Agile Trailblazers Blog

The Scrum framework has four key events: 1) Sprint Planning, 2) Daily Scrum, 3) Sprint Review, and 4) Sprint Retrospective. At Sprint Planning, we set a Sprint Goal that binds the team to work together on a common mission towards delivering a real outcome by the end of the Sprint. The plan (otherwise known as the Sprint Backlog) is the team’s best idea on how to accomplish its mission towards the Sprint Goal. So, how many plans have you ever made in your life that happen precisely the way you initially thought? If you are in the camp of “the plan is the plan is the plan”, it might make sense to get together every day and give a status update to your fellow team members on where you are with executing the plan. In the solutions delivery business, that’s just not reality!

The DevOps Story Needs to Be Told!

There is so much chatter about DevOps these days, but so little clarity about what it really means. The shame of it is that very few of us have really heard the "Story of DevOps." Some don't know the how the story begins...some get lost in the middle of the story...and others are scared of how the story will end.

The outline of any great story includes the Setting, Theme, Characters, Point of View, Plot, Conflict, and Resolution. 

• Setting - DevOps needs the right environment...the right mood, to really flourish
• Theme - The big idea that makes DevOps a foundation for successful Agile implementation
• Characters and Point of View - DevOps done right is so much about people
• Plot and Conflict - Transitioning from a silo organization can be a happy story or a disaster
• Resolution - Setting a destination for your DevOps journey is so important

In this blog series, we hope to help you write the “Story of DevOps” at your organization to make DevOps wildly impactful to your business results. Let's start with the setting...

So, creating a Agile team sounds good on paper, but making this a reality is often harder in most organizations. The hardest part of moving to dedication of team members is first believing that the benefits are worth enduring the pain that often accompanies this move. In the “pre-dedication” way of working, team members would move from team to team as the project heated up in a certain area or when a specific team needed the specialized skills only that team members possessed. These “pre-dedication” team members were also at the whim of the project manager who was bequeathed with the holistic knowledge of the “big picture” and could decide at any given moment that which agile project or which part of which agile project a team member was working that day. So, these team members would spend 25% of their time on Project A, 30% on Project B, 35% on Project C, and 10% on Project D. But, did anyone remember that all this context switching was an enormous drain on that team member and he / she was left with either putting in 25% overtime or being late on at least 3 of these 4 agile projects. As a scrum team member, a lack of dedication can kill your ability to deliver and not to mention your motivation to be at work.

Now that you are hopefully convinced that you want your organization to be steeped in a Culture of Commitment, how do you infuse the CofC in your company’s DNA? The “Culture of Commitment enabling” markers your teams need to strive for are depicted below.

Having played senior leadership roles in many solutions delivery organizations, we have witnessed both the presence and absence of a Culture of Commitment.

More often, organizations pervert the notion of the Sprint “commitment” with crushing delivery pressure or a lack of a support structure that allows a real commitment culture to take hold. For these environments, you can see the team do a collective “Whatever!” when Sprint Planning ends and everyone is looking for the commitment to the Sprint Goals. The real “commitment” is just to get the Sprint Planning meeting over and done. It is these types of organizations from which the Scrum Guide felt the need to “protect” us by removing any notion of commitment.