"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change!" - Charles Darwin

Friday 26 October 2012

Bootstrapping a successful Agile Team


When starting up a new Scrum team, you cannot assume that the team starts sprinting right away. 
Setting the foundation for the team success is key! 
Lyssa Adkins very well says in her book Coaching Agile Teams that basically a new Agile team needs to learn 3 things:

  • Learn about the Process (for instance the Scrum framework)
  • Learn about the Team itself (starting from learning about one another as human beings and then setting the stage for self-organization and cross-functional behavior)
  • Learn about the Product to build (i.e. learning about the work ahead) 
But how can an Agile coach make the team learn that?
I normally take inspiration from an interesting story from 17th century to help the team learn in an organic way: the story of the Hudson's Bay Company created by England's King Charles II in 1670.


This company was (and is still today) in the fur selling business: they provided supplies for the hunters who went to the North Canada to hunt bears or foxes and bought animals back from them to sell furs. After a while they realized their business was affected by a lot of hunters dying because they forgot essential supplies. Then in 1874 they developed a practice they called Hudson's Bay Start.

They provisioned the expedition with the necessary supplies. Then they sent the expedition team a short distance in their canoes to camp overnight. This was a test, very necessary so that, before finally launching into the unknown, one could see that nothing has been forgotten or that, if one had taken too much, being so near to the base, the mistake could be easily corrected.
In this part of Canada having the right supplies in the correct amounts was literally a matter of survival!

As I said, I take inspiration from this story and normally organize a Hudson's Bay Start for every newly formed Scrum team with a number of goals: 
  • remove the first impediments to start
  • check the development environment
  • start building the team
  • buy time to groom the Product Backlog 
  • practice Scrum with a "safe failure" approach. 

Therefore I ask to build a fake application (a bowling game tracker, for instance, but you can find many ideas at http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataCatalogue) in order to get the team away from the daily work and take them into a creative environment to let them learn faster and have fun.

When you start something completely new it is better to go out of your usual context, so that people are put on the same level (regardless their starting point) and thus are not afraid to experiment and challenge themselves.
The fake application creates the safe failure environment to practice Scrum, but it must be implemented in the real system and developed by using the actual tools, so that the development environment can be checked by really trying it out.
With a Hudson Bay start, you're less interested in the actual product and more interested in making sure the development and deployment process works.

One could ask: Why are you spending precious team time to build a fake application? Don't you have shipping deadlines to meet?
Of course we have, but it is also a matter of reducing risk.

The Hudson's Bay Start was not free for the Hudson's Bay Company either.
But the alternative for the hunters was dying in the wild!

No comments:

Post a Comment