Lindsay Velecina: 0:03

Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. This episode is a previous recording of our live ask a professional scrum trainer series, where a live audience asks questions of professional scrum trainers. We hope you enjoy this episode. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you're located today, welcome to today's Ask a professional scrum trainer podcast. I will be your moderator today Lindsey Velecina with scrum.org and today I have with us one of our professional scrum trainers Ferzeen Anis. She is based in Australia. So welcome, proceed. We're so happy to have you today. And thank you audience for coming. So just very quickly, for who is scrum.org. In case you aren't familiar, we are the home of Scrum. We were founded by Ken swaybar back in 2009. And our mission is to help people in teams solve complex problems. We offer training, certification and ongoing learning professional Scrum. And you'll notice on our website, there are a lot of free resources on there to help you with that ongoing learning things like this webinars, videos, whatnot. So please check those out. And we hope that today's session plays a part in that learning journey. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Fez to introduce yourself.

Ferzeen Anis: 1:32

Thanks, Lindsay. Hi, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Ask scrum trainer. I am a professional scrum trainer. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia. I'm very excited to do one of these. I haven't done one of these. We've been asked before. A little bit about myself. Let's see. I don't know, I always like to start with outside of outside of work, coffee being a Melbournian all things are good food and wine as well. I like reading lots of books. crime fiction is my jam. I picked up powerlifting as a hobby this year. So that's probably a new thing that I picked up that I do outside of work. Inside of work, you know I've been doing a practicing professional scrum for 10 plus years now, the first time I went to a professional scrum training, I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life. And I became a professional scrum trainer a number of years ago. It's been incredible to use my exposure to so many learners across the world to actually help myself be a better scrum master and an Agile coach to teams and organizations in various industries. And I'm really looking forward to sharing my experience with you and hopefully help answer some questions that you have.

Lindsay Velecina: 2:43

And test fantastic. So much fans. So this first question for you here. So where does the Project Manager button Scrum?

Ferzeen Anis: 2:51

Yeah, that's a very good question. It's a common one. There's one of two ways I like to think about it. Project managers, generally speaking historically have a wide range of responsibilities that they undertake to enable Scrum teams and Scrum team members, or project team members. And so the one number Way number one is that project management is like a suite of responsibilities. And either those project management responsibilities get distributed among the members of the team. So for example, classically, if your project manager does budgeting someone like a product owner on a scrum team might take over that responsibility because they are close to the product and they're making decisions about the product. So it helps to have the budget close to their decision making ability. Similar to something like figuring out team composition. Now, while a project manager may be someone who has experience, you know, assisting with recruitment and things like that, generally speaking, Scrum looks at something like a scrum team is able to sell tell what skills and capabilities are required in in a certain team and are able to advise accordingly. So, option number one, project management responsibilities are distributed within the various roles or accountabilities in a scrum team. Option number two is there still, that's still a suite of responsibilities that an organization needs someone to undertake. So it still works for a project manager to maintain those responsibilities. And so the project manager in that circumstance is actually looking at how they can enable the scrum team. So what are the I guess, supporting processes within the wider organization that are impeding a scrum team's effectiveness? What enablement? What services, what support they need and hopefully help get them that information and that support? So that's sort of the two ways I see project management and project managers fit in? It

Lindsay Velecina: 4:50

makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that. So we have a question here from Lily. So how did you become a professional scrum trainer?

Ferzeen Anis: 4:58

It's a very good question. So I became a professional scrum trainer. Seven years ago, I attended my professional first professional scrum training. And at that point in time I'd been practicing scrum for like three to four years. What was interesting is that what I experienced in my first PSM cause was that as much as I love scrum already, what was described in the training room, blew my mind, it seemed like the potential for Scrum and practicing scrum had not been reached. In my experience of Scrum thus far, so I I was lucky that the scrum trainer for that course was actually one of my colleagues in the consultancy I worked at at the time. And I went up to him and I said, Whatever you just did I want to do that with my life. How do I, how do I begin? So over the for about two years after that, I used him and I worked with a number of other mentors, existing professional scrum trainers, I basically went and collected mentors to help me on my journey to become a scrum trainer. They they helped me a lot to understand how incredible and vibrant this community is. I one of the most wonderful things about becoming a professional scrum trainer was the time it took and the journey. So over that year or two years, I went and got a lot more experience as a scrum master. I, in trying to do the assessments. You know, I really got to understand the theory and history and practice of Scrum, in getting feedback. Every step of the process from scrum dub org were incredibly supportive. And they never say no, they always only have feedback, which is, which is incredible. So that feedback really helped me grow. And then yeah, two years later, I was a professional scrum trainer going through all the processes. I couldn't recommend becoming part of the community enough, not necessarily to run your own trading business, or do trading, just from your own learning and development perspective. It's so hands down the best thing I've done for my career,

Lindsay Velecina: 6:56

as awesome, and we are so happy to have you as well. So thank you for that. So this question here. So in Scrum, how do you handle user training needs? As the system develops? Have you ever run into that with anybody? For Z?

Ferzeen Anis: 7:14

Yes. So I mean, I think this is where there's the ideal scenario and what gets practiced or experienced. I have had worked with teams who deal with users training as part of their sprint, so they have uses training built into their definition of done and for me, that's the ideal. That's the utopia. And that's generally fine. user training is a component of release ability for whatever you're working on, or usability for whatever you're working on, then that means until that training is done, or completed, that item of work is really done. It's not really releasable. So it needs to be built in the definition of Done and, and therefore be done as part of the sprints. There are definitely many projects where such that's not possible, or four, and this is where I'm like, not possible, perhaps more to systemic constraints, or let's say regulatory constraints, or customer constraints, rather than sort of self imposed constraints which can happen in those in those scenarios, I think ensuring that you actually pause sprints to complete the work that you need to do to help people learn and adopt the product is, or the feature or whatever it is that you're building or the service is, is done is is sort of ideal. So the idea is not to sort of like keep building things while you're trying to train people as well. Sort of making strategic pause to get people to adopt your product, I think is the other way I would look at it.

Lindsay Velecina: 8:50

Okay, great. Thank you. Let's next question here. So in Scrum, the product owner will create user stories and then what is the role? Trying to sorry, I'm having trouble reading this question. Then what is the role to a agile ba to add value? So what where does the BA role fit in Scrum? Does the BA role just become a coordinator in Scrum? That was part of that's really

Ferzeen Anis: 9:20

interesting. I would I would almost look at it the other way around. So I want to get some terminology right, because I'm actually as much as I'm a word nerd. I think terminology helps here to think about how scrum structured. So, first of all, let's look at the concept of an agile business analyst. An agile business analyst or business analyst is a skill sets. I used to be a business analyst. My first job was a business analyst, right? And if I think about how I fit into a scrum team, it is the accountability of a developer. So the terminology here is it's important not to assume that a developer in Scrum is a software developer or software engineer. A developer is anyone who has the skills to develop the product or the service or whatever it is that we're working on. So for example, if I'm in a technology team developers are the people like business analysts, designers, QA for software engineers, etc, etc. But I could be a marketing team, Scrum team and my developers would be people like who do blogging or blogging and social media and campaigns and even sales, etc. So the skills are what's required. So, one part of the question that I wanted to qualify qualify is that the role of the value of a business analyst in a scrum team that is developing, let's say, a software, a product or service, is to provide that development effort. That's absolutely right. The question also mentioned something along the lines of product owners write user stories, that is actually not necessarily the case, product owners are accountable for ordering the backlog, maximizing value by ordering the backlog. But in order to achieve that accountability achieved their goal, a product owner is fully able to delegate any and all responsibilities such as figuring out the design, figuring out the requirements, figuring out what customers are saying, figuring out what the data is saying, figuring out what the solution is saying, needs to be figuring out what the quality standards need to be a product owner is certainly not someone who can do all of these themselves. Therefore, it is not on the product owner to create product backlog items. It is up to a product owner can completely ask for that support from members of the scrum team or other team members to get that information. And so a business analyst would fit absolutely nicely writing as that developer who is assisting product owners with getting that detail for a product backlog.

Lindsay Velecina: 11:42

Great. And that's awesome. And I think that answers one of the follow up questions that came in as well. So this next question here, so I'm actually going to for those that were here on the live version of this today, I'm actually going to drop this into the chat because it's rather lengthy. So I don't want anybody to let the name of the question. So this is a two part question. So I'm working for an analytics organization where we're focused on Gen AI projects, which are short stint two to three week projects. They're practicing scrum with Kanban. And handling the discussions and expediting issues through Scrum, but managing the tasks through Kanban boards for easy tracking, what's the best models that they should follow for these? This is a really big question. But for short stint type of projects, what do you recommend Prizzi's? So some of you might need some more context. So I'll let you ask for the context that you need. Yeah,

Ferzeen Anis: 12:50

and I look, I'll make a go at what I think can happen. And if I haven't addressed what you're looking for, please follow up provide a follow up question to whoever is posted posted this. So one of the things someone wants told me that was really helpful is you can think about a sprint in scrum as a project, right? Because what are projects, they're usually time bound scope and budget bound, right. And in Scrum, a sprint is a time box within which you try to achieve a goal which is I guess, a flexible scope of work. And you can generally assess the cost of that scrum team running, right. So Scrum is a mini project in my goal, right? So I think that from this person that they're saying they're already doing Scrum ban and like, you know, I would sort of go into looking like, if there are two to three week long stints, you can just think of them as mini projects or that whole sprint. That whole whole three week project is its own scrum sprint, and maybe use a product backlog to manage what kind of stints or Sprint's of projects you take on over the course of your AI analytics journey. You could another thing you might consider is if you are able to, I mean, you might want to think about what your sprint length is and sort of maximize the sprint length to figure out to ensure the longest projects are taken on sometimes maybe one or two projects might take multiple Sprint's to get done, which is absolutely okay, that's like a normal project. I think the fact that you're using Scrum ban air quotes, or Kanban with Scrum is natural for any environment where you have a lot of variable sort of work. So a lot of kind of request driven work. And I think that I mean, even look using something like a visual board. It's not a scrum thing. It's a kanban thing. So it sounds like you're doing those things. I really think that one of the things maybe that you might want to read up and learn is actually how can we Then principles can help Scrum teams. So if you're doing a bit of both, then I would say, Look up, for example, the professional scrum Kanban guide from scrum.org that really talks about things like how to manage with better how to improve your floor, how to look at things like your cycle time, or workout and age so that you don't like let your service level expectations drop and things like that really powerful stuff. I really feel like Kanban practices, improve your scrum implementation. And so I think that is something you might want to do. Besides that, I would say also, and I mean, I'm not in a training room right now. So I think I'm allowed to say this. You don't have to get too attached to doing Scrum by the book. Like if a product goal or a sprint goal isn't making sense for you a single, then maybe think about something like trying to improve certain measures of success for your team or for your customer or for your business or for your client, essentially. But don't get attached to doing Scrum by the letter. If it doesn't make sense for your environment. It's okay to in my book, sometimes cherry pick. But yeah, so look into something like a professional scrum with Kanban or just Kanban and lean practices to improve flow is sort of my thoughts. They're awesome.

Lindsay Velecina: 16:15

Thank you. So this question here. So what is the best scenario I should strive for? If I've been hired by a company new to Scrum, my management had assigned me to be the scrum master of six new Scrum teams and these teams build one product. Yeah.

Ferzeen Anis: 16:34

Oh. So Nina, just because I can see the name in there, Nina. I'll tell you why Jasmine though, who. That's because I have been a scrum master and Scrum practitioner long enough to understand that a lot of organizations tend to devalue the role of a scrum master. And now it's the fact that they've hired you as a scrum master is a great start, my personal the thing that I would consider you to be watching out for is how many teams you're trying to be a scrum master for in my experience, if I'm trying to be the scrum master, for more than two or three teams, I'm at best doing some administrative work, right? So I would see there is an opportunity for you to stagger your time with these teams. So for example, you spend time with one maybe two teams bring the building up their scrum maturity before moving on to others, but hey, maybe that's not possible. My I have a three step process to figuring out how to how to start with Scrum, right? If you're starting off with Scrum number one get trained in Scrum. And this is not a sales pitch, right? I just want to be really clear. It's not a sales pitch. It's to language and is important because there are more myths and misunderstandings about Scrum in the industry than the than not so, and it's often the scrum master gets training in Scrum or is educated in Scrum. But you don't get the give the scrum team the scrum team members the opportunity to get trained now, you can train them since you're a scrum master that experience or you can go get them training. This is obviously context specific. But number one, get people trained get everyone speaking the same language so people understand what a planning is, what a review is, what a retro is what a daily Scrum is, and what are the roles etc. Right? So that's step number one. Step two, learn your sprint goal should be to learn how to Scrum, spend the sprint simulating Scrum, like do a planning do some refinement, do it do daily scrums, do reviews do retros like read at run at least one sprint where your whole purpose is not to build stuff. But to learn how to scrub, right. And then of course, you take time to you're doing this run you're doing you're building your product things then then come into my step three, regularly run retrospectives where your focus is on reflecting on how Scrum is working for you whether Scrum is working for you. How are the Scrum Masters, developers product owners performing and not performing? Like how do they feel? Do they need to change how they're working? The aspects of Scrum of the scrum process, you know, retrospect on scrum itself and try to improve it. So for me that's kind of my three step process to new company new to Scrum teams do this from organizations and if I'm supposed to teach them how to scrum training, do a Sprint Zero where you learn how to scrub retrospect on your implementation of Scrum.

Lindsay Velecina: 19:30

Great, thank you. So this next question here so we talked about joining a company that's new to Scrum. But what advice do you have for new scrum master and any books that you would recommend?

Ferzeen Anis: 19:46

Um, new Scrum Master, what advice do I have? You know what's interesting? I'm glad that the question is there because, you know, we say the scrum master serves the scrum team and we often forget that like your Scrum Master is part of the scrum. Team and in order to enable teams you have to enable yourself, right? So this is a bit of a put your own mask on first business, right? So the way I would think about your personal development is I break it down into the three services of a scrum master right? A scrum master serves the team. A scrum master serves the product owner, a scrum master serves the organization, right. And the scrum master serves the team is probably where everyone starts and I am included. I include myself in this I was a business analyst. And I had worked heavily within teams. So when I moved into scrum master roles, I was to work very closely with the developers of a scrum team. And in particular, I had a bias towards working with business analysts. So I would be mindful of our of your own skills bias that you might bring to the team. But yes, serving the scrum team should really be about how, what are my training or facilitation skills? What are my conflict resolution skills? What are my what is my ability to get people focused? What are my interpersonal and relationship skills like, because a lot of the things that a scrum master is doing for the scrum team is really building a high performing teams. So spending time getting with the team, getting to know them, personally, and I include both developers and product owners in this right. Then I look at, let's say, the service or the product owner, and this is where despite the fact that I had a background in the business analyst for a long time, I didn't improve my product management or product ownership skills, because I didn't think I need but then I realized as a scrum master, in order to enable a product owner, I have to have those skills. So I had to actually spend some time learning about product management, learning about product ownership, potentially take on those roles, if, if possible, so that I had the skills to enable a product owner, right. So that was that was the second part. And then the third party services to the organization. And this is, you know, this is the really icky scary stuff. Most people like me, especially conflict avoiders like myself or are worried about. But ultimately, in order to create the conditions for success for your team, you have to know what it means to be a change agent, you need to know what it means to have conversations with executives, with stakeholders with leadership to help not necessarily sell Scrum, but explain to them the benefit of what it is you're doing, why it is what you're doing so So basically, the journey for a scrum master is really figuring out what skills you're kind of there's a gap in there for you and working on those, right. The, the one book that the books that come to mind. For for, for serving the scrum team is Gunther ver hewins scrum Pocket Guide. Incredible book. And the gentleman is also a scrum master and prefer scrum trainer. Incredibly, and that's just sort of your go to for anything. How do I do this in Scrum, for learning about product management? I'm gonna have to Google this, but maybe Lindsey, you can help me out with this, which is the product owner book. That's the basis of the pspo course. Do you know off the top of your head?

Lindsay Velecina: 23:11

Sorry, the professional Scrum Product Owner book that said of course that's exactly it.

Ferzeen Anis: 23:15

Yeah, a professional Scrum Product Owner is the book, you want to read about that. And then think figure out where product management skills you might what product product management skills you might want to be missing and you might want to pursue, I don't have any books per se off the top of my head for organizational skills. However, I would work on my leadership skills in the book that for the concept that worked really well for me to sort of channel my inner leader was the concept of host leadership. So that's another one I would consider reading up on as well if that style of leadership rings. True for you.

Lindsay Velecina: 23:51

Awesome, thank you so much. We have another VA related question. So do you think an agile ba should look for upskilling as a product owner or scrum master for better career prospects?

Ferzeen Anis: 24:07

The forks are like figuring out the my history here because Yes. I'm sorry. For as long as I was a business analyst, and I'll say it myself, Lindsay, I think I was a pretty good business analyst, right?

Lindsay Velecina: 24:24

I'm sure you were.

Ferzeen Anis: 24:28

But like, I got I there was this fork in my career where I had to be when I shifted sort of wanted to become a consultant. It was like okay, what kind of consultant roles do you want to put on like that scrum master Agile coach role or product owner ba kind of role, and I had the skills potentially to pursue product ownership. But I no longer wanted to do that job. And to be honest, I am to this day, very, very inspired and intimidated by product owners because I don't know how you do your job. That is a hectic job. To say the least. And I suffer from enough, Alice's paralysis, which probably made me a good BA, but probably wasn't great for my mental health. And I needed to like, develop a lot of my interpersonal skills actually, for that scrum master role. And I took, I prefer to take on that challenge. And I, I felt like that's where my passion would be in the, and also because that scrum master role is again a little bit in that learning and development space. And I knew personally that that's the kind of style I wanted to pursue, and hey, I'm a trainer. So guess what that made sense. So that was my choice. Really kind of think about what you want to pursue, because the last thing you want to do is like, chase a role that you won't have a good time doing.

Lindsay Velecina: 25:42

Thank you. That's good advice. So what is the difference between a scrum master and a project manager? But why are they always associated?

Ferzeen Anis: 25:54

So I'll start with the second part of that question. Because the reason they are always associated is for as long as agile frameworks and methodologies and practices have been around or agile roles, let put them under an umbrella term. Organizations have wanted to try and retrofit the new roles into existing roles, because that makes the change for them less challenging, right? So if we could just find the perfect formula for a project manager becomes a product owner on a delivery lead becomes a scrum master and you know, etc, etc. Surely we'd all be doing the world's perfect, most perfect agile. The truth is, like I just gave you the different Association and to what you have just said, and that's because plenty of organizations I've tried to do this mapping from scrum master becomes a project manager, for example. And so the association comes from the fact of like, I guess, people being nervous about change and potentially having a misunderstanding about what that role whether it's scrum master product owner might be and saying, okay, in obviously, we don't want to make you redundant and things like that your skills are still needed, but where will in this whole agile team business do you best fit in. So that's sort of that retrofitting attempt that a lot of people have been trying to do, that's why they always get associated. A lot of people assume that the scrum master is the Agile Project Manager. Hence, that's because surely, there someone has to do the project management side of things. I don't know if this person was here at the beginning. I think the first question we answered at today's webinar was about project management in Scrum, so I'm not going to repeat it again. But I think the way to think about it is the difference between a scrum master and a project manager is a Scrum Masters pure accountabilities, team effectiveness, right. They, they are removing impediments, that impact the team from improving their ways of working, they are enabling them through education, through facilitation, through coaching, through mentorship, etc. To help them better at what they do right. Now, can a project manager also do these things? Absolutely. So they can either put on the head of a scrum master and do all these things. But project management also consists a lot of responsibilities in classically in organizations like, let's say budgeting, recruitment, performance management for some reason, and in which case, I think, again, context specific, you might think about a project manager, doing those things for a scrum team and helping them get those things done. An organization or project managers responsibility is being distributed amongst the members of the team. So the members of the team themselves, do those things. And yes, it's entirely possible a scrum master ends up taking some of those responsibilities.

Lindsay Velecina: 28:29

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. All right. So this question here. So what amount of technical experience or knowledge is needed to be an effective scrum master? Second to that? Is it a red flag if there is a shift and expectations from the organization for a scrum master to have sufficient technical knowledge? Yeah.

Ferzeen Anis: 28:55

Um, it's not a red flag. So I'm getting I'm going backwards with question. It's not a red flag. But my answer to your first question is also zero. But let me clarify. Again, you guys are all taking figuring out my entire bio history, right? My first job was as a business analyst in an IT project in a financial services organization, right. And at that point in time, I had graduated with a degree in arts and arts in Australia is the same as humanities unlike the US, which means social sciences. Right? So that means, as part of my first job, I had no idea what I was doing. Right? Forget technology. I didn't even I had never done a deal finance or tech in my life. So what was I doing as a business analyst in in, in an IT project? So there's a couple of things here, right? If I'm here these many years later, being able to talk to technology teams, being able to be a professional scrum trainer, or who are scrum predominantly being used by technology teams, but not technology teams only. Is because of a couple of things. I think Having a non technical background enables you to have curiosity, humility, and the willingness to learn. Right? I knew the only way I was going to be able to good at be good at anything I was doing was to learn, right? And how can that not be a good skill set for a scrum master this willingness, openness to learn curiosity, getting to know people trying to understand what they do right now, whether I liked it or not, of course, what's happened over time is I've picked up technical mumbo jumbo over the years now many Scrum Masters actually, even if they come from non technical backgrounds, go as far as learning some technology just so that they can understand the pains of people, right. So I've known people with my sort of similar history as myself, who learned to do a little bit of programming, who do a little bit of the testing, technical testing and things like that just so that they're, they're better able to help the team I never did. And I don't think that's ever impacted me as a scrum master. But that's also because I've never been like, well, I don't understand technology. So I'm just going to ignore the problems like it's really that's the balance. So I suspect where organizations are looking for Scrum Masters with technical background is because they're one they're worried. And that's completely natural. They're like, how can you enable my technical team members if you cannot speak the language. So I don't think it's a red flag. But I think it is on you for, let's say, applying for a role like that. Or if you're in a role like that, to help the organization understand why it isn't detrimental, that you don't have technical background.

Lindsay Velecina: 31:32

It's great. Thank you. Hope that helps. So this next question. During sprint planning, the product owner and the developers are unable to reach an understanding about the highest order product backlog items, but they are agreed on a product goal. What should a scrum master do in this situation?

Ferzeen Anis: 31:54

Okay, um, I'm wondering whether misunderstanding the question. So when we say they're great on a product goal, I'll be honest, I'll say something really contentious. They don't have to agree a product or sets the product goal. Right? Right. What they do need to agree on an ATT, sprint planning is the sprint goal. So this is where I'm not sure if there's sort of like potentially a typo in like this, right. So it is because the way I'm interpreting is that you're at Sprint Planning, you you you have alignment on whatever the product goal is, which is the feeder objective of the product, you you have none of what you want to work on on this current sprint like this, let's say 10 items up for grabs, right, but you're not aligned on which of those 10 are the most important. Right? Assuming that that is, that is the case, the order of product backlog items or product owners call as well. Order product backlog items, the product owners call where the developers can negotiate this at a sprint planning is to say which of these things now again, you're saying they don't agree. I'm wondering, are there dependencies? Are there risks? Our product owner is a product owner ignoring the advice of developers and

Lindsay Velecina: 33:05

just hear from Nina, she did set it as a sprinkle sprinkle.

Ferzeen Anis: 33:09

Yeah, that's what she meant. Yeah. So again, like, ultimately, in as a scrum master, you just want to ensure that both product owners or developers have listening to each other and not trying to walk over each other. Right? Developers are accountable for quality developers are accountable for solution at Sprint Planning, developers get to say what capacity they have, and how to do the work, right? product owners, and at best say these are the highest order items. To be honest, if the sprint goal is aligned, a product owner shouldn't really care what items gets done. They should care that the sprint goal gets met.

Lindsay Velecina: 33:45

Makes sense? Thank you. I hope that helps Nina. Oh, wait, maybe came back and said the developers aren't able to determine how many product backlog items they can forecast in the upcoming sprint.

Ferzeen Anis: 33:57

Yeah, but don't forecast the number of items forecast whether or not you can meet the goal, right. So it's like the example I always use is like, set sprint goals like by the end of the sprint users will be able to log into our application. Right now there are 10 different features you could build to allow users to log into an application you know, two factor authorization email and password pin biometrics, fingerprint retinal, right? As a product owner or as a scrum team. Your goal is to deliver a valuable and usable increment that meets a goal. Allow users to log into the application. Whether or not you deliver five items are 10 new items should be besides the point. So look at some past history to think about how many items you should be pulling in for some have some data. And if you don't have any data to go by just I always say proceed with caution. Like always underestimate how many items you can do. But commit to the gold don't commit to the number of items. That

Lindsay Velecina: 34:51

makes sense. Thank you. You're welcome, Nina. She said thank you. All right. So how do you convince gets people to change. As we all know, most people are resistant, resistant to change. And it can be tough to push them towards something new, especially if they've been working or got used to a process being a certain way for many, many years.

Ferzeen Anis: 35:15

Yeah, I don't even want to answer this question. Because if you figure it out, you can tell me people are resistant to change, look. The one thing I figured out is that how you phrase change to people is important. Ah, people have to be given a why. Or people have to be given a purpose, people have to be made to feel safe. People have to be made to feel like they will receive some benefit from this. A lot of people are told to change as opposed to ask to consider is this a valuable opportunity? Or is this beneficial? How does this feel for you? How might this look for you? And I always say, I think not I always say I think that the industry experts on this genuinely have said, and that's sort of what I tried to do is try not to go down the convincing and selling part. But you know, actions speak louder than words, work with your early adopters work with your influencers work with members of the observer organization, who are willing to have a great team have great vibes get good stuff done every sprint or less, you know, and use that to create some momentum, there will always always be some people who don't who don't jump onto the train. That's okay. That's human beings. But by and large, we are creatures of evolution, we're actually very good at change, we just have to see the benefit of it. So show them the benefit of show them the data, show them good vibes. And, yeah, that's sort of the idea.

Lindsay Velecina: 36:59

Great, thank you. So let's get to some event questions here. So what is your advice to prevent a daily scrum from becoming a status meeting?

Ferzeen Anis: 37:14

Add a daily scrum. So I'll tell you this. I figured this out the hard way. Right. So I'm fairly confident half if not more than half of us are doing the daily stand ups that are going, these are all the meetings I went to yesterday, these are all the meetings I'm having today. These are how many coffees I drank yesterday, and people are rolling their eyes. And that's the kind of fun stuff a worst case scenario, you're probably providing a status update to either a scrum master or a product owner, or some stakeholders, which is wonderful, right? In trying to change those status meetings. In my experience, I've done the whole, you know, maybe let's let's just let the developers plan their day, you know, let's just, you know, and things like that. And generally speaking, what people respond to it that is, well, then where will I get my update? Right? Then I've again, I've tried the whole Oh, why don't you just reach out to them on Slack? Or just, you know, sit on an art or even the whole? Why do you need that piece of information, just let them do their thing, right? All of these things have backfired. The only thing that has worked is that I explained to developers, or the scrum team, as well as the product owner. Well, the purpose of a daily Scrum is plan your day, by checking your progress around your goal, right? These things are short, sharp, almost logistical conversations about, you know, hey, I had this problem yesterday. Can someone know what I can do? And someone else says, Oh, I that happened to me, too. I fixed it. Let me come help you. Someone else goes, Hey, I'm leaving at 3pm today, because I'm going to pick up my kids from school. And I'm gonna pick this up. Yeah, sure. Great. You know, that's, that's the purpose of the daily scrum. Are we on track for our goal? It's 15 minutes. It's not a you know, it's valuable for the developers and all the developers only. And by adding a daily scrum, I find 15 minutes in the day. And I give that to developers. And I say, but your purpose in the 60 minutes, is to plan your day, based on yesterday. Don't tell me what to do. Don't tell what you're doing. Don't tell anyone else what you're doing. And you're going to have it right, because you're going to work today. So just have your daily scrum. They see the value of it and they go to those. There's engagement in domains. What happens to the status update is that nine times out of 10 most of the Scrum teams stop going to that. And yeah, generally, it's unfortunately maybe me as a scrum master or product owner or someone else or representative developer, who goes goes provides that status update, and that's a status update meeting. And then, at some point, stakeholders stop coming to that too, because it's not as fun when you can't micromanage people. So then that one disappears from your calendar to.

Lindsay Velecina: 39:42

Great, thank you. So this next question here, so how do you encourage quiet voices speak up in a sprint retrospective?

Ferzeen Anis: 39:56

This is so good. Hmm, this is really like facilitation not 101 is like facilitation 301

Lindsay Velecina: 40:10

There's there's

Ferzeen Anis: 40:13

i. So there's a couple of things here, right? I think to some extent changing up how you're facilitating purchase trip days is super important, right? In my experience, many retrospectives are including ones that run, unfortunately, are like week after week after week, because I, what went well, what didn't go, well? What could we improve? And we're just sort of going through the motions, people are coming pre prepared. And quiet people are like, what's the value of this? Right? So changing up your prompts are super powerful, right? Hey, how am I doing as a scrum team member? Like, let's talk about how we're doing in Scrum or, you know, the, what did we learn to sprint? What did you like with this sprint? Right? You know, what made you mad? What made you sad? What made you glad. And if you can't tell from those of us who are familiar with the various retrospective techniques, highly recommend googling various techniques and just try different one every sprint, those are ways to get multiple people to contribute, right? The other facilitation, so one side is like using different techniques. The other thing I would say, is look up something called liberating structures. Because liberating structures are hands down. Super powerful in enabling pretty much every voice in the room to be heard, depending on conversation and deliberate is actually designed the professional scrum master to core so it's really about getting making sure people's opinions and voices are heard. So those are the techniques I would give you. On top of that, I would also suggest that have a little bit of a think about what how, what are your retrospectives like currently? Are they all parties? Are they all vent sessions? Are they all ones where they don't actually really take any action, so perhaps maybe there's no value, people don't understand the value of it. So a little bit of a sanity check on your quality of your retrospective so people know that the only way they can get benefit from it is they contribute. And lastly, if you have quite members, and you are a Scrum Master, this is absolutely 100% a coaching mentoring personal one on one conversation situation, make sure you're talking to those people to understand why it is that they are not contributing not from a oh, actually this what I say never ask someone why they are doing on doing something why puts people on defense, right? Ask them why? Or how questions don't ever ask why questions facilitation coaching? One on one, right? Ask this person, what could I do differently to help you contribute? What are you missing? What do you need? Or how might we do things differently? Not why don't you talk in Sprint's retros, or whatever, right? So that's sort of I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff at your own quite people.

Lindsay Velecina: 42:53

Awesome, thank you. And I'm also going to drop a link to Tasty cupcakes. That's another site that has some great thing to prospective ideas on there as well. Several professional scrum trainers contribute to the Saulteaux and run it. So please check that out, too. Yep. Oh, next question. It's six Scrum teams work on one product? Can they have their own product owner and own scrum master? So I think that would mean six product owners.

Ferzeen Anis: 43:29

Yes, that would mean it. This one is an easy one, single product single product owner, right. That's to allow the product owner to act as a single source of decision making. For what to be worked on next by all the Scrum teams working on the product. They aligned to the same product goal they will work off the same product backlog. As far as the scrum master goes, there's no boundaries there. Yes, they can have their own scrum master, which is to say each scrum team group or someone in each scrum team group may have a person wearing the scrum master hat. Potentially that's shared potentially that's not that's really up to how you can decide. But yeah, absolutely, they can have their own scrum master but a product owner, single product owner, single product backlog, single product goal. Also, same baseline definition of done as across all teams, and all Scrum teams make ensuring they're integrating their increments by the end of every sprint. There's some bonus content for you. Great, thank

Lindsay Velecina: 44:34

you. So here's an interesting question. So can the scrum master and the product owner be the same person?

Ferzeen Anis: 44:42

Yeah, you can. I wouldn't, I wouldn't advise. I wouldn't advise it it's like it's like having more than multiple heads like it's it's multiple heads. But yes, there's no boundary against doing both. They're accountabilities, they're like hats, right. So while similar to the just the Thinking of my previous question, while is a constraint around a single product being owned by a single product owner, there's no constraint about whether a product owner can't also be a developer can also be a scrum master. So yes, they can. The reason I wouldn't advise it is because product owners and Scrum Masters number one operated a handle the tension, the healthy tension being a product owner is generally working about toward thinking about maximizing product value from the team's work. Whereas a scrum master is more focused on maximizing team effectiveness, which can often work at tension is a good thing, you know. So for example, you might have a sprint planning want that thing of like, hey, we want to make sure quality is met, we want to make sure we're meeting definition of done not like building 10 things, just because we have capacity, that kind of stuff. The other big challenge for me of being the same is that a scrum master is supposed to enable a product owner, well, if you're the one on the same person, there's no one helping you out with their job. So it's really hard to that. Again, I am a co founder of a two person business. So that means we don't have the option but to share the product owner accountability. Sorry, not sure the product owner ability should have both a product owner and a scrum master. Con considers thing going on. But I think if you asked my co founder, they would say that they tend to squarely sit in the product owner space and I tend to sit in the scrum master space, just because otherwise it's it that how else otherwise, basically, their backlog would be a mess without me. Yeah.

Lindsay Velecina: 46:36

That makes sense. Thank you. So what metrics or KPIs Do you track to show you're being effective at the scrum master?

Ferzeen Anis: 46:46

Oops, sorry. A scrum master effectiveness symptom number one, reliably sustainably, delivering valuable and quality increments. That means you need measures around quality. That means you need measures around value if you're adding unique measures around. Think cadence is the word but like I think sustainable and I'm not exactly sure exactly how to mention it. But the idea is that this could be subjective your Sprint's should feel like you could be doing this indefinitely. So if you're ending your sprints, feeling like you've run a marathon, you're doing it wrong, right? So Scrum Masters build a can't help the team building cadence that they could do indefinitely. Value quality. Measures equal, reliable delivery of value and quality. Great. The other one is a huge the other one is team morale and our sense of continuous improvement. So I would also potentially measure things like how how often are we innovating? How often are we running experiments, I would measure things like team culture, like employee satisfaction and or morale. There's 3 million different metrics in these worlds. Highly recommend if you're trying to think about measures, actual measures, or what metrics to use, or what kinds of measures to use, read, read up evidence based management from scrum.org changed my life in terms of how to actually put numbers next to things that I could only kind of I don't know, imagine in my head previously. So that's a great opportunity to think about what measures but yeah, quality, value, sustainability, team culture and morale. Continuous improvement. That's what you're measuring. Awesome.

Lindsay Velecina: 48:31

Thank you. All right. So this question, see here, a new product owner comes into the scrum team, which has been working on a product for nine Sprint's already, she doesn't know about responsibilities, but understand that she is accountable for the product backlog. What does she do in this situation? Yeah,

Ferzeen Anis: 48:54

yeah. So this is probably, you know, when I was mentioning, like, I went and got a product on a roll, because I didn't want to learn the product ownership, right? That's sort of me. Spend time with the team. It's very similar to like, pretend you know nothing. So spend time with the team to understand what the product is they've been there. And help from the team perspective, understand the product, the solution, right? Help them understand that be open about the fact that you aren't new. And that they can, this is a good thing they can use, you can use this to your advantage, because he'd be like, the only way for us to build a quality solution is if you can tell me what a quality solution is, right? Because you've been doing this for a while you're accountable as developers for the quality of the solution and the solution. Tell me teach me, let me know. On the other hand, on the flip side, and really, really important, get to know your business, get to know your customers. When I say get to know your business, figure out how your business is structured, where does your product line up? What are other product owners in the organization doing? Are there any frameworks, definitions of done leadership strategy things you need to be aware of any giulini Just get to know your business. Right? Get you know, your organization. And of course, of course, of course, then probably should have started with this. Get to know your customers like, if you're, if you're working on a CRM platform, go spend time with the sales team or the marketing team that's actually using them, figure out how they use it. Go spend time with the users, figuring out how to use it, spend the time on the spend a day on the phones, spend the day using your own website, spend a day days talking to customers about their opinion, get to understand them. So this stuff can take a little bit of time, but you want to be the expert in your product. And it doesn't matter that you're new to it. But give yourself the time to get to know the product, get to know the business, get to know the solution. And then you know, and then you're welcome to own the product backlog, set the product goal change things up.

Lindsay Velecina: 50:52

That's great. Thank you that we have time for maybe one or two more questions here. So how, how do you go about what is your advice for engaging stakeholders in a sprint review getting them engaged.

Ferzeen Anis: 51:09

Um, step one, when you can when you coke once you've created this sprint goal at Sprint Planning, in particular, for product owners, just tell your stakeholders that this is what we've committed to doing this sprint once you can give us feedback, right, so that's step number one. I think it's also important for you to curate the audience, a lot of stakeholders I know particularly our business stakeholders, they sort of get tired of getting invited to stuff that they have nothing to provide feedback on, it's not something they care about. So depending on your sprint goal, and what you're planning to deliver at any given sprint in terms of your increment, make sure you've created your stakeholder or invite invitation list right? Be mindful that stakeholders aren't just business stakeholders, your customers, users, dependent teams, partner teams, the teams in the organization, your sales team, your marketing team, your legal team, these are all stakeholders. So make sure that they're coming on board because they are the only people who will potentially help your increment see the light of day, right. The other side of is that most people forget that a sprint review is a two part session, part one feedback, certainly. But Part Two is update your product backlog based on what you've just seen to decide what to work on next, and update your agenda and tell your stakeholders this, Hey, come along to our sprint. So that yes, you can give us feedback on what we've done. But also, you can actually advise on what we might work on next sprint and what stakeholder until no business stakeholder doesn't like the opportunity to tell us what we might mark on. So create buy in, make sure they understand that it's the working session, you want to talk to them, you're not going to just you know have a PowerPoint running for them, where you just tell them what to do. Yeah. So curate your stakeholders accordingly. and update your agenda.

Lindsay Velecina: 52:56

That's great. Thank you. All right. So I think we're about ready to wrap up. Is there anything you want to leave our audience with today says anything, any piece of advice or story you want to share anything like that?

Ferzeen Anis: 53:14

Piece of advice, if you will, I think I want to say this because I think being a scrum trainer, I often start the hall you know, do Scrum. Do all this from these are all the values Scrum. If you take nothing else from Scrum is the fact that the only reason Scrum is so valuable is because it is leveraging your innate ability as human beings to solve problems and make evidence based decisions. If you're doing that you're doing Scrum. The other thing is, if you're going to pick somewhere to start with Scrum, start with a retrospective. Because the retrospective is an opportunity for your team to identify how to improve your processes and people in interactions, challenging your retrospective to figure out what works for you and go from there. That's sort of the idea. Don't Don't try to do Scrum. Just try to improve your current circumstances.

Lindsay Velecina: 53:58

Awesome. Thank you. Right. So we are going to get ready to close out here. I'm just going to share my screen again quickly. All right. So we have a lot of free resources on the scrum.org website, like this webinar, so please feel free to check them out. We also have learning paths on our website with lots of great resources in there. So please utilize those and stay connected with us through our social media channels as well. Thank you all for attending today. And thank you for those who are listening to the recorded podcast. And we hope to see you all again soon. All right. So take care everybody and Scrum on Thank you.

Ferzeen Anis: 54:40

Thanks, everyone, and thanks Lindsay.