Pick your battles

Great Scrum Masters pick their battles. You can’t fix everything at once. Sometimes you have to pace yourself.

But where do you start? Here are some of the first things I look at when I am thinking about how to improve the adoption of Scrum.

1. The Scrum Values

This one is the most important - even if it is a "soft" skill.

Respect, Focus, Openness, Courage, and Commitment aren’t just words. They are the foundation that makes everything else possible. Because Scrum is a team effort, teamwork is important. It's important in sports - and it's even more important when we're developing complex products.

Fight for:

• Real respect (no eye-rolling, no talking over people, no blame games)

• Focus - protecting the team from random requests and context switching

• Openness - being open to the ideas of all team members

• Courage - especially when giving honest feedback

• Commitment to the Sprint Goal and to each other

If the team doesn’t live the Scrum Values, everything else falls apart. This is always worth the coaching effort. Here's an article about what the Scrum values look like in the real world.

2. Incremental Delivery

This is one of the most important ideas in Scrum.

Encourage the team to deliver small, usable increments of value instead of big batches. Incremental delivery reduces risk, helps the team get feedback from the customer spooner, and prevents months of wasted effort building the wrong thing.

It’s not always easy. Teams often want to build everything before showing it to anyone. Push back. Incremental delivery is a mindset as much as a practice — and it’s worth fighting for.

3. Sizing Work So It Can Be Completed in a Sprint

Nothing kills momentum faster than Product Backlog items (often called user stories) that are way too big.

Ask the Product Owner and Developers to work together during refinement to break work down into smaller deliverables so they can realistically get items to Done inside a single Sprint. The purpose of refinement is to ensure each Product Backlopg item is small enough to be completed within a Sprint and that it contains enough information to develop and test it.

If most items spill over from Sprint after Sprint, you’re not doing Scrum — you’re developing in one Sprint and testing in the next which delays value delivery and makes it harder to change direction. This battle is worth fighting, even if it takes months to get there!

4. Don't Skip the Sprint Retrospective

When I see a low performing Scrum team, they are almost always skipping the Retrospective. That's because the Retrospective is where continuous improvement actually happens.

If teams are frequently wanting to cancel the Retrospective, the Scrum Master should be asking themselves why that is. Your job as the Scrum Master is to ensure that the events take place and that they are positive, productive and kept within the time box. If the team always wants to skip the Retrospective, it's often because the Retrospective has been none of those things.

Make sure that the Retrospective results in one or two improvement action items - no matter how small - and make sure that the team takes action on those improvements as soon as possible. Keep the Retrospective short, to the point, and remember it's more than just a place to complain. It's a place to figure out what to do about whatever is holding the team back. Keep the team on track - facilitation is an important skill for a Scrum Master, after all. And help them focus on what they can control.

When the team learns that the Retrospective is actually helpful, they won't be so keen to skip it.

5. Continuous Improvement

Even if the team isn’t great at Scrum yet, keep your eye on the prize of continuous improvement. A series of small improvements is better than a giant process improvement because the small changes will stick.

Some teams take years to reach high performance. That’s ok - as long we they are always getting better. When you aren't getting better, you're sliding backwards.

Final Thought

No one can focus on everything at once. You may need to let some smaller things slide in the short term. But focus on these things first: the Scrum Values, incremental delivery, getting work to Done, running good Retrospectives, and the commitment to keep improving.

Pick your battles. Fight the important ones consistently. Even if improvement is slow, it's still a step down the right path.  And remember that any time you modify Scrum, you're only hiding the issue.