Tag: Professional Scrum

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Fixed Price bids. An open invitation to bribe, cajole, lie and cheat.

I have been fortunate. Because some things take time and I have had the time to experience Scrum deeply before the demand rose sky high at my local markets. Time and experience formed the foundation upon which I build in some larger scale Scrum transformations that I am involved in.

I have learned much. I have much to learn. Yet, some people ask for my opinion.

A frequently recurring question is on the combination of agile and fixed price bids (and contracts). Here are my thoughts:

I have an opinion

Fixed price bids are an open invitation to bribe, cajole, lie and cheat.

  • Fixed price contracts introduce a blaming culture. They don’t aim at collaboration and sharing but at shifting all risk to one of the contracting parties. It invites people and organizations to be dishonest and fight in order not to take the blame (and the penalties). It might end up with the supplier financially getting hung, or the requester getting bad quality or not getting work by devious (and clause-wise) omission.
  • Fixed prices deny the very nature of our business. Software development is complex and creative work. There are a lot of elements that influence process and progress, and the number of unpredictable elements surpasses the number of predictable ones.
  • Fixed prices thrive on the belief that time, budget and scope can be fixed and planned upfront. Although everybody (at least off the record) acknowledges the truth in the metaphor of the iron triangle of software development, few seem to say it aloud. Hereby, fixing time, budget ànd scope creates only one certainty, i.e. low quality.

I have experience

Fixed prices define ‘success’ as the predicted combination of in-time+on-budget+promised-scope. Research by the Standish group has shown that agile is more successful than a traditional approach, even against these old criteria. This is not a reason to promote the combination! Yield rate is better but still low by setting the wrong expectations in the context of software development, i.e. that the unplannable can be predicted in a plan.

In the early years of my life in agile, I have delivered several fixed price projects successfully with Scrum. I even developed a framework for it. Still, from a contracting point of view it introduced the notion of ‘fixed price-negotiable scope’. Every single time that this notion was neglected or ignored I ended up in a one-way scope negotiation situation. The bleeding, the pain and the war situations never positively contributed to quality, time to market, user satisfaction, ROI, TCO. Blaming and penalties just appeal to a primitive sense of revenge.

In our Professional Scrum courses we work with the people in the class to figure out options to use Scrum. We try to facilitate bottom-up knowledge generation. We consider parameters and complexities that influence IT and software development, to find that in general we can’t be sure we have them all, and that at least some of the known ones are still quite unpredictable.

Agile via Scrum restores the understanding of the true nature of software development, and offers new ways of working and control to deal with uncertainty. It helps us to shift from the industrial to the creative paradigm and to accept that software development and fixed price contracts are not fit for each other.

I have a dream

Against all experience in, proven low yield rate, failures, burnt-out people and caused distress, the belief remains that a fixed price contract offers certainty. Although there is a tangible and incredible way to deal with the natural uncertainty of software development, Scrum. Scrum allows us to collaborate and behave as partners. We can jointly evolve, learn and check regularly on what does/does not work. But it still requires the first, huge step to let go of the false belief in planned certainty.

I have a dream; the dream that IT professionals stop offering on fixed price bids. Because it is unethical, risky and untrustworthy to make that kind of hard-coded promises in a complex and fast-changing environment. It is… unprofessional. And there is a great alternative option.

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Training Room with a View

I was recently in Offenbach (near Frankfurt, Germany) to facilitate a Professional Scrum Master training for German colleagues. Our learning & development center in Munich had set up the training in the best room I was ever able to do a training in. We had the 30th floor of the gigantic City Tower completely for us. And it offered a terrific view over the area and lots of daylight in the room.

Was it the location? The frequently passing airplanes? Or the sheer enthusiasm of my colleagues? Fact is that it was truly one of my most enjoyable Professional Scrum journeys so far…

Fyi. The City Tower has a height of 120m, and the top floor is the 31st (so still one above us). The tower is not completely taken by Capgemini, by the way…

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The importance of Done in Scrum

In the last Scrum Guide (July 2011) the definition of Done was given considerably more attention. Rightfully, as “Done” is crucial in Scrum.

The Importance Of Done

The definition of Done is essential to fully understand the Increment that is being inspected at the Sprint Review with the stakeholders. The definition of Done implements the expectation of an Increment to be ‘releasable‘, so ideally it is comprised of all activities, tasks, qualities and work that allow releasing an Increment in production. The addition ‘potentially‘ to releasable refers to the Product Owner’s accountability to decide over the actual release of an Increment; a decision that will likely be based upon business cohesion and functional usefulness. But the Product Owner’s shipping decision should not be constrained by ‘development’ work.

The definition of Done should be clear and concise for the Scrum Team as it will determine how much work a Development Team can reasonably take in into a Sprint during the Sprint Planning meeting.

The empiricism of Scrum only functions well upon transparency. That includes the definition of Done. Transparency means not only visible, but also understandable. Besides being available, the content of the definition of Done should be clear by just reading it.

A New Scrum Artefact?

Should we make the Definition of Done an official Scrum artefact?

It would seem like adapting Scrum to reality, a mere formalization of an existing practice; because it is extremely important to put quality even more at the heart of what we do; because we want to clear out that little grey zone in the base Scrum framework allowing some people to doubt the formal need of a definition of Done. With regards to the latter, it would provide additional guidance for people and organizations to improve, and investigate the next steps on the cobblestone path to Agility, although probably not the guarantee hoped for by making it a mandatory artefact.

All existing Scrum artefacts support the ‘inspect & adapt‘ cycles of Scrum; they provide accurate, up to date and transparent information to be inspected and adapted at the rhythm of the Scrum events (or sooner). In that sense, Done is already an artefact; it is in the Increment, making the state of the Increment transparent.

I suggest to formally include inspection of the Definition of Done at the Sprint Review, along the inspection of the working Increment, which it is a characteristic of. This pair-wise inspection serves to get feedback and input from the stakeholders that goes beyond mere functionality and business requirements. It will invoke a collaborative conversation over quality, and requirements with regards to the quality of working software in the organization.

The Sprint Review is also the time to inspect the current state of Product Backlog, i.e. what is now Done, what was left undone in this Sprint, what was additionally turned Done. From this current state, including the latest Velocity measurement, the actual product progress is available to the stakeholders.

I suggest to lay ownership over the definition of Done with the Development Team. A definition of Done can’t be forced upon a Development Team. Neither can it be cut short by forces outside of the Development Team. The Development Team will obviously include functional quality expectations from the Product Owner. The Development Team will obviously include general, organizational expectations and compliance (e.g. from the development or engineering organization). But it’s up to the Development Team to process it in the definition of Done. Decisions over the definition of Done will depend on the presence of skills, authorizations and availability of external systems, services and interfaces. Probably a Development Team would include stubs and simulators for non-available systems, add this to their definition of Done and make the impact of these dependencies clear to the Product Owner for ordering the Product Backlog. The effect on the planning horizon will no longer only be clear to the stakeholders by inspection of the Product Backlog at the Sprint Review, but also via explicit inspection of the definition of Done accompanying the working Increment.

The inspection of the working Increment and the definition of Done at the Sprint Review, and the related collaboration of the Scrum Team with the stakeholders, will provide the Development Team with important information to sustain, evolve and grow the definition of Done. They will probably have a deeper conversation over it at the Sprint Retrospective. The self-organizing drive of the Development Team will include all that’s actually possible, dig deeper, taking into account the feedback from the stakeholders, and evolve it as part of their continuous improvement of quality.

This ownership is comparable to the Product Backlog ownership. The Product Owner has accountability over it. But it won’t withhold the Product Owner from taking into account the technical and development input from the team. It won’t withhold the Product Owner from taking into account dependencies, non-functionals and organizational expectations. And after all, the frequent inspection of a working Increment provides information on reality to all involved so they can incorporate that in their work via their accountability.

A Desirable Side-effect

Although the goal is not to promote the Definition of Done to a Scrum artefact (as shown that is not needed), I do see an optional side-effect in explicitly inspecting it at the Sprint Review: additional transparency to the overall agile adoption.

Obviously the definition of Done will not always immediately, from day 1 of the adoption of Scrum, hold every possible task, activity or requirement to render every Increment completely production-ready. There will be a gradual evolution in applying Scrum. This is good as it helps all players continuously exploit the possible to a maximum extent.

Promoting inspection of the definition of Done with the stakeholders will help identify improvement areas in capturing enterprise agility. The finding of what is/is not included provides an indication on involvement of the broader organization in agile product development, even of organizational impediments. And stakeholders, in consultation with Product Owner and Scrum Master, might want to act on these from a management change perspective.

In a transformational period, including the definition of Done as an explicit artefact in the Scrum framework will help people and organizations in the software industry to… improve from better and more realistic insights.

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Personal Professional Scrum

Precaution: the author (me) is lately sharing a load of personal, retrospective findings with the world (you). Must be that he’s leaving some troubles and worries behind him. Or maybe it’s just the pills he’s taking?

It wasn’t until I started doing projects upon eXtreme Programming (2003) and Scrum (2004) that I finally found my way in IT, and started feeling at ease at a personal-slash-professional level. It then still took me several years (>2011) to find a professional homebase (some call it an employer) where I could really ‘go’ for my Agile and Scrum ways.

In the early years I never cared about profile or promotion; just me, expertise & the teams. But on the cross-point of deciding yes or no to stay in IT consultancy, I decided to give it one more chance. But it would be a ‘make or break’ and it had to be Agile and Scrum. I resurrected the knowledge and experience hidden in my brain and started publishing about it again. I finally went to Capgemini (March 2010), attracted by the fact that they had co-founded the Agile Consortium Belgium.

This was around the time that saw the emergence of Scrum.org by Ken Schwaber. I had my CSM by Ken back in 2004 but that was it. Never even considered CSP, CSC, CST or any other CS*. My reluctance for profile and promotion, you know. I liked the feel and the why of Scrum.org and engaged early. Full of doubts, but I demonstrated a good understanding as Professional Scrum Master, level I and level II. Confidence grew, I applied for PSM trainer, went to a PSM course by Ken (December 2010) and qualified as trainer.

Happily invited at an early class of the new Professional Scrum Product Owner program (April 2011), I fully subscribed the program’s goal of reaching out to Business people and helping Agile Product Management emerge. I demonstrated my understanding and my training qualification was extended with PSPO.

After a little migration within Capgemini I am now in the greatest position ever of working day and night in promoting, maintaining, supporting, coaching, training and facilitating Scrum; internally as well as at customers, locally (Belgium and Netherlands) and globally. And the Capgemini Academy is rolling out a training offering for private and for external audiences that combines:

  • Our Capgemini trainings: Scrum Kickstart, Scrum for Product People and Scrum for Managers;
  • The official Scrum.org trainings PSM and PSPO.

Our strategy connects to the vision of Scrum.org in presenting Scrum as a tool for Business Agility, not as an end in itself. As from Capgemini I sincerely hope to have impact but from a positive, open and adaptive attitude. Not grumpy or bitter or aggressive. Knowing that the path to Agility will remain a cobblestone path and there will be ups and downs. Keep an eye on the overall progress trend, a burnup chart of Agile values and Agility. Make the world a better place (to work in).