At last – the Case Study of SummerSchool Week 7 has been finished! Damned seven. Don’t you think so?!

Anyway, we are happy to present the missing Case Study of SummerSchool and to have a study now about the other approach for the introduction of Scrum: Bottom-up. And what’s more, it’s from a company and department which you wouldn’t expect to be so flexible. Prejudice!

The department “Justice Applications” of the Federal Computing Centre (BRZ) have introduced Scrum very successfully of their own accord, at first even without any external support and in spite of quite a few restrictions and they are now setting standards with their current productivity.

How that works? Read about it! 100830_case study brz

A big, fat thank you to CSM & CSPO Mathia Maurer, who found the time for 2 interviews and had the stamina for the rather complicated approval process by the department. I don’t even know how many ScrumCooking invitations I owe you now ;)

Katrin Dietze
Hands on Design, Marketing Team

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“Tobias will be stepping down as a staff member for the Scrum Alliance September 30th.” Jim Cundiff wrote last week. I regret that very much for in my opinion Tobias was extraordinarily committed and used to stand up for the well-being of Scrum Alliance. SA will certainly not lose him as a contributor but as a colleague and as a source of inspiration.

The question immediately forcing itself on the mind is: Why? What’s the matter? And why are people leaving SA as staff members, people who I know only had the well-being of the  Scrum  Community in mind? Last year it was Stacia, this year it is Tobias.

First, it is irrelevant, however, why Tobias, who among other things has been working untiringly for a new transparent programme for the certification of  Scrum Trainers, is leaving. He is leaving and SA will lose an upright, deeply convinced Scrum Evangelist standing up for decentralisation, transparency, open-mindedness and a clear, democratic policy. What a pity. For me this is another evidence for the feeling taking hold of me for the past 12 months: SA is en route towards centralisation, concentration of power and institutionalisation.

Let’s look at the only thing Scrum Alliance is all about.  Control of the one certification, which is ineffective  in fact and which Ken transferred to Scrum Alliance 4 years ago. He, who at that time did not want a single person to have the power to control a whole market, handed it over to an institution. This institution has had several years now to establish a system of certifying CSTs and CSMs adequate to the values we would like to communicate to our customers,  ScrumMasters and participants in training courses.

So far SA has failed to meet these standard, at least as I define them. The system, which Tobias established to the best of his knowledge, basically well-intentioned, is corrupt in my eyes. Scrum Trainers write endorsements for Scrum Trainers,  networks and Old Boy’s Networks are developing because it stands to reason that an endorsement will be written if the other guy writes one too.

Even if you mean well,  e.g. if I write an endorsement for Peter and he writes one for me, and I take it for granted that you will believe me that I do know Peter well enough and that I do know how to write such an endorsement, we cannot really dispel the suspicion inevitably arising vis a vis this system. You believe us or you don’t.

That is the reason why to date I ceased to deal with re-certification for the time being after writing the first two euphoric requests, which I had originally sent to Andreas Schliep and Peter Hundermark,  who really wrote nice endorsements.  This is even justifiable for SA are discussing again whether they want to change the system and in fact it doesn’t matter as  SA are introducing the SA Registered Education Provider. Thus, the profession of the CST has come to an end. Organisations will offer countless training courses as Scrum Registered Education Providers in the next months.  The CST is about to disappear as a profession which can  feed the practitioner without being emplyed.

The Trainers and the SA Board reading these lines will reply that I didn’t look after this process in the past 12 months. That is true, but I knew it was in the best hands with Tobias taking care, in spite of the above mentioned aspect. Now this has definitely changed. To be honest, I didn’t feel like taking part in a discussion about sense and nonsense of the new system, with the politically most influential CSTs  not even participating in public, and it’s evident that the discussion proper will be taking place somewhere in the USA over a glass of beer. We’ll see what the discussions of this topic at the Scrum Gathering on Wednesday will bring.

I’ll keep you posted.

Boris

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Outer space – infinite spaces. We count the year 2020. These are the adventures of the Scrum Enterprise®, run by a crew of 400 men (and women), travelling for ten years to explore new markets, with new ways of thinking and new methodologies. Many light years away from the Waterfall, Scrum Enterprise® enters utopias that no one has ever dared dream before.

The Scrum Summer School closes today and says good bye until the summer of 2011. We say Thank You for your active involvement, all the mail you sent us, and the good feedback!

We have finished off our Scrum Summer School with a utopia that concerns our mission for society.

It remains to point out one aspect that we have tried to live with you during the past eight weeks: sharing information and treating one another with respect in all our dealings. We have told you about our projects, our customers, and internal matters, because we as a company want to live our aspirations. We hope you had fun sharing our thoughts.

One more thing to be said, our mission statement. This is our ideal that is to guide us, and by which we want to be measured in the future.

At the very last, a preview of the next months: until the end of the year we will be very busy at bor!sgloger: Scrum Gathering 2010 in Cape Town is coming, autumn starts with a full schedule of Trainings, and we will help several organizations to implement Scrum. We have to train new employees, e.g. our new Trainer, the Training department needs more stable processes, the preparations for OOP 2011 have started, the third edition of my book has to be finished, we’re working on Scrum Day in Berlin with the ImmobilienScout24, the website needs a new design and  has to be fed contents on Consulting … and many, many more things.

The Scrum Summer School says bye bye, so long and see you!

Boris Gloger
and the complete bor!sgloger team

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1. How does one create a utopia, a vision for oneself, one’s company, one’s product? You can find one answer in my book: Scrum – Produkte zuverlässig und schnell entwickeln. Another possibility would be, to become clear in one’s mind, where one wants to get over the next 20 years and then start running. Otherwise the utopia remains a dream and never turns into reality.
2. I strongly recommend the book Utopia by Thomas Morus. Everyone who ever changed anything had a dream, a utopia in their minds, if they wanted to reach something.
3. Why a utopia at all? Because it releases energy. Klaus Kobjoll aptly says that the higher the aims you set yourself, the more energy is released. Fanaticism, the strongest form of energy, is at the same time very destructive.
4. The books by Tom Peters are also immensely worth reading. Re-imagine! for example.

The path that is completely different! There are people who get extremely scared, if they start to think about the utopia for their lives, for their companies, or other big topics. They get much more frustrated by seeing everything they still don’t have, than they get motivated to reach it. For such people I recommend the exact opposite: not to set any goals, never to think about the big picture, but just to follow their inner needs. To listen to the inner voice every day, and to do exactly what they want to do right NOW. Then you’ll find you have reached your very personal utopia and you are already living it. Every day!

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Our customer, a quickly growing and profitable IT company in Hamburg, is looking for a Product Owner (m/f) to start as soon as possible. They have been using Scrum for product development for about three years.

Your Responsibility:

• Development of a long term product strategy with a high  degree of flexibility and freedom
• Define product requirements as well as further product development and optimization
• Ensure good communication about changes to internal interfaces and users

Your Competencies:

• Higher education edgree or comparable education
• Multi-year experience in product management (Beginners also have a chance). Experience with online-business and excellent technical skills are preferred
• Excellent analytical skills in order to  structure technically complicated issues
• Experience with Scrum (at least theoretical knowledge) is preferred
• Excellent knowledge of English to work with many international team members

Please send your resume to: Andre.Haeusling@scrumjobs.com

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Our customer, an exciting start-up company in Berlin is looking for a Scrum Master to introduce Scrum starting October 10, 2010. (m/f) We are looking for someone  who likes  challenges, has an extremely high learning curve and demonstrates a high level of independence and self-responsibility.

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During this last week of Summer School there is a lot of talk about the utopia, the wish for an ideal (or idealized) state, of which one does not know whether it can ever become real, although this is to be wished for. Any utopia that is merely descriptive of such a desirable state (whether state, social system, corporate structure), must remain academic or a dream, if there is not the strong will and effort to reach it.

The bor!sgloger ‘utopia’

Those who have known  Boris Gloger for longer, and have followed this blog, could see over the past months how the one man show Boris Gloger (First Certified Scrum Trainer Ever, working on three continents, spreading his passion for Scrum in more than 200 trainings and numerous corporate coachings) turned into the bor!sgloger team – by now a team of twelve people, organized in the two companies bor!sgloger consulting gmbh and bor!sgloger training KG, and representing the biggest European service company in the field of Scrum.

In this time of transformation we, the bor!sgloger team, went through the experience of permanent challenges, just like any company that lives through such a development: the difficulties of team building (both on the organization level, and on the personal level), finding out the limits of competences, communication problems, grey areas of responsibilities, you name it … All this happening to us, who wanted to get everything right, and with the additional challenges of being confronted with geographical distances (three countries) and structural spread (two companies, several freelancers).

How did – and do – we meet these challenges? Since we are committed to Scrum principles, we focus on communication and transparency; we experiment: lots of self-reliance and autonomous responsibility for the teams – we were all agreed on the basics. How to live this, though, when confronted with realities, in the face of a permanently and constantly faster changing market?

Our Principles

In an open discussion and by democratic vote, the core team of bor!sgloger agreed on the following principles as the basis of our corporate activities:

1. The Principle of Distribution of Responsibilities
   To make it possible for teams and employees to act in an agile and adaptive way and take decisions self-responsibly, corporate divisions and areas of activity are singled out and delegated  to employees with entire responsibility, including even extensive freedoms of investing. They can and should use these, while weighing the importance of the respective issues for the company as a whole, without first having to haggle over a budget or get it grudgingly conceded. Every employees is co-responsible for the success of the company as a whole, by their own commitment to this task, and in their own sphere.
2. The Principle of  Information-Sharing /Transparency
   To make this work all those involved have to know about the company goals and the financial situation. In addition to constant involvement in strategic planning and roadmapping, we have begun to collect all the decisive data on finances, and to publish them within the company. Absolutely everyone of us can have a look at the company figures: incoming-outgoing, surplus, investments, key figures for trainings, consulting capacities. At the moment we have monthly updates, but soon they should be weekly, and our ambition and our goal for the future is to have up-to-the-minute figures.
3. The principle of Consultation and mutual Support
   The first principle can only work, if we lives accordingly: the daily business can always lead to situations in which the single person cannot – or does not want to – decide on their own within their area of responsibility. This case they can and should ask another person in the company for their opinion and/or support, or discuss the topic in the team. However, the authority for the decision is still only that person’s alone. Responsibility for the decision is borne by everybody together. [1]

Those three principles have been in use for several weeks now, and first experiences gained during that time has confirmed our hopes and expectations. The challenges of the next months will show, how sustainable and strong our concept actually is. We are ready to learn from mistakes, and to react in an Agile way to changes in the company and the market.
We’ll keep you posted. Here, at borisgloger.com.

[1] See: Niels Pfläging, The Twelve New Laws of Leadership (Die 12 neuen Gesetze der Führung)

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There are matters that we, in our present times, take for common inalienable rights of mankind, for the indisputable and unchangeable basis of our social structure and our possibilities. However, all of these were more or less brought into being by the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Before, such thoughts were mere utopias.

It took just a few paradigmatic changes for the move from absolutism to modern democracy. The basic principles declared by the Enlightenment are somehow quite similar to the Agile Manifesto. The human mind stands above everything else, freedom instead of absolutism, equality instead of caste, science instead of superstition and prejudices, tolerance instead of dogma. To the ‘evangelists’ of the day the way forward was to lie in the enlightenment of the suppressed: once they developed consciousness, people would of themselves become responsible and actively shape their social, political, and spiritual lives.

The ideals of the Enlightenment were developed by an elite of higher middle class and aristocratic circles.  They stood in direct contrast to the power structures of their time, to the accepted social order, and to sometimes to the Law.

Even in those enlightened circles there were doubts, and the question, still significant from our point of view, was: didn’t this new era need new citizens, capable of handling such responsibilities? Was it possible to put so many rights and so much participation into the hands of the people? Even the citizens concerned did not always welcome the Enlightenement. To disturb God’s order as manifested by the absolutist monarchs was not something that could be accepted lightly. Different views had to be taken into account, since after all, one’s soul and afterlife was at stake, and only to be saved by patiently and humbly supporting the Status Quo. (comparable to today’s view of retirement).

Women would have to wait more than 200 years longer, by the way, until they, at least theoretically, had any rights to shape their own lives freely and according to their own ideas in all aspects. And again, there was doubt and hesitation – apart from all the other known socio-political aspects, which cannot be regarded more closely in this place – whether people would be capable of taking up this responsibility indeed.

Those freedoms we have in our society at present have been hard won and slowly built up. We had to overcome doubts and insecurities and trust in an idea and a vision that seemed impossible to live under the given circumstances and hardly to be imagined even. Yet we have come this far. It took debates, revolutions, negotiations, conferences, successes and, failures. There had to be people who did their bit to make a change. Against established doctrine and also, time and again against hard won scientific opinions.

***

So, if we regard our organizations against a background of  Scrum, of agile software development, and if we want to develop them further, then inevitably we arrive at the question of what the utopia, the vision that we follow, actually is. Do we dare to move our organization out of the present absolutist state, to democratize it? Can we take it upon ourselves as managers, entrepreneurs, and investors to give up ‘reliable’ and internalised power structures, to interpret our higher responsibility for this world in the sense that we should make room for something new? Are we as employees, as dependent workers ready to take upon us more responsibility than that agreed upon in the contracts of the past centuries? Can we imagine a (corporate) world without absolutist power structures? No God given corporate emperors, area kings, departmental dukes, no foot soldiers? Can we imagine that all human beings are in fact equal, irrespective of birth (training), race (discipline), their class (hierarchy), and their religion (convictions)?

Are we ready for the same separation of powers in our companies as the one written into our constitution? A separation in the interest of a higher whole. One that sees people with their responsibility, not their power and influence. Then we could have self-organising teams, for the dissolution of hierarchical structures in organizations, and for the redistribution of traditional leadership and management roles into varying roles, or even roles to be filled by varying persons.

In this case we, the former entrepreneurs, investors, managers, employees, and customers, would be ready for democratic ways of acting and negotiating with one another. We would try harder to find new ways of dealing with one another. We would help one another to find the courage to leave what we have learned and acquired, and to walk towards this new vision with openness, good sense, and regard.

We, the bor!sgloger Team, believe in our responsibility for the this world. Wherever we are, and in whatever way we can contribute. We believe that sustainable economic management is not only a matter of dealing with material resources, but also concerns the sphere of immaterial actions.

Yes, of course, the principle of economic viability holds good for every company that wants to survive. (On the other hand dying would be another evolutionary option that may be thought about.) We do not wish to forget the other maxims from the Agile Manifesto over this. In thought and in theory these discontinuities do exist already. Together with our customers we work on their manifestation in projects and forms of organizations.

***

If you find this blog too philosophical, here is a practical exercise in organization development:

1.) Preamble

Language creates reality, and the limits of language are the limits of the individual world view (Ludwig Wittgenstein). If semantics can be seen as language, then we can also look at the organization chart, as we know it, as limiting the corporate world view and the company’s self view.

2.) Exercise

Create a picture of your company that completely eschews every element of existing representations (as e.g. organizational charts etc.). Do this without using either electronic media (PowerPoint, mind map), or flip charts or pin boards. Use the room you are in, and whatever you find there, excepting the above mentioned things. Tell a colleague about your company through the ‘drawing’ you have made in this way. Then put this one question to yourself and your colleague: What does this picture let us see about us, about our company?

3.) Reflection

Dissolve the picture in a sustainable way. Keep only the knowledge you have gained from this one question, and introduce it into the discourse about the development of your organization.

Organization development with Scrum is more than a short term optimization of team productivity or efficiency. We passionately and consistently follow a vision in which we all take part. And that we impart.

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Summer School is starting its final week: our utopia. Utopia is characterized by crticizing the dominant social circumstances in society and at the same time proposing an ideal situation for revoking the criticized circumstances. [1]  The bor!sgloger team wants to show  you our utopia this week and show how we as an internationally competitive company try to achieve this utopia.

A utopia for work in the 21st century – a beginning

One of my colleagues was extremely angry last week, when I said to him: “You work for me!”….So it happened to me, to the Scrum guru, to the representative of the radically different way of thinking, to the guy who tries to seduce companies to try something different, to try something they don’t believe in to begin with. I had fallen into the manner of thinking from  the capitalistic stone age.

Then  as a friend and long time colleague  told me, he works for the cause, the company, the success of the team, but not for me, I was somewhat upset as I do pay him out of my own pocket. On the other hand I knew this made sense. He really did not work for me, but for himself. Whether I liked it or not, whether it made me angry or not, in reality what is obvious at the beginning of the 21st century: in our society, with our levels of education and our high living standard, we no longer work for the boss, the company or the money, but for ourselves: for the joy, for the self improvment, for the attainment of our goals.

In the 21st century there is no room for the ideas of Taylor, Slone and even the progresive concepts of Peter Drucker, or the thinking of the Harvard Business Review and the traditional teachings of BWL in the world of work and companies. All of these ideas are owed to the classical picture of modern organization, that Max Weber described with bueaucratization and that we all daily experience, if we have anything to do with process driven and rule based standard procedures in companies.

But wait a moment. We have extremely successful organizations. Were these ideas so wrong? Wasn’t it the Taylor oriented organizations that made the western industrial nations what they are today: extremely powerful super powers, who can afford to have 25% of their employable population not work or are so poorly educated that they can’t be allowed to work, or that it is too expensive or makes no sense to educate them? Because that, what you could teach them for a reasonable price, would only be enough so that they could work in Taylor styled organizations on assembly lines, in a laundry or picking apples. Unfortunately it is now cheaper to have machines, foreign workers or outsourcing to do this type of work rather than your own countries population.

Why then this utopia? Why do we need a new way of working with each other? Why do we need an new understanding of companies, if the old models were so successful?

Because these models are no longer adequate!

For example the clothing industry: the mass manufacture of clothing has ended. Zara offers for example, mass produced clothing, but for how much longer? After only a few days, the next product is brought into the store or discontinued, based on information gained from the market. Companies like Zara and H&M have utilized the old paradigm, the law of estimation: low profit margins, but gigantic overhead costs, that is their business.

The production chain is lean, so lean that our friends that talk about lean in the software develpment industry in reality do not know, what they are talking about. This type of lean is so extremely process oriented, that it is indeed lean, but certainly not agil. This industry has managed using the quality criteria of Six Sigma to deliver articles with only 5 mistakes in a million. Product checks have to be performed to find mistakes, although one can not really test live action instances: There are no mistakes … and people are optimized out in every conceivable position.

But how are things produced in companies like Zara? Who makes the decisions? Main headquarters make the decisions at Zara. There extremely well educated, cross functional teams sit and analyze trends, design new articles of clothing (allow themselves be inspired, or steal ideas) to be produced. They use very short sprints. Everything is extemely centralized: Dieter Rösner said it very well: the more an organization (a system) outsources, the more centralized it becomes. Again this has nothing to do with ‘agile’.

Companies like Zara go for optimization. They create extremely good processes to quickly adapt to the actual market situation. Their business is mass production. They use clear processes, employees must adhere to strict standards and everything is supported by technology. Without this technological support it would not be possible to maintain this degree of centralization.

***

In addition to this path to greatness, to conformity, there is also a path to a specific niche. This path can be achieved in a totally different manner: high adaptation and distinctiviness in image. Extremely good knowledge of their market and extremely well educated employees that work for themselves. Employees, that are no longer called employees, but talents, like Tom Peters suggests. People who know why they are there today and know exactly what job they need to do. These companies must make their employees talents, treat them accordingly and involve them in company decisions. In these companies talents must make decisions so quickly that they can not afford to wait for slow, bureaucratic structures. The consequence is that these companies can then be split and/or new companies can be formed.  Look at Gore, Salesforce.com or 3M. Companies in which talents all have been granted a necessary  degree of freedom. At Netflix [3], it is left entirely up to the employees how much, how long or how often they want to take vacation.

These companies are the ones that today have an entirely different understanding of how one treats employees. These companies will consequently change our society in the long run. On a happy note for Germany, management gurus like Tom Peters think that companies in Germany are already a head of the pack. In “West Germany’s Unsung Economic Miracle” [2] he writes that the middle class has managed to make the economy of Germany strong. He is absolutely right about this. German companies can not keep up with American companies. Market capitalization of Apple and Google beat everything that Siemens has to offer. Even some Spanish c0mpanies are better, than the German ones… but that is the middle class: totally different structures, closer to the market, good in their niche. The same is true by the way for Austria.

Small companies need processes and they are well counseled to let these ISO be certified and to deal with Total Quality Management and EFQM [4], but they need above all innovation and continuous renewal. In my opinion that only works, if companies hire people, who take the song of the capital employee seriously.

In a few years, or maybe in one or two decades we will have more and more companies that manage to give their employees room to live and develop: companies in which people work, where every morning they like going to work, not because work is what it is all about, but because they want to complete a task, to contribute something, to have a voice in what is happening and to find recognition in their society, where an individual can be respected for being different. Companies in which like at Schindlerhof [5] every employee can see the relevance of business performance indicators every day, like in Semco, in which the people democratically make all decisions together or at Netflix, where employees decide completely on their own when to take a vacation.

***

An alternative to this scenario does not really exist in the western world: billions of people, can be hired cheaply as due to their poor living standards they are willing to work under degrading working conditions and for stavation wages. If we as a society want to still have something to say in a few decades and if we want to continue to care for our aging population that in part has never really worked hard in their lives, the only way we can do this is through perfected automation and in an extreme increase in effectiveness of the working strength of well educated people.

—

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopie

[2] http://www.tompeters.com/printer_friendly.php?print=1&note=columns/005257

[3] Netflix lets its staff take as much holiday as they want, whenever they want — at it works

[4] EFQM: The EFQM-Modell for Business Excellence ist a business model that enables a holistic view of organizations. It was developed by EFQM as  Europe’s answer to the US’ highly valued Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the Japanese Deming-Prize. It offers organizations help in constructing and developing sustainable comprehensive management systems.  Businesses value it as a tool, to determine the basis for self-evaluated strengths and improvement potentials, to encourage and improve their business success.

Source: Wikipedia

[5] The Schindlerhof is Germany’s best conference hotel

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Even our Scrumlies were interested in  “Money for Nothing”, one of two Methods for Value Based Pricing introduced this week at summer school.
Rudolf even developed a special version based on “your  own value”.

So that was week seven, topic “Scrum and Fixed price”! Summer is almost over and Summer School will also close soon. In our  eight and final week we will look at the future of Scrum. Starting Monday here at borisgloger.com.

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