Scrumming the scrum
…you are using scrum as a process improvement. The build crew must have effective sprint retrospective meeting and have popped the happy bubble. The basic scrum mechanisms are in place, and you want to leverage scrum to fulfill its vision of kaizen.
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Speeding up the speeding up delivers ever more value in the same time with the same people and resources. Becoming hyperproductive gives you an unfair sustainable competitive advantage in the market.
Therefore:
slow down to speed up—implement the top item of the accelerator list within a week, or two, and evaluate its impact. Repeat ad infinitum.
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To remove the top priority impediment, put it in the sprint backlog as a user story with crystal clear acceptance criteria that will determine when it is done. Evaluate the state of the item in the review meeting like any other item.
Focusing attention on the top priority accelerator will have the side effect that the team will self-organize to implement other high priority accelerators as well, without losing focus on the highest priority accelerator.
Implementing the top priority accelerator should yield immediate velocity improvement. If not, the team has not properly analysed system dynamics and understood the root cause of the primary dysfunction.
When the team is successful in achieving velocity increase the system will re-stabilize after accelerator implementation and the next most important accelerator may be in an unexpected place. So often unnecessary work (waste) will be generated by working on multiple accelerators at once. Focus on the top priority accelerator.
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- shu—A myriad of ideas to speed up make it hard to choose one. Often, people are working on more than one accelerator (or resolving more than one impediment).
- ha—An elegant, and rather short, accelerator list feeds the improvement (kaizen) process, using a separate swim lane.
- ri—Your organization enjoys an unfair sustained competitive advantage.