Simon Baker's latest blog entry reminded me of something I've been thinking during some of my consulting gigs with organizations that are adopting Scrum but are relatively new to it.
To get directly to the point, I've got beef with the part of Simon's posting where he describes the three questions answered by every team member on the Scrum meeting:
Each team member answers 3 questions
In turn, each team member answers the following 3 questions:
- What have you done since yesterday's meeting?
- What are you going to get done today?
- What obstacles do you need to be removed?
It's not that there would be errors as such or that I would add a question. Nothing like that. Simon does a great job describing the Scrum meeting as it is described everywhere on the net and in the literature.
My beef is with the wording used everywhere on the net and in the literature.
You see, what I've found is that people are used to reporting progress to the project manager. (Can you believe that! We do something for a few decades and suddenly it's difficult to get out of the habit?) All sarcasm aside, I think the way we talk about "answering three questions" contributes to the difficulty of getting people away from reporting progress to the Scrum Master (who almost unanimously is the same guy who used to be the project manager before adopting Scrum).
"Three questions" is probably the easiest way to communicate what you're supposed to do. After all, you're asking yourself--and answering--three questions. The downside is that it doesn't seem to be the most effective way of communicating what you're supposed to do. Apparently words like "answer" and "question" tend to be associated with ideas closer to being interrogated rather than communicating information.
I can't help but think that some of the teams I've met on my journeys would've had an easier time if the whole three questions thing would've been represented using slightly different words. We all know what happened with Royce's waterfall paper. People scanned through the article, saw the waterfall picture, and failed to read the rest of the paper where Mr. Royce explained that the model described by the pretty picture would only work for the most trivial of problems. I'm afraid the same has happened in many places with Scrum's three questions--people take the bullet list and fail to pick up the why and to whom.
After all this whining, I guess it is only fair for me to make at least some kind of an attempt at improving upon the status quo. Behold, my suggestion for a replacement description of Scrum's three questions:
Each team member updates his peers:
In turn, each team member provides his peers with 3 pieces of information:
- Things I have done since yesterday's meeting
- Things I am going to get done today
- Obstacles that I need someone to remove
What do you think? Am I making a nothing into a something? Should I tell Ken to correct this horrible mistake with a new edition of the Scrum bible? Could you care less?
Hi Simon,
I did see you explaining the intent of the situation versus "reporting to the Scrum Master" and I applaude you for remembering to bring that up.
I simply failed to communicate my own intent behind my words accurately enough.
Sorry about that.
Bartek, it's not the content of the questions that's important. It's the fact that one describes how (answer questions) and the other describes the what (information which needs to be communicated).
It's the same problem that Scrum's self-organization tackles. It's better to give the team a goal and let them figure out the way to reach that goal rather than command the team to do X, Y, and Z with the hidden agenda of achieving an implicit goal.
When you're asked a question, you act the way your brain is wired to do: answer the question to the one who posed the question.
In the case of a Scrum meeting, nobody is (hopefully) asking the questions from team members but the question is still there--people have formed an idea of the three questions and that idea is carved into one's brain cells in the form of "enter room, stand next to the wall, answer the three questions when it's your turn." Without anyone explicitly asking the questions, it is the former project manager, now the Scrum Master, who is the most natural recipient of the answers to these questions. That is, if you've learned about the Scrum meeting by reading a description where it says you answer questions.
If you'd read a description of the Scrum meeting where it said you're supposed to let your team members know what you did yesterday, what you're going to do today, and what impediments are standing in your way, the natural recipient for your "answers" would be other team members.
Did that make my intent any clearer?
It's interesting how the choice of words can subtly influence one's point of view. I think Lasse is right to turn the phrasing around to "update peers" instead of "answer questions."
I also noticed Bartek wrote about "scrums I run". Anyone find that choice of words interesting? If so, why?
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