We already brought some of Scrum’s inception and its main principles. There are some branches of this method that are applicable to many teams or only to a few of them.
You probably remember that the Scrum conception came into project management from rugby. Like a rugby team preparing for a match, Scrum helps Agile teams to work together productively to achieve a common goal.
When an organization that works according to Scrum, wants to succeed in scaling Agile, it needs to focus on the whole ecosystem of teams to transform organizational culture. This is where Scrum at Scale comes to the rescue.
It is based on many of the fundamental principles of Scrum. It also borrows concepts from complex adaptive theory, game theory, and object-oriented technology.
The Scrum pillars
According to Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, creators of Scrum, these values will give life to the scrum pillars: Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation.
And yet the team members will learn to experience all the values as the rites, artifacts, and roles are used in their daily lives.
The goal is really to amplify the power of Scrum, where values should be the backbone for team decision-making on agile projects.
Scrum values should help teams embrace Scrum, deliver software of outstanding quality to their customers, and still ensure a spectacular environment in which to work.
Teams with these values will certainly stand out in such a competitive job market.
The Scrum framework has a relatively simple working dynamic. It composes a small set of events, roles, and artifacts. But as or more important than the implementation of this mechanic, is the experience of Scrum values.
The values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect create the environment. And Scrum’s pillars of transparency, adaptability, and inspection are alive and team trust is established.
The 5 Scrum values
According to the Scrum Guide, successful use of Scrum will depend on how Scrum Team members become more familiar with the 5 values. And mainly how these values are put into practice on a day-to-day basis.
Commitment
In Scrum, each person must be committed to the team’s goals and the Sprint goal. There is no continuous production of valuable work without a commitment to results.
When we commit to team success, not just worrying about our individual achievements, it creates an environment of trust, productive problem solving, and high team standards.
Be very careful, commitment in Scrum (and agile in general) is not the heroism of doing everything a PO “commands to do”, donate what hurts, to achieve your goals at any cost.
Scrum is a framework that helps the team, through inspection and adaptation, to find a sustainable pace. It will generate value with cadence, with a level of healthy internal pressure, sufficient for the team to achieve its goals with quality, in the shortest time possible.
Courage
A Scrum Team works with the courage to do the right thing and tackle difficult problems, within the framework of the framework.
It takes courage to be transparent about progress, under pressure to deliver faster, and not to show unfinished work to stakeholders.
You might look for help or admit it when you don’t know how to do something. Therefore, you need the courage to alert people when they are not being committed to the team.
We need to find out when we’re creating something our customers don’t want. It takes courage to admit that our ideas were wrong or when we need to change direction.
Also, you need the courage to share a distinct opinion with a team member and engage in productive conflict. It takes courage to admit our mistakes. This can be applied to our technical tasks, our decisions, or how we behave.
Focus
In Scrum, the team maintains a constant focus on the Sprint goal and team objectives.
Scrum’s iterative process promotes team focus. In this way, the team focuses on what is most important at the moment, which is the goal of the Sprint. The team focuses on the activities necessary to complete the activities according to its definition of done.
Rather than people working independently on a separate Backlog item, the Scrum Team is often more effective when members collaborate on one or two items.
When there are competing priorities, focus helps a team decide what is the most important thing to do at the time. And when the future is uncertain, there is a tendency to want to continue analyzing scenarios.
Focus helps a team accept uncertainty, look at what your team knows, and take a small step. This approach works because we learn from execution and then we can change direction based on what we learn.
The Development Team’s shared responsibility to deliver a Done Increment creates a focus on the overall result, not simply what each individual can accomplish.
Openness
The Scrum Team and Stakeholders agree to be open about the work and the challenges of doing it.
Scrum requires that everyone involved work with transparency. Also, it allows the inspection of the process to take place openly so you can make the necessary adaptations.
Openness allows team members to ask for help and enables team members to offer help to each other. Yet, it allows team members to share their perspectives, feel heard by their peers, and be able to support team decisions.
When our assumptions become invalid, openness helps us admit we were wrong and change direction. This applies to developed functionality that we thought would have a lot of value. This also applies to how we choose to implement functionality in a product.
Respect
Scrum Team members respect each other as capable and independent people. Each person has a different background, different experiences. In addition, everyone shows respect for these differences, as diversity makes the Team stronger.
If we respect that people are naturally resourceful, creative, and capable of collaboratively solving complex problems, we create, empower, and enable self-organizing teams.
When we show respect for people and assume they have good intentions, we can have difficult conversations that help us figure out ways to resolve conflicts and grow more as a team.
When there is respect for all opinions and perspectives, we can ensure that everyone has the opportunity for everything.
Tips to introduce these values in your team
These Scrum values need to be in a visible place and need to continue adapting. Here are some ideas to encourage your team to assimilate the values into your Scrum team:
- Post the values on a wall and ask each team member to write how they apply to their day-to-day work.
- Add a “moment of values” in your retrospective. This will give everyone an opportunity to inspect and adapt the values in your team.
- Consider introducing a ‘values’ award. It’s not a serious award, but a fun award that can sometimes you can give to two people or the entire team.
- Present these values to members of other teams that do not yet apply Scrum.
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