Agile Leadership

You want to improve your product's time to market. Which of the following practices might help you achieve this goal?

A.Reduce the number of features in each release. B.Commit team members to only one team. C.Automate frequently performed tasks. D.Improve cross-functional team skills. All of these practices will contribute to delivering a product to market faster. Reducing features in a release shortens the effort and complexity of a release, committing team members to only one team at a time, automating repetitive tasks, and improving cross-functional team skills improves the ability of the team to focus.

True or False: When an organization starts adopting an agile approach, managers should shield Scrum Teams from change and uncertainty created by those who do not yet understand agile approaches.

False. Change and uncertainty are part of life. Instead of resisting these influences, an Agile Leader should serve teams into building the capability to deal with change and uncertainty. Agile Leaders should support the teams in collaborating with their environment, so that people share a common goal in the value chain.

True or False: A primary reason to adopt an Agile approach is that it reduces cost, since Scrum Teams work more efficiently and deliver more value in less time.

False. One benefit of an Agile approach is that it enables teams to build and deliver a product and get feedback so that they can adapt the product based on that feedback to deliver more value. Reducing cost by not building features that have no value, and improving practices based on feedback, which may also reduce cost. Cost reduction may become a secondary benefit, but reducing cost should not be viewed as a benefit of using an Agile approach, in fact increasing cost may be of greater benefit if the team is delivering higher value products.

True or False: A self-managing team has complete freedom to decide how it works.

False. Organizational standards and policies, as well as the maturity level of the team, will put guard-rails on what a team is allowed to do. More mature teams may be given more authority than less mature teams, but even for the most mature teams, every organization has some rules that everyone must follow.

True or False: In an Agile organization the manager will always retain responsibility for the personal development of the members of a Scrum Team.

False. Personal development is a responsibility of everyone in the organization. While personal development is a responsibility of each Scrum Team member, and Scrum Masters typically facilitate team member professional growth, the manager often, but not always, facilitates professional growth of entire teams. This may be more likely if your organization is not at the highest level of Agility yet. The majority of organizations are not yet at the highest level of agility and as a manager you are probably still responsible; historically that is just how it is arranged in most places. Even if your organization (or more likely your department or team) is based on 100% Agile principles, as a manager you may still be responsible for peoples' development, but people will make their own decisions on how they develop themselves without the involvement of their manager\leader.

True or False: Managers make good Product Owners since they are already used to making decisions and directing the teams responsible for product delivery.

False. Product Owners are accountable for optimizing the value that their Scrum Teams deliver, but they do not have authority to direct people, and they don't make decisions for the team. Managers who come into a Product Owner role often have a challenge in focusing on clearly articulating what the teams need to and letting go of directing people. A Product Owner plays many roles, but being a manager is not one of those roles.

True or False: In an organization using Scrum, the manager is still responsible for the quality of the product.

False. Responsibility for the quality should be with the Scrum Teams. A leader serves the team by providing them with an environment where they can create high quality products, but the team should be responsible themselves.

True or False: Managers make good Scrum Masters since they are already used to organizing and running teams.

False. Scrum Masters do not organize and run teams; they help their teams apply the Scrum Framework and grow their abilities as a team.

True or False: It is a good practice to spread team members across several Scrum Teams so that you can maintain high utilization of resources and be able to respond quickly and remain productive when impediments occur.

False. Spreading people across multiple Scrum Teams virtually guarantees that the teams will increase the amount of time they spend waiting while a team member is off doing something else. Utilization of resources (people) should not be the objective; the objective should be delivering value. To improve throughput and speed delivery, dedicate people to a single team.

True or False: The primary benefit of an agile approach as compared to a traditional plan-based approach is to improve the ability of a team to deliver on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.

False. The primary benefit of an agile approach as compared to a traditional plan-based approach is to deliver business value by improving customer outcomes. In the course of frequent product deliveries and empirical feedback, an agile team will learn what customers really need, which may not align with the original scope of the release. Because of this feedback, they are able to adapt the product based on feedback to provide better customer outcomes with the time and budget available.

True or False: Velocity is a useful measure of the value a Scrum Team produces.

False. Velocity tells you only how many units of work were completed, not whether that work was valuable. Instead of focusing on productivity, look at the business value that the Scrum Team is delivering. To improve their ability to deliver business value, focus on removing impediments.

True or False: Teams must be co-located to use Scrum.

False. While Scrum can help both co-located and distributed teams work more effectively and deliver more value it is difficult to find evidence that distributed teams can be equally as effective as co-located teams.

True or False: Directing all Scrum Teams to adhere to the same release schedule improves the frequency of delivering value to the customer/user.

False. While using a common release schedule could increase Scrum Team synchronization, it is the role of the Product Owner to set common goals and help the teams to deliver value. The increase of value delivery is often a result of applying Scrum in combination with empirical principles (transparency, inspection and adaptation) and the Scrum Values (Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage).

True or False: A critical responsibility of an Agile leader is to create an environment where agility is supported and to help remove impediments to delivering done product Increments.

True. Agile leaders are primarily serving leaders who help their Scrum Teams improve by supporting good agile working practices and, most importantly, interceding on their behalf when they need help to remove impediments. Shipping/Delivering a valuable product should be the metric used to measure success.

True or False: Consistent achievement of Sprint Goals is a good indication that a Scrum Team is performing well.

True. Consistent achievement of Sprint Goals shows that the Scrum Team is working well together, that they are able to agree on the Sprint Goal, and they are able to work together to achieve that goal.