Scrum 2.0 | Yes we can!
Would it be possible to upgrade Scrum to Scrum 2.0? What would that mean? Would it be possible to mix traditional Scrum with social networking flavors?
Scrum is partly about improving communication between all team members. Social networking is all about connecting people and improving communication between them. Both try to improve communication ... so let's try!
Let us pick a single team conversation and see how we can enhance it with some social networking tools.
Scenario 1: Daily standup meetings
Let's not go that far... the whole point why this works is because we have face-to-face contact. I would be kinda strange to replace this with everyone sitting behind his desk (micro) blogging about what they did. Let's try something else.
Scenario 2: Inter-team communication during the day
Let's imagine for a second you have a team practicing extreme programming. This team is obliged to maximize communication during the day. Some of the communication that can go on is:
So I guess the second scenario can be a good one for further analysis. We know that team communication is crucial, knowledge sharing is even more crucial, but making too much noise will kill all of the benefits of trying to share. A business case for a technical tool? I guess we are kinda stuck with person to person solutions here, we could try to whisper but even then ... :-)
We need a tool that allows us to share information (crucial or not) between team members, small messages, things that pop up, things that have no need to be archived until the sun explodes messages like 'I'm feeling sick today ... give me a break'. We need to be able to send them with no ease, everyone who might be interested in what I or the team has to say can listen upon those messages but you can't force people to read everything. This latter one is very important, we want to know what is going on with everyone but we don't like the information to be forced upon us. Email has this problem, you send it, I have to read it but first I need to open the message, if I don't want to read it I still have to delete it otherwise my inbox keeps growing... It is up to the reader to decide whether or not to read the message if he doesn't want to the message should just 'disappear' (don't even have to delete them), he should be able to give feedback at no ease, look at feedback of others and so on....
What we have here is a business case for what is called Micro Blogging.
Let's look at Twitter. You either love it or hate it, but you can't get around its popularity. Twitter is all about micro blogging, a technique similar to sending sms messages. The main difference is that your audience is much, much much much bigger and secondly and not unimportant is that reading a Twitter message it is much less intrusive than having to open each sms message individually. Each sms you receive you need to open individually whereas Twitter messages are pushed to you as a continuous stream where you decide whether or not to read a message. So sms / email = push + click and Twitter = push and forget.
The biggest disadvantage currently is that you can't used it behind the company firewall. Yammer is a tool which allows you to overcome that obstacle, it lets you create a Twitter like stream behind the firewall and is only available for those have been registered and allowed to use it.
So what would happen if the team would embrace something like Yammer and use it instead of shouting, sending emails...?
First of all it would take out all the noise out of the team, don't feel obliged to use it for everything because it is still very important to keep up a good atmosphere within the team, so talk... but don't make noise!
Second, Let's say you found a great article about TDD, just put it on the stream and whoever feels like reading it will, those who are too busy will just ignore the message.
Third, no more spam in your mailbox! No more messages to delete, nothing to open just to make sure it isn't interesting...
Fourth, most of these tools even have API's which means that with some effort you could easily redirect your CI server information (build broken / fixed, what has been updated and so on) and stream it directly into for example Yammer. If someone is interested to see what is going on with the build he can, if not just skip it; it will only take a blink of an eye to do so.
I can go on but you get the picture I hope? By introducing a stream like micro blogging tool we reduce a lot of team noise and we optimize communication. We just eliminated a lot of waste ;-)
Yammer is really great, no matter where you are you can always check the team stream because they have ported the application also to a desktop, mobile and iPhone application.
Scrum 2.0, yes we can!
Scrum is partly about improving communication between all team members. Social networking is all about connecting people and improving communication between them. Both try to improve communication ... so let's try!
Let us pick a single team conversation and see how we can enhance it with some social networking tools.
Scenario 1: Daily standup meetings
Let's not go that far... the whole point why this works is because we have face-to-face contact. I would be kinda strange to replace this with everyone sitting behind his desk (micro) blogging about what they did. Let's try something else.
Scenario 2: Inter-team communication during the day
Let's imagine for a second you have a team practicing extreme programming. This team is obliged to maximize communication during the day. Some of the communication that can go on is:
- Check out this article about TDD
- We need to bring down the build server for a second, memory upgrade
- Added feature X to the base test class
- Get me some coffee ... NOW
- Mails from the CI server (broken/fixed)
- and so on ...
- shout it
- send an email
- put it on wiki (+ rss feed)
- send it using instant messaging
- and so on ...
So I guess the second scenario can be a good one for further analysis. We know that team communication is crucial, knowledge sharing is even more crucial, but making too much noise will kill all of the benefits of trying to share. A business case for a technical tool? I guess we are kinda stuck with person to person solutions here, we could try to whisper but even then ... :-)
We need a tool that allows us to share information (crucial or not) between team members, small messages, things that pop up, things that have no need to be archived until the sun explodes messages like 'I'm feeling sick today ... give me a break'. We need to be able to send them with no ease, everyone who might be interested in what I or the team has to say can listen upon those messages but you can't force people to read everything. This latter one is very important, we want to know what is going on with everyone but we don't like the information to be forced upon us. Email has this problem, you send it, I have to read it but first I need to open the message, if I don't want to read it I still have to delete it otherwise my inbox keeps growing... It is up to the reader to decide whether or not to read the message if he doesn't want to the message should just 'disappear' (don't even have to delete them), he should be able to give feedback at no ease, look at feedback of others and so on....
What we have here is a business case for what is called Micro Blogging.
Let's look at Twitter. You either love it or hate it, but you can't get around its popularity. Twitter is all about micro blogging, a technique similar to sending sms messages. The main difference is that your audience is much, much much much bigger and secondly and not unimportant is that reading a Twitter message it is much less intrusive than having to open each sms message individually. Each sms you receive you need to open individually whereas Twitter messages are pushed to you as a continuous stream where you decide whether or not to read a message. So sms / email = push + click and Twitter = push and forget.
The biggest disadvantage currently is that you can't used it behind the company firewall. Yammer is a tool which allows you to overcome that obstacle, it lets you create a Twitter like stream behind the firewall and is only available for those have been registered and allowed to use it.
So what would happen if the team would embrace something like Yammer and use it instead of shouting, sending emails...?
First of all it would take out all the noise out of the team, don't feel obliged to use it for everything because it is still very important to keep up a good atmosphere within the team, so talk... but don't make noise!
Second, Let's say you found a great article about TDD, just put it on the stream and whoever feels like reading it will, those who are too busy will just ignore the message.
Third, no more spam in your mailbox! No more messages to delete, nothing to open just to make sure it isn't interesting...
Fourth, most of these tools even have API's which means that with some effort you could easily redirect your CI server information (build broken / fixed, what has been updated and so on) and stream it directly into for example Yammer. If someone is interested to see what is going on with the build he can, if not just skip it; it will only take a blink of an eye to do so.
I can go on but you get the picture I hope? By introducing a stream like micro blogging tool we reduce a lot of team noise and we optimize communication. We just eliminated a lot of waste ;-)
Yammer is really great, no matter where you are you can always check the team stream because they have ported the application also to a desktop, mobile and iPhone application.
Scrum 2.0, yes we can!
posted by Maarten Volders at
9:41 PM
0 Comments
