back to notes

Some thoughts on what we might need to cover with a scrum master for a kanban team

Go to start of metadata

Some thoughts on what we might need to cover with a scrum master for a kanban team

Ensure all work is visually represented on the board – there should not be “other” work or a workflow that is too high level that team members track their own work separately from the board

Document and maintain the explicit agreements for the team – at a minimum, they need agreements on daily meetings, retrospectives, replenishment, pull criteria for workflow queues, product demonstrations, and WiP limit boundaries. But, each team will likely have a much longer list to address how to handle blockers, SLAs, expedited items, standard items, intangible items, delivery planning meetings (relative to releases), replenishment (which is facilitated by the PO), and any other agreements the team needs to have. Documenting them is easy, but to make them highly visible and for the team to agree to work according to the agreements – this is the hard part and where a scrum master provides great value

Work with team to establish, maintain, and respect WIP limits on ALL work in progress. – it is the team’s responsibility, but the scrum master can really support the team through helping them focus

Manage flow of work in a daily meetings, including: Identifying aging work items (what has been sitting in a status for a long time, or longer than established in the explicit agreements. Calling out any SLA risks – what items have due dates and are we at risk of missing the date? Focusing on blockers – what can we do to remove the blocker? What explicit agreement do we have around blockers (for example, if something is blocked for more than 3 days, do we stop other work to swarm as a team and remove the blocker?) Discussing improvement suggestions A good method is to “walk” the board from right to left, with a focus on getting items moved to done. It’s not a status update, but more of a “what have you done for me lately” approach. If everything on the board is in a good place, this discussion can be very quick (meaning, as little as 5 minutes)

Facilitate meetings: daily meeting, delivery planning meeting, and possibly service delivery review (more of a program level meeting, but still can be applicable).

Ensure improvement is being address properly and facilitate improvement activities – improvements must be: Collaborative – ensure the whole team participates Planned – ensure the goal or hypothesis, inputs, expected outputs, actual outputs and data are all captured and documented to support the conclusion of the experiment. Limited – ensure only one change is made at a time – otherwise, there is no way to track the impact of a single change when there are multiple changes happening. Sufficient – ensure enough data (two to six weeks of data at a minimum) to support the conclusion

Capture and maintain metrics – at a minimum, the scrum master should capture the throughput and cycle time. However, to be truly effective, they would need to: Capture system lead time (from time work is committed to time it is delivered) per work item type, and understand how to communicate lead time (able to deliver in x days with 85% confidence) Maintain the cumulative flow (Jira has one but doesn’t work well with the data) – look for alligator mouth in any column, which would represent a bottleneck (assuming all columns have limited WiP), which helps the team know where to focus improvement opportunities. Facilitate discussion around the metrics as it relates to improvement. Maintain blocker data – how long was an item block, what was the reason? Facilitate blocker review calls to group and review blockers and start to focus on root cause analysis where possible. Maintain disposition data – track the percentage of backlog that is discarded, and data around work that is aborted (stopped mid-process and thrown out), and data around abandoned work (work that is stopped mid-process, but returned to the backlog). Assess the stability of the system – track how many new items are coming in vs being delivered, which a goal of being close to 1 (or at least not having a large amount of variation).



last updated september 2019