ZenHub Webinar The Top Challenges with Scrum in 2024

Read or listen to my answers I gave during the webinar organized by ZenHub with Mike Cohn and Klaus Boedker. We discuss some touchy subjects. You can find the full webinar on the ZenHub website, and here you can find my personal answer.

🙇‍♀️ Feeling bogged down by Scrum ceremonies? You’re not alone! This video dives into common challenges teams face with Scrum, including:

▪️Perception of wasted time: Is Scrum really that time-consuming? We discuss streamlining processes without sacrificing value.

▪️Scrum Master juggling roles: Learn how a Scrum Master wearing too many hats can impact team performance.

▪️Doing Scrum without training: Discover tips for successful Scrum adoption, even without formal training.

▪️Scrum Master struggles: Feeling undervalued? We explore strategies to showcase your worth and champion Scrum’s benefits.

▪️The value of Scrum events: Are daily standups a waste of time? Experts discuss optimizing Scrum ceremonies for maximum impact.

Transcript

ZenHub2: since we have about three minutes right now, I’ll probably, we can probably start letting people in just to, to make sure that we run things on time. Um, so I’ll start the actual webinar.

ZenHub2: Um, so yeah, people will be joining and the recording will start in just a second.

ZenHub1: Cool.

ZenHub2: Awesome. Thanks.

ZenHub1: And yeah, as people are joining here, yeah, no problem guys. Thanks for joining. I really appreciate it. And obviously, um, we wouldn’t be able to do this without all of you. So, um, really appreciate you giving us 45 minutes and then all the prep time that went into this as well on your end.

ZenHub1: So, um, it’s great.

Mike Cohn: Bob, is your background real? It looks too organized. It looks fake, but I think it’s real. It, it’s real.

Klaus Boedker: It’s, uh, with the help of my wife, it looks better than I would have done. Okay. It’s one of those that looks

Mike Cohn: like people put up as photos. Recording in

ZenHub1: progress.

ZenHub1: Chase and Kristen, maybe you can jump in here and you can just see my screen. Um, yeah. Slides that I have up. Perfect. Okay. Yeah, it looks good. Right.

Mike Cohn: Are there slides for what we’re doing? Or is it just like that title slide?

ZenHub1: They’re just kind of mostly directional. So it’ll be the questions that you guys already have. And then we’ll have a few just questions up so that anyone listening doesn’t have to try to remember what I said or kind of recall back or write anything down.

ZenHub1: It’ll be up on the screen in front of them. And that way, if you guys want to refer back to that, when you’re giving an answer as well, then you, uh, you can, we have those up on the screen, but yeah, they’re, Not a lot of, not a lot of writing. We, we try to keep it simple so that people weren’t having to, uh, you know, spend time writing and could really spend time listening to the answers.

ZenHub1: So awesome.

Mike Cohn: Have you seen, um, stream alive yet for zoom

ZenHub1: stream alive? I’ve not seen that now. It’s

Mike Cohn: pretty cool. You can do things like have people in the chat type in where they’re located and a map will pop up with all of the locations with dots for where they’re commenting, it’s got an AI that will read the.

Mike Cohn: Chat and extract questions from the chat. It’s pretty cool. I’ve been experimenting with it. So very cool.

ZenHub1: Well, Hey, we have 22 participants joined so far. Um, we’re still gonna give it a few minutes just so we can start on time, but that’s a great idea if anyone wants to jump into the Q and a and, um, share their name, where they’re from, where they’re working, um, we’d love to know who’s all here on, so feel free to jump in if you do want to share.

ZenHub1: Uh, your name and where you’re joining from today. That would be great. And like I said, we’ll give things a couple more minutes here just so that anyone that, uh, is grabbing a coffee or, uh, um, grabbing a water before the webinar, uh, can still join here.

ZenHub1: Elspeth joining in from Ottawa. Hey, Elspeth. Elspeth

ZenHub1: is our creative director. Always supportive.

ZenHub1: Matthew from Vegas. Thanks for joining. Don from Dayton, Ohio. Thanks for joining. It’s good to see you both.

ZenHub1: Hopefully everyone can see those. It’s not just me.

Mike Cohn: Took me a minute to figure out where they’re coming in. They’re coming in in the Q& A. In the Q& A,

ZenHub1: yeah.

Mike Cohn: So I never use zoom webinar side. I use zoom for meetings, not the webinar part of it. So I mean, to check it out again.

ZenHub1: Yeah, that’s pretty good. It’s powered all of our webinars and it hasn’t let us down so far.

ZenHub1: So

Mike Cohn: I remember the, you know, the early pandemic when was like, is zoom going to be able to handle it? We’ll zoom break the internet. Like I I’m impressed. I mean, they did an amazing job

ZenHub1: scaling up. So. It’s a go from people are occasionally using this to run video calls to now every company is powered by this constantly for eight hours a day is yeah, pretty impressive on the engineering side when it comes to scaling.

ZenHub1: So, yep, they did a great job.

Mike Cohn: My dad told me he bought zoom stock like a month before the pandemic. He has no idea what it was. It was just some, some article and then it like doubled really quickly. So he sold it because he didn’t really know what he owned. And it was like, yeah, so.

ZenHub1: All right. Well, I think we can get started here. I know we have a packed agenda. I don’t want to wait, uh, wait too long here and kind of cut into the time. People are still trickling in, which is okay that, um, But yeah, um, we’ll start off by just saying thanks so much for everyone who’s joining today. Um, all the participants and audience members who’ve taken time out of their day to join us.

ZenHub1: And, um, especially thanks to our panelists who I’ll let introduce themselves in a moment here. My name is Aaron Upright. I’m one of the co founders of Zenhub. And I have the privilege of hosting today with, like I said, three fantastic guests from the Agile community here. Before we just jump into the webinar, I wanted to provide a bit of background on the webinar and some of the key themes that we’re going to be discussing today.

ZenHub1: Earlier this year, we ran a survey with 30 scrum practitioners to try to better understand some of the biggest challenges and really just questions, concerns maybe that were coming up with the scrum framework in 2024. I’ll add that this wasn’t your typical statistically significant research survey or research project that we conducted, you know, we didn’t go survey thousands of people and try to get to that statistically significant answer what we really just wanted to get a better sense about quickly is, you know, What are some of the big themes that are coming up?

ZenHub1: And, you know, the big concepts that people are struggling with is it kind of relates to to scrum in 2024. And the goal of this roundtable today is to shed some light on some of those themes that we saw come up and get our perspective from our experts here on, you know, whether you’re also seeing those patterns or some of those themes and, uh, the teams that you’re coaching or the teams that you’re supporting.

ZenHub1: So without further ado, I want to hand things over to our guests to introduce themselves. Daria, let’s, let’s start with you.

Daria: Of course. Thank you for having me. So my name is Daria, and I am a professional Scrum trainer. And I’ve been running a kind of an independent training and consulting company called Scrum Mastered.

Daria: Since the beginning of the pandemic, uh, really providing virtual educational materials, lots of videos and content for scrum practitioners, very focused on scrum masters to build better, to help them build better teams really. And so that was, I was focusing on, um, through all of this time, as I was also working as a scrum master, which is, uh, has been a great experience.

Daria: And I definitely love the fact that I got to experience this role and to continue to work in the space. Yeah,

ZenHub1: that’s awesome. Mike mentioned earlier that he loved your videos. I love your YouTube videos as well. So, um, I always love watching those. Um, Mike, would you like to jump in next?

Mike Cohn: You’re very similar to Daria in that I’m a scrum trainer, coach, um, writer.

Mike Cohn: I do anything I can to help scrum teams been doing it since, um, kind of the beginning of scrum started many, many years ago.

ZenHub1: That’s great. Finally, Klaus, would you like to introduce yourself?

Klaus Boedker: Absolutely. So my name is Klaus. I am based in Vancouver. I, um, I love floral shirts to brighten up the greatness here when it’s, when it’s raining most, most of the time.

Klaus Boedker: So I’ve been in the, uh, I’ve been in the agile universe also for a number of years as a, as a scrum master, as a coach, as a trainer, helping teams organizations really get better at agile and agile practices and sort of agility in general. Um, so yeah, thank you so much for having me here. I’m, I’m super excited to be part of this.

ZenHub1: Yeah. Like I said, thank you all so much for your time. Obviously this wouldn’t be possible without you guys joining and supporting us today. So we really appreciate you giving us an hour out of your day. Yeah, let’s let’s dive in here. So, um, first thing we wanted to talk about today’s is this perception.

ZenHub1: We heard a lot from respondents on our survey that, that scrum is very time consuming and particularly, you know, 33 percent of respondents mentioned there’s really this perception that scrum is very time consuming, particularly it involves a lot of overhead. Uh, and we dug deeper into that a lot of what people were referring to is, you know, scrum events and in tasks like backlog grooming, issue creation, sprint planning, how long those meetings can take and just the perception that a lot of that is is overhead.

ZenHub1: So, Mike, we want to start with you on this 1. Um, in your experience, you know, is there that perception among teams that you’ve worked with that the scrum processes are overly time consuming? Um, if so, why do you think that is? Mike. Oh,

Mike Cohn: there’s absolutely that perception. And there’s also that reality. I mean, it is a real situation for many teams.

Mike Cohn: Um, I’m going to, you talk about, you know, like non scientific studies. I’m just going to kind of make one up. I I’ll stand by this number, but I haven’t like researched this, but I’m going to guess that probably 5 percent of the companies I work with, I encourage to spend more time. on things. The other 95 percent of the teams, I’m trying to get them to spend less time on things.

Mike Cohn: And so teams spend way too much time in backlog refinement. Um, teams do, um, retrospectives often that’ll take a lot of time that they don’t need to sprint planning. Um, almost every team, I try to get to do that more quickly than they’re doing. So a lot of teams kind of take these things Too seriously and spend way too much time on them.

Mike Cohn: We could go into ways to shorten that, but I want to stick to the heart of this, which is that yes, there is a perception of the reality when scrum is done. Well, I don’t think those need to be the situation at all. I don’t like traffic. I hate traffic. I hate commuting. So if I get in a car and there’s a lot of traffic, I complained about the traffic.

Mike Cohn: However, I never complained about the white lines on the highway. Those white lines on the highway are there to help us go faster. And I think of a scrum is very analogous to those those lines on the highway. And, you know, if we’re doing it well, it’s just enough to keep us moving quickly. So a sprint planning meeting, as an example, if it’s done quickly, is going to help us go faster.

Mike Cohn: Throughout the spring, it’s going to help us go faster. So Scrum is the framework should be like those white lines. It should be there just enough. It should be helping us go faster. And if it’s feeling like it’s, um, burdensome and time consuming, we’re doing it wrong and that’s where we have to get teams to switch their behavior.

ZenHub1: Yeah, I think that’s a good call out. Daria Claus, is there anything you’d add to that? Is that, you know, a perception that you guys have come up against in your coaching journeys or working with teams? I’m curious if that’s the case and maybe some of the ways that you’ve addressed that perception amongst teams that hey, these events are just You know, more overhead or overly time consuming. \

Daria: Okay, I’ll jump in. Yeah, so definitely this perception exists. And I think there is a reality as well as Mike mentioned, though I feel that often there is people mistake things that happen or events or meetings that they have with Scrum when they’re actually not Scrum. And the reason For those extra meetings that they have to have is because the original events that are in scrum like planning retrospective Review and daily scrum.

Daria: They’re not well done. So they’re actually not fully utilizing the time in those meetings, which means now they have to have more meetings and I’ve seen cases where people would kind of list all the meetings they have And I’m like, this is not Scrum, this is not Scrum, what is this one? I have no idea what this one is supposed to be, right?

Daria: Because they actually missed the point of the original meetings, which created more overhead for them.

ZenHub1: Right, the pre backlog refinement meeting, as it were, that shows up on the calendar. Yeah, exactly. Plus, um, why don’t you jump in here? I’m curious. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll build on

Klaus Boedker: top of that. I’ll build on top of that as well.

Klaus Boedker: So I, um, in my experience, it’s also about helping the team members and some of the stakeholders better understand, like what is sort of the, uh, the method behind the madness here. Like, what is the, what is the value, what is the purpose of, of why are we doing these events? Why are they there? So, for example, um, people look at the daily, daily, the daily scrum, and I think, well, it’s just about, you know, it’s just about talking.

Klaus Boedker: What did I do yesterday? What am I going to do today? Sort of in a simplified version. But if you help them understand that what it really is, it’s a, it’s a feedback loop, a very short feedback loop on your daily work as in what’s happening right now, then, then they will, uh, it becomes less about the overhead and less about, oh, you know, why do we have to do this and more about, oh yeah, I do see the value.

Klaus Boedker: I do see the benefit of this because like Mike said, it will help us go faster if we, if we become better at coordinating so that that’s been my experience, um, helping them understand sort of the value and the purpose behind it.

ZenHub1: Yeah, I think that’s a really important call out as well. And, you know, for us, you know, we do a daily scrum here at Zenhub, at least our development teams, um, do, you know, we really focus that on, on blockers, right?

ZenHub1: Because that, I think, to your point, Klaus, is really the value of that particular ceremony or particular event, whatever you want to call it, um, is not just to, you know, go down rabbit holes on work in progress. You know, if that starts to happen, typically, We try to, you know, shut down that conversation or at least move it, you know, offline between the 2 people that most impacts.

ZenHub1: It’s the blockers that are kind of the really important part. So we can surface those early, often, and then take action to remove those. But, um, yeah, it is easy sometimes with these events and with these ceremonies to kind of lose sight of the true value of them and the true purpose of them. So thank you all for weighing in on that.

Mike Cohn: Let me add 1 more thing on that. If I may, Aaron, 1 One of the reasons I think this ends up being a problem for teams is because the scrum meetings have names, right? Of course they have names. And I’ve done something with probably 20 different, um, individuals over the years that have said, Oh, we, we meet too much.

Mike Cohn: And I’ll say, okay, you know, How long have you been doing Scrum? Oh, you know, six months. Okay, back up longer than that in your calendars, you know, back up and outlook, pick a month and let’s see how many meetings you had in that month. And almost always they were having more meetings in the pre Scrum world, but those meetings didn’t have names.

Mike Cohn: They were like the, the one off meeting with this person, the one off meeting with this person. When we give them something, a name, it becomes a target, right? Oh, cause, you know, We’re doing that thing again. We have that thing and it happens a lot, you know, it happens every two weeks or whatever it is, and it becomes more visible as a thing rather than all the one off meetings that we had in the pre scrum world.

Mike Cohn: So most teams actually spend less time in meetings when they do this, but they’re not really aware of it because these, they become targets now with their, with their names.

ZenHub1: I think it’s a really, really good call out. So, um, transitioning to kind of the second topic we wanted to, uh, to talk about, um, it, this is a one that, you know, might hit home with a lot of people, um, listening in today, uh, certainly something I think that, you know, we hear when we speak with our customers, it’s a theme that almost constantly comes up, which is, you know, the fact that scrum masters have to juggle a lot, right?

ZenHub1: 40 percent of respondents, um, to the survey that we ran mentioned that, you know, while their team might have a designated, uh, scrum practitioner or scrum master, they That individual is often juggling multiple roles. You know, maybe they’re a product owner or a product manager, and they’re also running these scrum events.

ZenHub1: Maybe they’re a, you know, agile coach and they’re also running these scrum events. Maybe they’re a lead developer and they’re also responsible for that. Um, so I want to, um, Klaus, I want you to kind of weigh in on that. Is that a challenge that you’ve seen kind of firsthand where. Yeah. Scrum masters are having to juggle multiple roles on the team or something I’m seeing more often even is juggling multiple scrum teams at the same time Um, not just run those events, but kind of make those, those, um, practice recommendations and process recommendations across multiple teams at the same time.

Klaus Boedker: Absolutely. And I’m actually, I’m surprised that the number isn’t higher than 40 percent because I see this very frequently in organization. And So here’s, here’s, in my experience, here’s what happens when you’re a scrum master and, and something else. And that something else can be, you’re a developer, you’re a tester, or, or like we said, you’re a scrum master for, for that maybe two, three, sometimes even four teams.

Klaus Boedker: Yeah. So what, in my experience, what happens is that when, when you’re in the sprint, you know, you naturally want, let’s say you’re a scrum master and a developer, you naturally want to start helping your team out. If sort of we’re in this crunch mode and, And it’s pointing towards we’re not going to finish all our work in this sprint.

Klaus Boedker: So you’re going to take off your scrum master hat, put on your developer hat and say, well, let me help out, you know, because I want, I want to make sure that the team finishes what they, what they have in their sprint backlog. And then as a consequence, the scrum master then has less time to be obviously a scrum master.

Klaus Boedker: So some of the events that we just talked about right now will suffer from that. So for example, maybe the scrum master will have less time to sort of observe what’s going on and prepare for an upcoming retrospective. Yeah. Maybe they’ll have less time to work with the product owners to make sure that that we have a prioritized backlog when we go into refinement and there, there could be all kinds of sort of symptoms of this issue.

Klaus Boedker: But, but the bottom line is that because of the, that instinct that I want to help my team out, oftentimes the scrum master role is the one that that sort of is, uh, is at the, at the sort of the, the bottom of the pile compared to if you’re a developer or a tester, or maybe even a, again, a scrum master spread across, uh, multiple teams.

ZenHub1: Yeah, it’s a good call it too, because I think a lot of the scrum masters, you know, we’ve seen at least in customers we interact with, they’ve come into that role from from other previous roles where they were maybe more of an individual contributor on the team. And so there’s that, that idea that, hey, I can jump back in and maybe help solve some of this versus, you know, I’ve never been a developer before.

ZenHub1: I don’t really know how I can help the team get unstuck from this or where I can go and add. Yeah. I’m some more firepower there. Um, I want to open it up to Mike and Daria as well. I think, you know, just looking at it from a very realist lens, though, you know, a lot of organizations are, you know, in a really tough situation now of having to do more with less, you know, or at least the same with less.

ZenHub1: Um, I want to get your perspective on that. Obviously, it’s not a great thing when scrum masters get pulled into multiple different areas or necessarily multiple different teams. Um, but that is kind of a sign of the times here when organizations maybe have to be more thoughtful or don’t have budget or don’t have resources to go and hire more people on the team.

ZenHub1: Um, I want to get your guys’s thoughts on that. Darya, you want to go first?

Daria: Sure. Yeah. Uh, well, I think the That’s the reality right? We might not especially smaller companies who Are maybe not able to have a scrum master or even the companies who only are able to hire kind of a part time person to help them out.

Daria: Obviously, we will see the, um, the effects, the negative impacts of that on the team’s effectiveness long term, right? It’ll just take much longer for them to become more mature when the person is working with the team. I think what often happens is the role of the scrum master is minimized to its absolute minimum to just administrative tasks.

Daria: Oh, uh, book a meeting, uh, run the meeting, collect the notes, all of that. And yes, it is part of the Scrum Master role at certain times, but that is actually the least important part of the Scrum Master role, um, for the team. Right. And so because one person has to basically juggle two roles, they are really not providing the benefits of what a scrum master is supposed to provide to the team, right?

Daria: So that is just kind of to the detriment. And then we see. Things like, oh, uh, our meetings are not effective or we have too many meetings. Uh, it’s too much overhead because well the scrum master didn’t actually get a chance to be a scrum master for the team and to help them understand how to Uh be more effective how to use scrum how to properly implement it.

Daria: Um, and um Do we have a solution? I don’t know. I feel like it would be great if we had like a magical one that can solve that. Um, but maybe more making sure that the person who you have as a scrap Scrum Master actually has the right, um, I’d say personality and skill set, well skills you can develop, but more personality to take on that role of someone who is more of a coach, a teacher, rather than someone who can organize meetings and take notes.

Klaus Boedker: That’s a good point.

Mike Cohn: I just have never bought into the idea that a Scrum Master has to be full time on one team. Um, I’ve been a Scrum Master, I was a Scrum Master early in my career for years and was never just on one team. I get it if we’ve got a team that’s got a lot of dysfunctionality in an organization that’s, Very dysfunctional as well, that it can be a full time job, but I don’t think it has to be for one team, especially in an era today where most teams have someone else on the team with Scrum experience.

Mike Cohn: In the early days where we only had the one person who knew anything about Scrum, it was a little bit harder to coach them into, To coach team members into how to work this way. This was a very novel way of working. If we go back into the mid nineties, when scrum got started, it was a very novel way of working.

Mike Cohn: Um, and it needed a lot more coaching and problem solving organizations, but I think it’s totally fine for a scrum master to be on two teams or be a scrum master for two teams. Um, Klaus had mentioned four teams. I think that’s too many. And I think he did as well, but up to two or three teams, especially if one’s kind of good.

Mike Cohn: Because what happens is over time, the team as a self organizing team takes on some of those responsibilities. They know how to run a planning meeting, right? Early on, it’s a big deal if you don’t have your scrum master there, but after a while the team knows what to do. Um, and it’s better if we have a scrum master there for that, but it’s not the end of the world.

Mike Cohn: If we don’t, for example, for one meeting, so I think it’s totally fine, um, to have a scrum master, do multiple things, um, early on could be necessary to have a full time one, but I don’t think that’s a requirement over the longterm.

ZenHub1: How in that, in that case, I guess, do you know that the workload is becoming too much?

ZenHub1: Like you mentioned, maybe, you know, two or three teams is manageable, but four is, you know, unmanageable, or it’s starting to get to a point where it’s unmanageable. I know that’s going to be subjective and probably different for everybody in terms of their capacity and what they could handle. But I’m just curious if you have any general kind of thoughts on that in terms of, um, you know, for people that are in that situation, um, not just how to advocate for themselves, but how to kind of, um, You know, ask those questions and be introspective that yeah, maybe, maybe I am at the point where I’m, I’m spread a little too thin.

Mike Cohn: I think most of us know that. Um, I mean, we know if we’re, if we’re spread too thin, we know, you know, every, everybody’s spread too thin, right? I mean, everybody has too many things going on. It’s the, the state of the world the last 20 years and, um, or longer perhaps. And I think the bigger issue is do our managers know when we’re spread too thin and do our managers know if.

Mike Cohn: One of us has spread thinner than the other person, right? So they know where to kind of put the relief valve, um, on that. Cause everybody’s spread too thin. So I think it’s more about making sure our managers know if too many things are slipping through their cracks. If we’re not really helping the team in the way we should be.

Mike Cohn: But I think most of us are aware as scrum masters when we’re not doing everything we could make sense.

Daria: I’d like to add on that. I think that if, um, generally I give myself, um, four to six months working with a team. And if there, if after that time, I feel that I cannot go on vacation. Then I did something wrong or I didn’t have enough time to work with the team.

Daria: So say you’re working with three teams, six months later, you’re like, I cannot, like, I don’t know what’s going to happen. The building’s going to explode if I’m not there. Then you probably are spread too thin. And then the other thing kind of to, um, jump on what Mike was saying is that, um, I think having one Scrum Master working with multiple teams, it is much more effective than having one Scrum Master.

Daria: who works with one team but also is a developer or also is a tester because those are two different roles and it’s much harder to juggle those rather than to be Scrum Master to multiple teams.

ZenHub1: Yeah, agreed. Thanks a lot of sense. So I want to dive into a third topic, which again is a bit different. Um, uh, and what I kind of want to discuss is some of the challenges we heard around, um, adopting Scrum for the first time amongst teams.

ZenHub1: So for first time, you know, uh, uh, Scrum adoptees, you know, 40 percent of those respondents mentioned, um, that they were feeling, you know, a lot of challenges when it came to implementing Scrum efficiently. And then a lot of those, you know, tied back to to formal training. Um, and, you know, when we dug into that sentiment, tried to understand it a little bit deeper.

ZenHub1: Some of the things we heard are, you know, hey, we feel like we’re kind of taking a thicket until we make it approach. And a lot of our information is very informal. It comes from reading online articles, reading blog posts, um, you know, watching videos, um, you know, And, uh, you know, the organization has said, Hey, we’ve got to be, you know, working at a scrum centric way.

ZenHub1: We got to be planning sprints. We got to be estimating work, but hasn’t really provided that kind of formal training. Now, I know there’s a lot of debate out there, maybe frustration when it comes to certifications and courses and, you know, I don’t want to open a can of worms here, but Daria, I’m kind of interested to get your perspective on how crucial you think it is to kind of have some formal basis, whether it’s training, whether it’s a certification, when it comes to adopting Scrum for the first time amongst a team.

Daria: Well, I think it is crucial. Um, overall, the probably one of the most important pieces at the beginning, um, as the team starts to adopt whatever framework or method is to make sure that everybody is on the same page, because what often happens, people come in with different experiences, different knowledge, and everybody says, well, I know what’s from is right, but they know their own version of strong.

Daria: Maybe they’ve seen it in previous company in a different team. You’re not sure if it was the right one, right? Was it actually aligned with the original Scrum framework, the Scrum rules? And so, making sure that the whole team is aligned on what is Scrum, what are we trying to implement, and understands those rules is crucial.

Daria: In terms of the formal training, um, I think it’s important that the whole team attends some kind of training together, right? So whether you invite a scrum trainer for a two day class, or it’s a workshop, kind of like a customized workshop for the team just to, um, set the, uh, the expectations around the roles and the rules.

Daria: That’s, for me, is essential and often solves a lot of problems. I think one of the recent examples was the team was struggling for years and I ran one day workshop for them and within several months they suddenly started implementing great improvements and it got so much better for them just because all of them attended one day training together.

Mike Cohn: Love

ZenHub1: that. I really like that idea, too, of attending training as a team, as opposed to, hey, 1 person is going to go off and then distill that information back to everyone. And, you know, hope that we all get on the same page from there. And like you said, so many different team members, you know, come together with different experiences from prior companies they’ve worked at, or prior situations that they’ve been in, or maybe inherited.

ZenHub1: And so, yeah, getting everyone aligned and on the same pages. is, uh, really important. And I think you did a good job underscoring the importance of that. Klaus, I’m, I’m interested to get your perspective on this question. You know, is this something that you see and, you know, does it concern you sometimes that there’s teams out there that are, are kind of taking that fake it till you make an approach and just kind of learning by, by, you know, fire here on some of this stuff or look at, I know there’s a lot of really good content out there and, and, um, you know, uh, not all content is created equal.

ZenHub1: There’s also some, some tough content out there that maybe it’s a little bit too optimized for you. For clicks and not enough for real value. So I’m just curious if that’s something you’re seeing.

Klaus Boedker: Absolutely. I agree with, with, with, you know, with our experience and what you mentioned, you can liken this a little bit, like to you being invited to being a, you know, a part of an orchestra and we have a conductor in there.

Klaus Boedker: But you’re not going to get training on how we’re going to be playing together. You may have the experience, you know, from playing in other bands and all that, but, but this, no, you’re not going to get any training for this. And, you know, just, it’s not going to go over that well. So I think as Daria said, that’s the least we can do when we, you know, when we sort of invite people into working in a, in a way that that’s different from what they’re used to in the past.

Klaus Boedker: I also think what’s behind this is sort of this, this, this sort of the sensation of a fake it till you make it is that Scrum is, you know, Scrum is, is, is fairly, Scrum is simple, you know, it’s just so on, on the first page in the Scrum Guide and it’s simple on, you know, um, purposefully. So, so, Teaching someone to learn Scrum in sort of in a vacuum in a classroom is fairly straightforward.

Klaus Boedker: Most, most classes will pick it up, you know, sort of in the first day and can run fairly effective sprints, you know, over the, over a two day class using some sort of stimulation. The really hard part, and I think this is, you know, that’s what’s behind that number of the 40 percent is using Scrum and implementing once you hit sort of that messy, uh, Organizational context that you have to implement scrum into that, I think, is much, much harder to do.

Klaus Boedker: And I think that’s a lot of what’s behind the, uh, you know, um, we sort of, we have to fake it till we make it.

Mike Cohn: I’ve been, I’ve been teaching classes forever. And one of the first ones I taught, so I was like in my third or fourth class, you know, I give a bid to a client and, um, I don’t know what it was or how many people, but they come back and they go to save money.

Mike Cohn: We’re just not going to send the testers to training. And I’m like, Uh, okay, no, it’s a, it’s a price. It’s not per person anymore. It’s the price. And ever since then, it was like, you know, here’s my price, I’ll come train and I’m not going to charge you, you know, X dollars per person. We do. I think it’s huge, but because I didn’t want to have, make somebody make that decision.

Mike Cohn: Oh, that guy doesn’t get trained. Um, cause that’s just, that’s just not going to work. When I wrote a book called succeeding with agile years ago, I surveyed, Many of my clients, um, who were successful, some that had not succeeded, I interviewed some that had not worked with me, um, of both types to see. And what was interesting was all of the successful ones said they had done a lot of coaching beyond just coaching.

Mike Cohn: Basic training and wish they had done more, including ones that I thought had done like massive amounts of coaching. Um, I didn’t put that in the book because I didn’t want the book to sound like I was trying to push coaching services, but literally everyone that had been successful had done a lot of coaching beyond training and wish they had done more, which was very surprising that it was that universal.

ZenHub1: That’s a great call out. Um, well, the next thing I want to talk about is it’s a big one and I want to spend some time here and really get your perspectives on it. And I think it’s someone something that a lot of, um, you know, people in the audience are probably feeling again. This is a theme that comes up when I talk to a lot of our customers, especially scrum masters and people that are practitioners and kind of running these scrum events.

ZenHub1: And that’s this idea that as a scrum master, you know, it can be really tough sometimes to show your value, right? Or to, you know, prove your value, um, you know, to the rest of your team and 40 percent of people that we surveyed, um, 40 percent of those respondents said. You know, they find it difficult to show their value to the organization and their concern that people on their team, whether that’s, you know, their peers or developers or, you know, leaders don’t necessarily see their value.

ZenHub1: And, um, you know, I think a lot of, um, a lot of the sentiment we saw, like I said, was from, you know, people that don’t necessarily feel appreciated by their teams, or, you know, maybe the developers on their team see their role as we kind of mentioned is like purely administrative, like. Hey, this is the person that just sets up and runs these events.

ZenHub1: They don’t actually provide value beyond that. At the same time, you know, there’s, there’s a challenge. And I think this has always existed with leadership kind of recognizing the value that scrum masters can have in the delivery process. Um, you know, I think it’s no surprise to anyone here that, you know, some of these roles are being eliminated from the organization.

ZenHub1: And so close, I wanted that open, open that up to kind of you and see if it’s, you know, sentiment that you felt, um, personally, if that sentiment that you’re, you’re seeing others that you coach and work with, um, are kind of feeling and why, why you kind of think that is.

Klaus Boedker: I see, I see two parts in this, in this, you know, this finding right here.

Klaus Boedker: I, the first part is, and this is what worries me the most is that the team members themselves or 40 percent have a hard time seeing the value that the Scrum Master brings. I think that’s much, much more worrying than some outside stakeholders, um, not being able to immediately spot what the value is, because as a team member, if the Scrum Master is doing is doing the role, you know, right, you know, immediately, whether, you know, if that’s happening, both because your, your event, sort of the whole, the work and the value flows much more smoothly.

Klaus Boedker: The events are going really well. Um, sort of, that’s the process side, but also the other side of the people side, you also know, and experience that when it’s, when a scrum masters are doing their job really well, because it, you know, they help build this, this awesome team. And we all know that. You know, when we’ve been part of a team, that’s awesome.

Klaus Boedker: And I’m seeing that’s not, we can immediately sense the difference. So, so to me, that that’s, that’s the most worrying part about this, that they can’t immediate that they don’t see value, uh, from the scrum master. The second part about the organization. I think, you know, to me in my experience, that’s because the sort of the immediate stakeholders around the team, the leadership around the team, they don’t always know what to look for.

Klaus Boedker: So the way, you know, what I, what I want them to look for, you know, when it comes to whether a scrum master is, is bringing value or not, is that sort of the, it, the value we bring a scrum masters is, is indirect in terms of what they can see on the outside. And so we don’t directly contribute to the product that’s being produced.

Klaus Boedker: We contributed to it indirectly. Again, through those means that we, you know, that I just mentioned that everything is just flowing. It’s great to be on the team. So as a result, the team is able to deliver what they, you know, what they’re, what they’re, whatever they’re producing, uh, probably faster and probably to a higher quality and also to the, to greater delight of, of their stakeholders.

Mike Cohn: Mike, what’s your perspective here? I’m with Klaus on the, being concerned about the, the team members, not seeing the value. I’m kind of sitting here contemplating. Every team I can remember ever being on and thinking of individuals there or roles. And was there ever a role or a person where the rest of the team would have only 40 percent would have valued.

Mike Cohn: Right. Um, and if there were in my time is like a, you know, VP or director or whatever, I would have probably gotten rid of that person. Um, you know, so that’s, that’s very scary. Um, to me, what’s fairly straightforward about this is don’t play the game unless you know how you’re going to keep score. And, you know, so you get a job as a scrum master, the first thing I want to know is how is my boss going to evaluate my performance?

Mike Cohn: What are you looking for me to do? Um, and that could be many different things. It could be and cost mentioned improving quality. It could be I’m going to improve quality. It could be. I’m going to help a team improve predictability. It could be. I’m going to help them deliver the right things instead of the wrong things.

Mike Cohn: It could be. I’m going to help them deliver more quickly. Um, better. Um, set and meet expectations, and there are all sorts of things that could be the goal in bringing a scrum master or scrum into an organization, and don’t play the game unless you know you’re going to keep scores. So scrum masters need to talk to their bosses and understand what will they be evaluated on, and by doing that up front, they have some say in the matter, too, right?

Mike Cohn: Hey. You know, look at me on this. And, um, Mary Poppendick wrote a great article, Mary Poppendick, one of the lean thinkers, kind of the foundation of Agile, um, and co founder of the Agile Alliance. Um, and she wrote that we should measure people on their span of influence, not their span of control. So I’d want to meet with my boss up front and say, you know, here, here’s how I think I should be evaluated.

Mike Cohn: What do you think? Um, and then I’d share that with the team. So the team knows what I’m there to help them. With, um, and I think that’ll help increase the, the team perception. Um, sorry to give a long answer, but I want to have one more thing on this. Um, I think part of it is because too many scrum masters have shifted over into too much of the facilitator and pure coach role instead of acting as mentors at times to their teams.

Mike Cohn: And we facilitate a meeting that’s. Easily replaced if we want. Um, and then as a coach, I think we often fall back onto being asked a question and going, I don’t know, what do you think? All right. And that’s kind of the coaching stance and there’s a time to be a coach, but there’s also a time to say, I recommend this.

Mike Cohn: I think we should do this. Daria talked about the first six months with a team during the first six months with a team, I’d expect a scrum master to be much more mentor than coach over time. We shift into that. coaching role. But early on, we got to mentor the team. We’ve got to tell them how to play the game is from

ZenHub1: Daria.

ZenHub1: We’ll give you the final word here. I want to get your perspective on this.

Daria: Yeah, no, I think, uh, I, I agree with everything that has been said so far. And, um, one of the things that I often talk about is setting expectations, right? With the team, with your manager. And this is one of the first things I tell scrubmasters to focus on at the beginning.

Daria: You’re starting working with a new team. Once again, we’re creating alignment and setting expectations around what can your team or your manager expect from you and what you can, you expect from them, right? What kind of help or support or just being open, right? From, from the team specifically. And, um, The same i’m kind of looking back at a lot a lot of the teams I worked with I usually don’t even need to Prove my worth to the team members or to the managers because the team sees the value and then they become The promoters for me to be on their organizational level.

Daria: They will be coming to the manager and say, Oh yes, um, our scrum master Daria has helped me with this and this, and, um, I really appreciate her. And so this is really what makes the difference. And if you don’t know how to get there, um, I’m not even sure. It you can just like read a book and then that’s going to happen.

Daria: I feel like there’s a lot of Intricacy in how to work with the team. It’s more about building relationships team building all of these things that are hard to do and You just learn doing those You work with the team, but then also, as Mike said, taking on different stances as you work with the team.

Daria: Sometimes you need to be a teacher. Sometimes a coach, sometimes a mentor, sometimes a facilitator, right? But you need to be able to switch between them depending on what the team requires. And even though I do try to help Scrum Masters kind of look at it as here’s your decision matrix, right? Here’s what happens.

Daria: What kind of stance or action do you need to take? But it’s really still, even with that, it’s hard to do if you Have no idea what you’re doing, uh, as a scrum master. So

ZenHub1: now it makes makes a lot of sense Look, I want to stay away from the the tooling conversation there because obviously I have my biases I do want to ask one question there as more of a general thing and not you know pick on or talk about any one specific tool, but Do you think it’s fair for scrum masters to ask more from their tools when it comes to that facilitation aspect?

ZenHub1: Right? Like, do you think that tools should be doing more there to help that out then, you know, leaving it up to scrum masters themselves to maybe do so many of these administrative events and run these events? Um, cause that seems to be where a lot of that perception comes from around the kind of administrative side of the role.

ZenHub1: I’m just curious to get your thoughts there. Anyone wants to jump in on that?

Mike Cohn: I think so. Um, you know, those are the, Those are the parts of the job that can be automated or removed from the job, um, and allow a scrum master to focus on the more important things that they do. And, you know, I don’t want to denigrate the coaching part.

Mike Cohn: I just, we, sometimes we fall into that too much, but that’s where the value is, right? Being able to coach a team, perceive something, um, and a tool, we’re not there yet. A tool is going to have a really hard time noticing something that happened in a meeting and be able to. Coach somebody to improve better from that.

Mike Cohn: Um, but the, you know, the tools can automate more of the routine aspects of being a scrum master. So absolutely. Um, I think they’re getting better. I think the tools are moving quickly in those directions, yours included. But that’s, you know, that is what we have to expect from tools. I

Klaus Boedker: agree with that.

Daria: Yeah, small things definitely can be automated, but yeah, it’s just, um, there are some intricacies and subtleties that only a human being can notice.

Daria: Uh, but certain things definitely can be made, uh, easier, right? And the fact that we are using tools to run retrospectives or, you know, uh, um, our work planning, all of that is, um, the proof of that, that tools can be helpful.

ZenHub1: Great.

Mike Cohn: One of the things I wonder from your question up here about the, the 40%, uh, you know, feeling undervalued is I wonder how much of that has changed with not necessarily just the pandemic aspect, but the, the shift to work from home.

Mike Cohn: Um, I think it’s easier to see the value that a Scrum Master brings when we’re all in the office. Right. And as we’ve shifted away, I think that’s made it hard to demonstrate the value and it has. Caused a lot of scrum masters to shift some of their time to the more mundane things. You know, make sure we got the meeting scheduled.

Mike Cohn: Let’s run the meeting, those types of things. Instead of the coaching, it’s much harder to coach somebody virtually.

ZenHub1: It’s a good call out. I think everyone’s feeling that it’s not just the, yeah, it’s not just the coaching aspect. It’s just way harder to form that human to human connection virtually, right?

ZenHub1: It, whether it’s a one on one, whether it’s a coaching session, it doesn’t matter what it is. I think that’s just really difficult to have that true human to human connection bond. Like you mentioned, I think that’s a good call out, Mike, of when that happens in office and you can truly sit down with someone and advocate that you.

ZenHub1: Yeah. You know, um, really care about, you know, improving value and improving team performance and, and coaching on process, it’s a lot easier than trying to schedule a 30 minute zoom call. And I get that, you know, certain realities have kind of forced us down that path and I don’t want to open up a whole can of worms on hybrid work or work from home or return to office.

ZenHub1: But yeah, I think that’s a situation that a lot of teams struggle with. And, and I would say in most cases that human to human interaction is just harder over a zoom call. So.

Mike Cohn: I think it’s just, yeah, it’s, it’s harder to notice the value. I can remember a very specific time early in my career as a scrum master where I’d had kind of a half day meeting with our human resource director, trying to get her to change the, the personnel reviews that were very individual based.

Mike Cohn: So I had this person do instead of how did it. How did they help the team? And, um, I was in those meetings like half a day and then I didn’t necessarily mention it to my team, but the next day they commented, Oh, how did it go with Gina in those meetings? Right. Um, and if that had all been virtual, I probably wouldn’t, I probably wouldn’t have brought it up.

Mike Cohn: I didn’t bring it up with them. They noticed it. Right. And so that’s a case where my team would not have noticed me trying to do something that would have helped them. It’s not the type of thing I would have really mentioned. So that’s fair.

ZenHub1: Well, look, we’re, we’re running up on time here. Um, and I want to, I want to try to keep this as honest to the timeline as possible because I know that, uh, our participants in our audience and you all, you know, have, have other things to do today.

ZenHub1: Um, it’s not all about, uh, not all about us in this webinar here. I have eight other

Mike Cohn: teams to scrum masters

ZenHub1: today. Exactly. Um, to kind of round out the conversation today, the last big theme I want to tackle and kind of get your perspective on is, is around the value of scrum events. And we touched on this kind of earlier in the conversation as well.

ZenHub1: Um, and the general sentiment that we saw from the survey was, was people feeling, you know, generally pretty positive about most of the scrum events, but in particular, there were some that people didn’t feel as, uh, as, as, um, excited about. Um, Uh, 27 percent of respondents that we interviewed, um, in particular called out daily standups and retrospectives as being the biggest perceived waste of time.

ZenHub1: Um, Daria, is, is that, you know, uh, does that track with kind of your experience? Did those events in particular kind of take the brunt or, um, are there other kind of events that you see as well that, uh, typically, uh, maybe don’t have such a generally positive, um, sentiment towards them?

Daria: I think, uh, the spring planning is generally the safest one to kind of a lot of teams.

Daria: I feel, yeah, sure. We need to plan, um, retrospectives definitely. Suffer from that feeling and that perception and are usually the first ones to either be cancelled, postponed, uh, all of that. And then the daily scrums are becoming more of like every couple of days scrums. So, um, that’s often, uh, happens and, um, I, as kind of looking at the question right there, do I feel that all of this from events are necessary?

Daria: Yes, I do feel like all of this comments are necessary. I know that some people might, um, argue with me on that. I just feel that it’s everyone has a very specific purpose. And even In a way, I’d say if you are to cancel all of them and you’re not sure which one to leave, I’d say that would be the retrospective, even though it is usually the first one to get cancelled because in the retrospective you may be able to notice that you’re missing something, like planning or refinement and all of that.

Daria: And that discussion will happen in the retrospective. You don’t have a retrospective, you’re not going to have this discussion. So you won’t be able to improve. Um, so for me, it is essential to, instead of trying to like cancel, shorten, postpone, find a way to make those events as effective as possible.

Daria: Figure out why. Are they perceived as a waste of time by the team? Because often the reasons are very easily resolved. Uh, for daily scrums, it might be, Oh, we have like a manager and the project manager and three other people, and they are interrupting us. And then our daily scrum runs for 45 minutes and we hate it.

Daria: Let’s do it once a week, obviously, but that’s not a daily scrum, right? So you miss the purpose. And so in the same way, the first thing to address is figure out what makes them Less valuable. And what can we do as a team to make them, um, a lot to actually help the team achieve their purpose and the purpose of each event?

Daria: So that, you know,

ZenHub1: it’s a really good call out plus make anything that you would add to that.

Klaus Boedker: I have, yeah, I have one, one point on that. So I, I agree with what you’re saying, uh, Daria. And I think without getting too philosophical and, uh, I know that we’re, you know, we’re just coming up on time, but I think that’s actually one of the. Both one of the brilliances of Scrum is that we have these repeated events, so we get really good at them.

Klaus Boedker: So imagine that team that’s not good at coordinating the work, that’s not good at reflecting on how they’re doing, they’re not good at demonstrating the work they’ve done, and suddenly they pick up Scrum. And because of these repeated events, they get really good at it. And at the same time, I think this can also be sort of sometimes a downfall of Scrum for some teams that, Oh, we have to do it again.

Klaus Boedker: We have to do this every day. Because when they get really good at these events, if they, if they, you know, think that they have to stick with this very rigid sort of approach and not start to sort of, uh, make up their own, you know, add their own events and add different events because that, that fulfill or different practices that fulfill the same principles.

Klaus Boedker: I think that’s when they can feel like, ah, really, we have to do this again. Um, so, so it’s, it’s about, you know, good scrum teams will, will start to sort of adjust and tailor when they, yeah, when they become better at it.

ZenHub1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Mike, we’ll give you the final word here. Um, take us home here.

Mike Cohn: Well, they may want to argue with me. So let’s see if there’s the final word. I’m gonna, I’m gonna say that I think all the meetings are, um, subject to, to change, um, that we may skip some of them. Um, the daily scrum, for example, originated out of research that was done by, um, James Copeland into the borderline quattro product.

Mike Cohn: Um, back in the eighties and the, the realization that people weren’t talking enough. Um, and back in the eighties and I was working in software back in the eighties, that was true. Um, these days, I don’t know if that’s true with slack and other messaging tools and zoom the ability to Quickly talk to people.

Mike Cohn: I don’t know. In fact, I’m going to change that. I know we talk more than we did in the eighties. Um, do we talk enough that we don’t need a daily scrum? I don’t know, but some of the teams I work with doing totally fine without daily scrums. Um, I’d love to replace that. Of course, scrum is immutable, so we can’t change it, but I would love to replace it with a rule that says talk a lot or communicate a lot.

Mike Cohn: Right. And daily scrum is a awesome way to communicate a lot. But there are others. Um, the review. I work with a lot of teams where we’ve essentially gotten rid of the review mostly. Um, and that’s because as we’ve gone to kind of a continuous deployment model, if I wait two weeks, just to be able to explain, I wait two weeks and I want to demo what we’ve done.

Mike Cohn: It used to be, Hey, what do you think of this? Should we put it out there? If I demo it in two weeks now, it’s like, Okay, great. What are our customers who are already using it? Think about it. Right? And so we go to more of a one at a time feature review, finish one thing, show it to the three people who I’m going to say care, right?

Mike Cohn: The three people who wanted that thing, if they say good, we put it out there. Um, and then what we do with the end of the sprint review is more of kind of a it. Informative thing. Hey, here are all the things we’ve been out in the last two weeks. Um, and just so everybody knows everything. And sometimes those have been recorded and work totally fine.

Mike Cohn: They don’t get watched a lot, but, um, if we keep them short, it is in some cases good enough. Um, the retrospective, um, if you’re a kick butt team, let’s say you’re really doing great and you hate retrospective, you hate them and you’re doing one week sprints. Right? And then you realize, Hey, if we go to longer sprints, we don’t have to do as many retrospectives, right?

Mike Cohn: So now you’ve got a team that decides to go to four week sprints just to get out of doing retrospectives as often. I know I’m being silly there, but it’s plausible. So, you know, have a rule there. Hey, you know, inspect and adapt, talk about your process once a month, maybe not every sprint. And that’s a deal I’ve made with many teams.

Mike Cohn: I’ll say, okay, you can stop doing it every two weeks. Thanks. Cause you’re just going through the motions, right? Nothing to come. Nothing comes up, but do it every month, but do it for real, right? Really put some thought into it and come up with something. Okay. And all of those cases, I’m not doing scrum anymore, but I’d argue that in many of those teams, we’re doing something a little bit better, right?

ZenHub1: Yeah, I really just love that idea too, of like defining those values as a team as well when it comes to, like you, you said it just, you know, super simply, which is talk more, right? Um, you know, one of the big things that is always, I think like frustrated me about the, you know, daily standup or daily scrum, whatever you want to call it is, is that concept of like, well, let’s just wait until the next morning in that meeting to talk about blockers that we have.

ZenHub1: If you know about a blocker in an afternoon, don’t wait, jump in, talk more, you know, go approach someone that can unblock you on that or ask for help. Buildings on fire. I’ll

Mike Cohn: tell you about it tomorrow.

ZenHub1: Exactly. Right. Because at 9 15, every morning, we’re going to have that meeting regardless, but at 3 45 on a Thursday, unblocked, you know, don’t wait until the Friday morning to go and address that.

ZenHub1: So I agree. I think like, you know, you, you kind of hit the nail on the head there. Hey, if we’re distilling those values as a team, and you know, 1 of those is let’s talk about those and let’s surface them asynchronously or in real time. Let’s not wait until this event comes around to talk about. A blocker that we have or to talk about a struggle that we’re having, and that’s the mentality that teams should be working with.

ZenHub1: So

Mike Cohn: can I add a little bit more to that for a moment?

ZenHub1: Yeah, look, we still got a full group of participants here. This has been a good conversation. No, one’s leaving. So if you guys have a few more minutes, go

Mike Cohn: for it. In the early days of Scrum, we didn’t have the retrospective. That was not part of Scrum, right?

Mike Cohn: Esther Derby convinced Ken Sch Weber and I to add that into Scrum. It became, um, part of Scrum early on, but it wasn’t there at the very beginning when it was added. I will admit to this, I was opposed. I was completely opposed to adding retrospective. So everybody get mad at me, but here was my logic. Why would I wait until the end of the sprint to identify a time to get better?

Mike Cohn: Right. If I see a time to better, I should tell my team tomorrow. Well, here’s where I was wrong about that. I’m busy. I got to finish the goal of the sprint. Right. And so I don’t tell the team about it tomorrow. Cause I don’t have time to talk about it today. Um, and then by the time I do have time to bring it up, I forgot what my good idea was.

Mike Cohn: Right. And I equate it to something like saving for retirement. I have a, what’s called a 401k here account in the U S every month. Somebody gets taken out of my paycheck, goes there a great approach, a better approach would be every time I have a spare 5, mail it to my bank, right? Well, we know how that’s going to work, right?

Mike Cohn: And so setting aside that regular time is actually a really, really good idea for most teams. So, um, that’s why I think daily scrum can be changed, but for many teams, it’s the right approach retrospective on a regular basis. The right approach as well.

Daria: I would like to jump in here because I just, I think that people might misunderstand the kind of that, um, you, I think that the meetings are there, especially for the teams who are still trying to figure out those values and, um, and to get into the habit of doing that, of communicating every day, of continuously improving, et cetera.

Daria: And, um, often teams are like, well, Mike just said that we can totally bypass the daily scrum and just talk to each other, or let’s just do our retrospective once a month. And no, no, no. You first need to figure it. Like you need to learn to do it the right way, get good. Right. And then you can change it because now you understand why it was there in the first place.

Daria: Thank

Mike Cohn: you for saving me, but people will still misquote that. Thank you.

ZenHub1: Yeah. Well, guys, like I said, I was looking at the participant list here and not a single person has dropped despite the fact that I’ve done a poor time of time management for 7 minutes beyond where I asked you guys to stay today.

ZenHub1: But with that, we should we should end things. Um, so I do want to say to everyone that’s joined today. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great discussion, especially. Thank you to our panelists Klaus for all your input today. Um, is a quick note here. Um, we are recording this. We’re going to make that recording available to everyone after if there were.

ZenHub1: team members, um, that, you know, from your organization that signed up, but weren’t able to attend or got pulled into something. Um, so we’ll send that out after, after the fact to the, uh, the email that you used to register again, thank you all so much for joining. Thank you again to our panelists and, uh, I hope everyone has a great rest of their Thursday and a great rest of the week.

ZenHub1: Thank you guys so much. Bye

Daria: everyone. Bye. Bye