Scrum and human behaviour – a hand and a glove – Part 1

Scrum, Agile and Lean techniques all make clear that Respect and Trust are necessary conditions for success. What is less mentioned and understood is how Scrum and Agile techniques create and engender this trust, and more so, does it in such a way that those being “manipulated” to trust and respect do not even realise what is going on.

To understand how Scrum and Agile techniques achieve this, let’s look at some of the planning and co- ordination events within Scrum:

• Prioritisation
• Estimation
• Sprint commitments
• Daily stand-up

In Part 1 we give a brief overview of Prioritisation – parts 2-4 will cover estimation, sprint commitments and daily stand-ups

Prioritisation

When there are a number of customers providing input into a unified Product Backlog, and there is contention about what is done first, the technique used in Scrum and Agile is to play Planning Poker. Put simply:

• All interested parties assemble in a meeting room
• Each is given a set of Fibonacci series based planning poker cards – the same used for estimations
• Each presents their input to the Product Backlog – why is it worth doing?
• Once all have presented – voting starts from the top
• Business value voting –what we stand to gain if we do it
  • All members raise a card to score business value
  • The highest and lowest scores present their cases – why it should be done, why not
  • Vote again
  • Repeat usually maximum three times for adequate consensus, after which the senior makes a call (the designated Product Owner for the meeting)
• Business risk voting –what we stand to lose if we do not do it
  • All members raise a card to score business risk
  • The highest and lowest scores present their cases – risk high, risk low
  • Vote again
  • Repeat usually maximum three times for adequate consensus, after the senior makes a call (the designated Product Owner for the meeting)
  • Repeat for all of the Product Backlog
  • You now have the best consensus opinion on what priorities are

Repeating these meetings regularly to review priorities brings you closer and closer to the best possible set of priorities

Why does this work?

It works because:

• It is based upon the trigger class of strategies employed in repeated non-cooperative games from game theory
• Research shows that human and other co-operative species evolved to intuitively employ a tit-for-tat strategy in order to achieve more together by balancing co-operative, aggressive and defensive impulses.

The trigger strategy works as follows:

• Initially cooperate
• Punish the opponent if a certain level of defection (i.e., the trigger) is observed.
• The level of punishment and the sensitivity of the trigger vary with different trigger strategies.

What this translates to in business prioritisation where:

• there are non-cooperating or conflicting goals from the various business representatives present – be they business plans, product features whatever
• there are shared resource limits such as budget, time, skills, staff etc.

is the following:

• All press for objective presentation and evaluation of business cases
• Those that appear to vote on emotion or are overly partial to their own projects will be punished in the next round of voting

More information

• Trigger strategies                             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_strategy
• Tit for tat                                             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
• Evolution of co-operation            http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Robert-Axelrod/dp/0465021212