Check your SCRUM team's health with Self-Assessment and act on it.

Have you ever considered how well your team (or the team you know ) is following the SCRUM guidelines ?

"As a Scrum Master or Agile Coach, you will always be confronted with new teams, maybe even requested to steer the wheel in the right direction for teams that are struggling with agile ... Then again, how do you do that ?"

There are probably many ways to do it, for myself, I have followed the "Improvement Kata" Lean principle used by Toyota, there are 4 major steps:

- Understand direction /or vision

- Grasp current situation

- Define the next target condition

- Move toward that target condition iteratively, which uncovers obstacles that need to be worked on.

Understand direction

This usually should be the vision/or direction of the customer ...

i.e "He wants the team to adopt agile principles" , "he wants the agile coach to put the team on the "right" tracks" ...

Grasp Current Situation

How to assess the current team SCRUM practices versus the SCRUM "recommendations" ?

There are probably many ways to get this, I will only choose two to compare them .

1. Spent some time as an "Observer" and write down everything that may help you "check" the team level, from good practices to bias that needs to be corrected. This is clearly a good way, but it takes a lot of time if you want to be present for all SCRUM ceremonies (Daily, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective...)

2. Schedule a 1 hour meeting with all SCRUM team members (Developers, SM, PO) and propose a self-assessment exercise in the form of a checklist.

Personally I recommend the second way, it is quicker, and it follow some Agile Principles (Transparency, Collaboration ...and this feel more human compared to someone judging from the side line)

I have found a pretty nice checklist which can be used either in PDF or with an Excel file with some graphs if you are fond of them.

This PDF checklist has been done by Henrik Kniberg and can be found here, the Excel version is here.

Usually I introduce the subject as "A way to continuous improvement", let us check with transparency how we are currently on the SCRUM principles, identify our pain points, and work on them to get better for next time!"

This checklist is not about identifying people's weakness , it is about identifying what is lacking in our current way of working.

Define the next target condition

After your checklist is done, you normally should have a clear view on what should be worked on, set with the team a mid to long term goal.

Move toward that target condition iteratively, which uncovers obstacles that need to be worked on.

Check with the team what are the current pain points that need to be resolved ASAP, set the next goal for the team. i.e "For next Sprint, we should have a clearer Sprint Goal !" or "We should have a Definition of Done and a Definition of Ready for next Week".

Here you go ! Continuous improvement it is.

This exercise should be done from time to time to assess the team's progress towards your Mid-Long term goal. I usually do it within the time associated to the Retrospective, with experienced team it should go quite fast.

Tags: #Agile #Scrum #SelfAssessment #Coaching #TeamHealth