Scrum tested positive for Coronavirus. Don’t worry, there’s a cure.
We have been more than 4 months inside this crazy pandemic situation now. 12 million+ people worldwide contracted COVID 19 and in some countries the numbers continue to soar high. As a consequence, workers everywhere have had to adapt their ways of working, which in a lot of casse means, home office.
In Germany, we have been in home office since mid March but it is not too bad; I work for a tech company, I do not need much besides a laptop and a good internet connection. However, somewhere along the way, our beloved Scrum contracted Coronavirus too and this had a heavy impact on our every day work. The symptoms were pretty clear:
- General lack of collaboration. Having to do everything online took its toll; personally, I never realised until now, how important it was to physically meet up with my team members for sprint change, a coffee, a face to face conversation or just a short foosball match. As a consequence, team dissatisfaction levels started to increase.
- Transparency infection. If before something was not clear, I could just walk to my colleague’s desk and ask for clarifications. Now I have to resort to calls and/or chats for every single exchange I need to have. Many people do not look at their chat tools so much and they do not want to be disturbed by calls. This makes communications longer and more painful than usual. A natural outcome of this was information loss and confusion among team members.
- A pretty bad case of reaction (as opposed to adaption). As the project went forward, and as COVID 19 constraints started affecting the clients’ demands, the team went into a reaction mode. The iterative scrum transformed slowly into a plain execute mode, without paying attention to backlog, priorities and above all, value.
To make things worse, Kurzarbeit happened. Kurzarbeit is the equivalent of being furloughed. My company, like many other German ones resorted to Kurzarbeit, since the client requests went down and the budgets shrank significally. Kurzarbeit is a good option a company has, unless they want to start firing employees. Needless to say this was a big blow to the team.
Despite all the symptoms, the team was still working, albeit on limited time and resources. This meant that the team members were working on the project, two or three days per week, de facto halving the capacity of our two-week sprints.
Fast-forward a couple of months: the symptoms got worse. The product backlog was almost not moving anymore, the velocity decreased significantly, client requests kept coming and we had to continuously adjust priorities and expectations. The peak of the virus culminated in the most dreaded question:
Should we switch to Kanban?
Wait a second, I thought. We cannot give up easily. There is a cure for this virus and we need to try it. And that’s what we did.
Step 1: show me your face!
It might sound really funny, but this helped a lot. During our dailies we all turned our cameras on and started showing our faces, a practice that we had abandoned after a couple of weeks of home office. Seeing my team members in their “natural habitat” was energising and it reminded me that we are all working towards the same goal, regardless of where we were or what new pyjiama we are sporting (admit it, you have all done it, at least once!) This increased significantly the openness levels, which brought up more collaboration, commitment and transparency. It was a domino effect, really.
Step 2: be conservative
The team made a very conscious decision: do not overcommit, especially given the fact that time and resources were limited. We decided to have fewer stories in a sprint, rather than more, for fear of not getting everything done. This may sound pretty logical, as decision, but once you establish a certain team velocity during your sprint, expectations to continue delivering the same are really high. We had to explain this was not sustainable anymore. In order to realistically reach goals, we had to ramp down.
Step 3: stick to it
This was the core, or better the cure (excuse the pun)of scrum! Once we committed to the stories, nothing could come in between, not even a 5 minute task which the CEO absolutely needs by end of the day (which, by the way, are never 5 minutes task…) There was no room for extras, the scope of the sprint would be jeopardised otherwise. It is of the utmost importance that this is communicated clearly to the stakeholders, so that they understand the risks involved in changing things suddenly. This, for us, made all of the difference.
In times where drastic changes happen and things get confusing, it is important to step back and re-evaluate the way the team is working.
Scrum has few, clear guidelines on how things should be implemented but it should never be taken for granted. During the COVID 19 lockdown, our scrum got infected and risked losing all the values it stood for. With some practical reminders and implementations, however, it can be easily cured.