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Sample Coaching Plan

ENTERPRISE AUTHENTICATION TRACKER
Coaching Plan and Recommendations
December 19, 2018

Becca Hokans / Srikanthreddy Singareddy
Agile Coach / Scrum Coach
Enterprise Agile Transformation Group
 
Contents
Summary 3
Observations 3
Daily Standup 3
Backlog Refinement 4
Sprint Planning 4
Sprint Commitment 4
Retrospective 4
General 4
Coaching Plan and Recommendations 5
Daily Standup 5
Backlog Refinement 5
Sprint Planning 5
Sprint Commitment 5
Retrospective 6
General 6
1:1 Coaching 6

Summary
Enterprise Authentication Tracker is a functioning Agile project in WF Virtual Channels. They spun up in July of 2018 and began development work during November. During the early sprints, the team focused on DXD stories and spikes to establish the cadence of Scrum ceremonies and rhythm of Agile work. Enterprise Authentication Tracker is managed under a fixed scope against a fixed scheduled. The team has dependencies on Waterfall projects, forcing the team to develop stories in layers rather than vertically.

Overall, the Enterprise Authentication Tracker team is new to Agile and Scrum, and have struggled with the Agile mindset, values, and principles, as well as with Scrum practices. They went through the 3-Day Initial Workshop plus one week of hands-on User Story development at the beginning of their assignment in July. We coached the following behaviors in the moment to alleviate those struggles:
• Learn to write discrete, small user stories by slicing large stories into bite-sized chunks
• Assign clear value to Epics and break down Features to deliver from those Epics
• Self-organize during Scrum ceremonies to obtain the goals of the ceremony.
• Understand the Scrum roles and responsibilities for each role
• Understand the lifecycle of a user story
• Conduct in-person retrospectives at the end of each sprint to discuss feedback and identify improvement opportunities

Team members who have previous Agile experience are stepping in as mentors to the team as the project continues. The team has relied on our coaching to establish self-organized principles and practices within the development activities.

This document provides more information around the coaching plan for Enterprise Authentication and recommendations for moving forward. As of December 21, 2018, coaching ownership rolls over to the WFVC team. We will be available on an ad hoc / on call basis through February 2019.

Observations

Daily Standup

In the beginning, standups were run more like status calls with the Scrum Master calling on people each day in the same order. After some continuous coaching, the team has moved into a self-organized fashion and contributes updates without prompting. When the Scrum Master was on vacation, the team used Skype to track participants and called names at times, but this practice was kept to a minimum. Most importantly, during the Scrum Master’s recent vacation, the team stepped up to volunteer to facilitate the standup in self-organized fashion, with different people taking ownership of different ceremonies.

Backlog Refinement

The team spends roughly 3 hours per week in story refinement. They are in the midst of building a healthy backlog of 2 to 3 sprints ahead, but struggle to look one sprint ahead as a team. We’ve coached the team to review user stories ahead of time to maximize the time spent on refinement. The Business Analyst and Technical Analysts have stepped up to work on the user stories, adding use cases, technical documents, and other full-use documents prior to the refinement sessions. In retrospective, the team would like to be involved early on in the user story creation, yet notes that trying to look ahead and build a healthy backlog takes too much time. This is due to the misfortune of not having a dedicated team in place to focus on the product and its development in full.

Sprint Planning

The team struggled with estimation during the first couple sprints. We tried a couple ways of estimating involving the whole team and with just the dev and QA before sliding into a good practice of having Dev, QA, and BAs contribute their estimations for the story. These estimates are occasionally challenged by the rest of the team.

Sprint Commitment

The team commits to a sprint on the last day of the preceding sprint. This is a common practice within Scrum cadence. The team determines during planning what is ready to go so most of the planning goes smoothly. Occasionally there are questions or last-minute blockers on the story to be committed and it must be rejected to remain in the backlog.

The Product Owner has forecast out the backlog over a series of sprints to scope work and show a need for scaling the team. This confused much of the development team who saw these sprints as committed; we coached them to see the difference and understand that until the work is committed, every planned sprint is a forecast.

Retrospective

The team still struggles with retrospectives. They were unused to live retrospectives, so we have spent several sprints reinforcing the live nature. The Scrum Master captures information on a spreadsheet based on spoken input; the team can be quiet in this scenario and only contribute a few items, or have mainly one or two contributors for the full exercise. We coached them to a new retrospective practice to use and a new retrospective tool – using the Skype whiteboard to generate “stickie’s” for further discussion. This option generates more feedback than the spoken option. This tells us that the team has not yet created a safe space in which to share feedback.

General

The team has a solid understanding of Agile values and principles, as well as Scrum values and principles. They operate in good-faith manner within the Scrum framework and are exploring its limits for their development needs. The team tracks their work in JIRA for full transparency and reporting. The team is open to coaching feedback and focusing on becoming a high-performing team once their development cadence is established.


Coaching Plan and Recommendations

Daily Standup

Moving forward, we encourage the team to continue the self-managed standups as they go further into development. The status-like nature of some standups should decrease as more development, QA & Impediments tasks are reported daily.

Given the success of the self-managed, self-organized team during the Scrum Master’s vacation, we recommend changing facilitation from time to time and turning the meeting into a ceremony for the Development Team to communicate updates. The Development Team members have the ability to run the meeting while the Scrum Master observes and coaches the behavior.

Backlog Refinement

Despite active coaching, the team still struggles with the concept of a healthy backlog. We’ve noticed that these meetings are occasionally shortened, cancelled, or partially repurposed. The team needs to keep the current times sacred and seek to spend 3-4 hours per week to refine stories. Once a healthy backlog is achieved, the team will have enough focus to work on current stories and continue looking ahead for design considerations, dependencies, and spikes that are required to support the upcoming sprint. Additionally, the team may find they need 2-3 hours of refinement time on stories once the healthy backlog is defined by concentrating on the next chuck of user stories and on planning the next sprint.

There was a comment during retrospective that the Business writes stories with Technical details instead of letting the Development Team determine how the user story is implemented. Some stories do have this level of detail coming from the Technical Analysts who work with the Developers. The team needs to probe that comment to find common respect and practice for writing user stories and make the best use of the Subject Matter Experts in their domain.

Sprint Planning

The team needs to trust the estimates if the team is giving the responsibility and accountability to the Dev, QA, and BAs. No one should demand a resizing or push multiple times for resizing out of disagreement without a suggested resolution. At the end of the day, if certain people own the estimates, then they determine the estimates. We suggest using Skype polls to size so that the entire development team can provide input and can do so anonymously, which may resolve some of the disagreements over sizing.
During development the team needs to decide which method of estimation works best for them and consistently use that method. Changing methods would affect story points which affects velocity; it’s best to choose one method and stick with it for predictable velocity.

Sprint Commitment

Continue to work through stories in Sprint Planning to make them ready for commitment. When using sprints to forecast backlog items, reinforce that the planned sprint is only a forecast will change based upon the performance of the preceding sprints. The Product Owner needs to review the cycle time of the development stories against the backlog to gain a sense of when the scope will be delivered and take that information to the Steering Committee to use as needed.

Retrospective

Continue using the Skype whiteboard to gather feedback for retrospective and talk to the team about the context. Encourage the team to speak up more during the exercise and share their thoughts. Continue to identify 1 to 2 action items from the retrospective and work on those as continuous improvement items. These could also be added as Tasks within the sprint if the team wishes to track progress there, or tracked outside the sprint.

General

The team has some work before them to effectively communicate. There are multiple discussions about user stories before open questions are asked that affect commitment, and times when dependencies were not identified in advance and delayed the development. Although they have been sprinting for five months they have just reached the ability to do development work on working software and is losing coaching support at a critical time. We recommend seeking additional coaching through WFVC.

The team has not yet defined their average velocity so the team will need to work on that throughout development. Non-development predictability was 43%; target is 90-110%.

Collaboration among the team is essential to refine and create user stories throughout development, including those stories in the forecast and backlog.

The team shows strong communication skills but occasionally talk past each other in ceremonies, resulting in misunderstandings with user stories. The team needs to work on a common language or common meanings within the team to minimize these misunderstandings.

1:1 Coaching

The Scrum Master will continue coaching each member of the team on agile, team empowerment, individual empowerment and business value. The coaching sessions will be performed as needed. The Scrum Master will promote the Scrum framework, coach on the Scrum practices, and ensure the team is following the Scrum values and principles, as well as Agile values and principles. The Product Owner is prepared to coach to user stories based on previous and current experience.