Why do we want to achieve standardised work?

We standardise to sustain good practises, make audits less painfull and make our work sustainable. Standardisation is not the goal, sustainability is. But how do we get from our current way of working to a more sustainable way?

"To throw away what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful." - Marie Kondo

We start with sorting out what we don't need. We clean our work process and get rid of clutter. Anything that does not contribute to the creation of value, we remove. Ask with every step of the work process if it is really needed; what would happen if the step is removed? When you create a work item, think about the minimal product you are happy with.

"A dramatic reorganization causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective. It is life transforming." - Marie Kondo

The next step is to reorganise. To make it easy to work, to reduce movement, lookups and extra meetings. We can improve on this by refining the work we do and collect or link all information on a work item to that work item. We stop going to meetings that are not helping us to add value to the product we create.

"Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder." - Marie Kondo

To keep stuff organised, we regularly clean it. This means looking at our processes and stuff we make, and clean out the clutter. Did we took a short cut somewhere? Fix it. Do we need to refactor to improve? Do it. Stuff that is not maintained will cause headaches in the future. And yes, it takes time to do this, but it will take up more time down the road, when it gets in our way.

Now we come to the part where we can standardise. We make rules about the previous steps. We define our way of working, our definition of done, our test strategies, our meetup schedules. We make rules about how we as a team work. And we publish the rules to make it transparent to everybody how we work.

"The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past." - Marie Kondo

Sustainability is the ability to keep a pace over a longer period of time. In scrum this long period is called a sprint; perhaps we should have called it something else, because we don't sprint like sprinter. We are not trying to achieve a new world record on the 100 meter, but we are trying to create stuff for others over a longer period of time. We are trying to set a pace and slowly improve on that pace over time. We do this with the previous mentioned steps. We aim for goals and get there with small steps.

What is the best team size?

Some say a team of nine people is more than enough. Some argue that a team of fifteen works fine as well. My argument is that the smaller the team, the better their performance. But who's right and why?

The bigger a team is, the more interconnected it is, the more time it needs to discuss and agree. Each new member adds extra interactions to each other member, growing interactions exponentially. Brook found this out in the 1970's and created a formula for it.

Cognitive load is the amount of stuff a team can handle. The Paas-scale can be used to determine how much the type of work effects the load. The lowest number on the scale is simple work that costs very, very low mental effort. The highest number on the scale cost very, very high mental effort. 

Depending on the work, it requires more or less mental effort. What would happen if we plot the numbers? Let's have a look. 

The green line is Brooks law. It starts at zero and curves up, like one would expect of an exponential formula. The line tells us that with a team of three, there are three interactions. It also tells us that a team of fifteen will have 105 interactions.

The red line represents low mental effort work. From the graph we can tell that the size of the team doesn't really matter in this case. It almost seems that interactions can take place while working.

The yellow line represents very high mental effort, it crosses the green line at three. So interactions will very much effect this type of work, suggesting a team size of a maximum of three.

What about the recommended team size of "ten or fewer people in general" according to the 2020 Scrum guide? For average mental effort work a maximum of eleven people should be in the team. If the work is mentally harder, the maximum team size shrinks. This means that the team size by Scrum isn't very far of what the numbers say, but it is a maximum team size, not an average! 

It is fair to say that any member above eleven won't increase team performance significantly. Splitting a team with many members into two or even more teams of five to six will boost performance again. The cognitive load is halved per team, but interconnections have gone down by a factor resulting in an increase of performance.

Software development is an above average mental effort, making teams too big is very counterproductive. When you aim for a high performance team, go for team sizes of about five to six people.

Let me know what your thoughts are about team size in the comments below.

Time management with Scrum

One of the goals of Scrum was to get rid of meetings. With meetings I mean unnecessary ones. The only thing that counts is delivering value at the appointed moment so users will be happy. How does Scrum help with effective time management? Scrum helps time management with events.

Scrum events

There are five Scrum events: the sprint, the planning, the daily, the review and the retrospective. In the sprint everything happens: building, refining, testing, delivering. In the sprint all the actions take place to deliver value to the customers. During the planning event, all the work the team thinks they can do in one sprint, is planned: a workplan is thought off, a goal is defined and work items are selected to be completed in the sprint. During the daily standup developers (everybody is a developer in the team) discuss progress and impediments on the defined goal. In other words, they meet to see if they are going to achieve what they have promised all the stakeholders (that includes users). At the review everybody is invited to inspect what has been done during the sprint. Possibly a demo is given to show what has been made. The last event is the retrospective; a moment of reflection by the team to inspect and adapt on the way they do things.

Time spent

About 22.5% of all time has been claimed by Scrum events. We need another 10% per day to learn. That leaves 5.3 hours of actual work time. This doesn't sound much, but this is net time. So all the overhead is gone. We should be able to work for a bit more then five hours a day without interruption. 

Let us look at some reasons why we cannot spent this time and on some things that we can do to spent our time more effectively.

Pitfalls

One of the biggest pitfalls is that we are going to listen to other people outside of our time and outside of planned events. The social part is fine, we need that as humans. But the part where it as about work is wrong, there are events and a PO for that. When developers approach a stakeholder to verify something it is fine, then it is part of the developers job. But the other way around will cost time instead of saving it; therefor decreasing performance of the team as a whole.

The second most heard excuse of not working on items from the sprint is that a person is needed in a meeting. There is no meeting where a developer is needed on something that is not on the sprint log. And if there was one, the developer should be the initiator. I've seen developers that could not do their jobs because their expertise was needed. By pulling out a developer, the developers flow will be disrupted, causing a delay of a couple of hours to a days work. Some developers are so busy in attending meetings, that they cannot do their jobs anymore. Attending meetings will make the team loose focus and decrease team performance.

The last pitfall I will mention is to not use all the Scrum events. Some teams cut short on planning, review and retrospective. Not paying enough time for planning will result in extra planning during the sprint, in a change of calculated hours, in a deviation of the sprint goal and result in unpredictability to the stakeholders. Not paying enough time to inspection and adaption events like review and retrospective will stagnate learning of the team and will guarantee performance will never improve.

Good practices

A way to be more effective is to go pair programming. At first sight it seems that it will cost time. But ever since Kent Beck wrote about it, it has been proven over and over again that working in pairs improves quality of the work disproportionately causing less issues and less technical debt, opening up hours to add features.

Sharing knowledge in the form of a center of practice (run by developers) adds to quality of work and to speed of delivery. It will cost time in the form of a meeting. So run the meeting as an Open Space, free for everybody to join if they have anything to learn or to contribute. This is a very cost-efficient way of gaining lots of knowledge and improve quality of work, resulting in less rework and an improvement of performance.

The last tip on spending time more effective is to talk about it during the Daily Scrum. Talk to each other about the work one is doing and find a way to finish the work today. This will increase focus on getting the work done, it will put importance on it. Making your work more important than meetings makes it also easier to say no and stay focused.

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Let me know what is holding you back to increase performance or let me know what you did to get things done in the comments below!