SCV Retrospection: The Supporter, the Critic, and the Visionary

I am happy to inform you that one of my article got published by Scrum alliance. Click HERE to read full article

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. — Norman L. Kerth, The Prime Directive

At the end of a project, everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgment used to embarrass. — Norman L. Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Retrospection is an important Scrum event that provides the Scrum team with an opportunity to inspect its processes and collectively come up with improvements. It's the ScrumMaster's responsibility to create an environment of psychological safety in which all team members inspect the sprint activities and frankly discuss how they felt about them. At every sprint, the team discusses a couple of specific things they want to improve.

To increase the effectiveness of retrospectives, I have tried the following techniques with the team:

1. Traditional: What went well, what didn't go well, and what needs improvement
2. Starfish technique: Start doing, stop doing, keep doing, do less, and do more
3. Bollywood style: Hero: keep doing; Heroine: new experiments; Comedian: fun/joy; Villain: stops you from continuing) — Certified ScrumMaster® workshop by Satisha Venkataramaiah at Leanpitch Technologies
4. Sailboat retrospective: Anchors (impediments) and wind (positive factors)

All of these techniques helped gather insights into how the team felt about the sprint, but they didn't give input into how the team would improve. So I thought about how to get this from the team.

A couple of months back, I had attended a neurolinguistic programming workshop in which I participated in an activity called Walt Disney's Creative Strategy: The Dreamer, the Realist, and the Critic (Visionary).. It's a tool to spur creative thinking by using parallel thinking to generate ideas and then evaluate them.

I tried applying parallel thinking in the team retrospective: Every team member thinks in three dimensions, such as the Supporter, the Critic, and the Visionary (SCV), to provide his or her input. Let's consider these roles and see how they help in a team retrospective. – Read More

Crystal Clear - Process

Crystal clear process includes three steps

1.Chartering, 

2.Cyclic Delivery 

3.Wrap-up

Chartering: 

Chartering includes building the core team, performing the exploratory 360°, shaping & fine-tuning the methodology conventions and building the initial project plan.

            

            Build the core of the team:

Is nothing but forming the development team

An Executive Sponsor provides direction and support to the team, also act as domain expert for the project.

A Lead Designer acts as project manager, coordinator, technical expert and trainer.

An Ambassador User acts as the expert on system usage.

A number of Systems Analysts, Programmers, Support analysts, Business Experts, Testers, Text-Writers, Coordinators and others (Whoever is needed by the team).

            Perform the Exploratory 360°:

It is preliminary feasibility analysis which provides high level project review of the key issues (given below) which will affect the development effort

Overall project plans and constraints

High-level requirements (usually captured in use cases)

Expected business value

Technology to be used & alternatives

Necessary resources

Development methodology

            Shape and fine-tune the methodology conventions:

Shaping the methodology: Set of rules which are agreed upon by the team as the framework to be used in developing the system

Fine tuning methodology: Initial framework will be reviewed & revised iteratively during cyclic delivery, gradually evolving as a methodology tailored to fit the project.

            Build the initial project plan:

Developing the initial plan which includes project map (Consists tasks and their dependencies), Release plan with projected timelines (start and end date) for delivery cycles & iterations and Tasks (Prioritized and estimated).

Task estimations are done using Blitz Planning, which is a close variant of XP’s card-based planning technique.

Cyclic Delivery:

Each delivery cycle includes either one iteration or multiple iterations which leads to delivery to the real users. Each delivery cycle includes below activities to be performed

     Recalibrate\Revisit the release plan
     Develop in iterations
     Deliver to real users
     Reflect on the delivery

Recalibrate\Revisit the release plan: Release plan is reviewed and updated based on the experience with previous delivery cycles performance.

Develop in iterations: All the development is done in iterations which can range from one week to three months. One delivery cycle can have one or multiple iterations.

Deliver to real users: Integrated system is delivered to a group of users and use their feedback is used to improve the system. Update the plans/requirements according to the user feedback.

Reflect on the delivery: Reflection workshop is held and the team reflects on the delivered product and process used to develop the product.

Cyclic Delivery - Iteration:

Iteraration starts with Iteration planning, where team plans the tasks to be performed during the iteration.  Each iteration include multiple days integrated.

Each day (Cyclic program-test-integrate) includes

A Daily Standup meeting: Team meets to collaborate with one another

Mutiple Integration Cycles: It consists of Designer-Programmers developing tasks by programming and perform unit testing. These are called episodes. At the end of the integration cycle new code should be integrated into the system and integration tests should be performed.

Iteration Completion Ritual: A reflection workshop is held at the end of the iteration.

Crystal Clear Process-Wrap-up:

Wrap-up is the last step, in which Team performs acceptance testing and prepares the final product & user environment for final deployment.

Final reflection workshop.

Create Knowledge base: Record the lessons learned from the project which will be helpful for future projects.

Hope you got some idea on the crystal clear process. In next  post, let’s get started with eXtreme Programming. Please share your feedback to improve this blog or let me know if you need any specific topics to be covered. I will be very happy to present it in my blog.If you have any suggestions OR queries, Please feel free to reach out to me @ Linkedin || Facebook

Very Happy to see 1000 page views to my Blog, Thank you J

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-Balaji Sathram, CSP, PMI-ACP