Establish Team Norms For Scrum Teams
Develop Guidelines as to How a Team Work Together
Last week, I was working with my Product Owner on a product kick-off deck when he asked me to work on the slide around how the Scrum Team will work together. This came as an interesting question and led me to do some quick research around how scrum teams must work together to create a positive productive process.
I learnt that there is a term called Working Agreements, which describes positive behaviours that are basic, but often being missed out or less emphasised in Scrum Teams. The agreement can be as simple as “We will be on time and participate for all scrum events.” Regardless how basic and simple an agreement can be, it is a commitment the team made.
The working agreements are created by the Scrum Team and the Scrum Master facilitates this discussion. It is often posted somewhere that is visible to the scrum team (assuming the team is colocated) for easy reference. It will be something for the team to refer to when the going gets tough.
How Can Working Agreements Help a Scrum Team?
Working agreements aim to help the Scrum Team develop a sense of shared responsibility since these agreements are created by the team themselves. Not only that, team members can be better aware of their behaviour through feedback both internally and externally with respect to the Scrum Team. Finally, the overall quality of the team’s process is observed to be increased through these agreements.
Examples of Team Working Agreements
As I mentioned earlier, a working agreement can be very simple. What is crucial is it’s created by the Scrum Team. Below are some working agreements I have come across that are useful for teams.
Accountability
The team is accountable to what it has committed as a team, and deliver on it. Taking the example around the Definition of Done. A user story is done when it is ready to be released to the users, if wanted. There are no more merges, no documentation, and no further testing. For the user stories that the Scrum Team has committed to deliver in a sprint, the team members are accountable to deliver the user story to the done state.
Avoid Incomplete User Stories
The Scrum Team should be committed to help get a user story to done instead of starting a new user story. Similar to Kanban, the Scrum Team should thrive to keep the number of “Doing” user stories to the minimum. Rule of thumb is to try to close any in-progress user story before the team starts on a new story that cannot be finished in the ongoing sprint.
Contribution
There should be no hierarchy in a Scrum Team. Being a cross-functional team, team members have specific roles but a common goal. Hence, everyone in the team has equal voice and valuable contribution.
Impediments
Roadblocks or impediments should be resolved within the team. If help is needed, the Scrum Team can seek help from the Scrum Master. Being the Scrum Master, you should coach the Scrum Team to manage impediments as part of being a self-managing team. As an old Chinese proverb goes “Give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Be Transparent
Transparency is one of the three pillars of empiricism, the foundational building block of Scrum. Within the Scrum Team, we will give feedback, we will receive feedback and we will act on feedback. There should be no hidden agendas.
Retro, Retro, Retro
In Scrum, we embrace empiricism. Inspection can be done for the product, processes, people aspects, practices, and continuous improvements. For example, the Scrum Team transparently shows the increment at the end of each Sprint to the customer to gather valuable feedback.
Adaptation is about continuous improvement, the ability to adapt based on the results of the inspection.adapt and improve. Going back to the example above, the team does not complain if the customer changes the requirements during inspection. Instead, the team adapts by using this as an opportunity to collaborate with the customer to clarify the business needs and test out the new hypothesis.
In summary, everyone in the organization must ask these questions regularly:
- Are we better off than yesterday?
- How can we be better than yesterday?
Conclusion
As a Scrum Master, I am the custodian of the agreed working agreements, but the Scrum Team has the responsibility to raise the red flag when someone breaks the agreement.
In the spirit of transparency and adaptation, the working agreements should be re-visited in an ongoing basis to assess if these agreements should be updated.
