Agile Intelligence: Scrum of Scrums

With the rising popularity, the Agile methodology started getting applied in almost everywhere. The project sponsors and some other stakeholders in many organizations were bought into it pretty quickly; not much due to the fascinating stuff Agile brought in, but the scars left by the traditionally approached and failed projects. Very soon, the large projects started with agility have been caught with an unprecedented reality: the overhead of communication.

So far, Agile methods fostered communication in all direction, and in small projects with small number of team members, that worked quite well. As the size grew, the numeric formula of 2ⁿ-1 started taking toll that was due. By and large, the project management practitioners take the project communication very seriously. Each project plan comes with a communication plan, be it a software development project or a stadium development project. The project managers take a meticulous measurement of the communication cost in terms of hours and infrastructure (long distance and international calls) spent. Accordingly, the project team structure and the communication plan have been devised for traditionally approached projects. For the projects following Agile methodology, the communication channels active would be 2ⁿ-1, where ‘n’ being the number of team members, stakeholders included. This means, a 4 member team would create 15 communication channels, and a 12 member team would create 4095 number of channels. As you know, the team size can grow even larger for large scale implementation work, and this theory of Scrum may wreck a havoc, to put it mildly.

The proponents of Agile methodology were quick to respond. Instead of trying to pester with the same technique, they quickly brought in the age-old method of communication clustering; this time under the guise of Scrum of Scrums. In a nutshell, Scrum would be held within the small workgroup or team formed on the basis of the geographic location and modules they work on. The Scrum Master of each Scrum would then assemble in another meeting to discuss the same topic, albeit with a different phrase. Instead of asking how the individual has been doing, the questions would focus more towards how the team has been doing. Accordingly, a set of 5 questions have been formulated –
1. What did your team do during this period?
2. What will your team do in the coming period?
3. What are the obstacles on your team’s way to completion?
4. What are the tasks that your team will put forward for other team(s) in the coming period?

As you can see here, the fourth question comes with a lot of relevance. This question now addresses the collaboration need among the teams. One team finishes a certain work (say, development of a module/screen) and hands over to another team (say, for integration) is a common phenomenon in a project, and the fourth question is set to address that. With the answers provided by each Scrum Master on this question, the other Scrum Masters would get to know the tasks they are going to get assigned in the coming period.

Another important shift was on the change in frequency. Scrum takes place everyday, and hence the questions are about yesterday and today. Scrum of Scrums are not meant to be an everyday affair, so it talks about the last period (i.e. the days between last scrum and the present scrum), and the coming period (i.e. the days between the present scrum and next scrum). That brings an important question: what would be an ideal frequency? The answer to this varies widely. The early proponents of Agile still believe a daily frequency should be the ideal dose. The practitioners who are transitioning into Agile from traditional approach thinks it should be much less; they are grouped into twice weekly and once weekly frequencies. Once weekly frequency practically imitates the traditional project progress review meetings, while the twice weekly frequency provides more substantive discussions among the Scrum Masters, not necessarily all those would be relevant.

I would recommend the readers to visit the same Scrum Alliance website to read more about the latest happenings in this area, while I would like to proceed on stories.