing. There are many things wrong with this. Context switching, Sprint efforts, lack of understanding of how much new effort it will take, the Team losing its velocity, the Team Members not being able to account for each other’s work, potential budget concerns, black matter or unaccounted work, jeopardizing the sprint goal- the list goes on. The effects of your Team being pulled away from their current work is significant.
For this analogy, imagine that there is a group leaving a city to drive to a destination wedding in another state. They all need to take separate cars but have a specific plan they promise to adhere to. They leave at the same time, promising to drive alongside each other until they get to their destination. Naturally, the wedding cannot be delayed and there are a lot of activities they are expected to do as soon as they get there.
A family member asks one of the drivers to drive just a bit out of the way to a town that the group had not planned on stopping in. The driver feels guilty about saying no to their family, so they agree to do it. The results are significant.
The group realizes that they have lost a car and slows down. They are reliant on that driver to help them get where they need to go for the wedding. The driver doing the favor soon realizes there is road construction or the town is further away than they realized. Instead of focusing on wedding preparation thoughts, they feel frazzled and late. If they drive a few extra hours a day, they can still catch up to the group, but they will be tired and worn out. The end result is the entire group is weary, frustrated with each other, and potentially late to the wedding. The worst case is that they arrive late, are rushed, and do not have time to get ready for the wedding. Quality suffers, morale suffers, and their obligations may not even be met.
The Solution: Ensure that all work is determined in sprint planning and any extra work goes into a user story to be prioritized. If there are a lot of directional changes, then shorten the Sprints to match the changing requirements.
