Category: Interview Series

In the current times, businesses are undergoing drastic changes. Small business are significantly affected by the coronavirus outbreak. In our recent interview with Dave West (CEO, Scrum.org), he has shared his thoughts about reason for Scrum being so successful, small business solutions, difference between professional coaching and Agile coaching, and a lot more.

Q1. According to you, why has Scrum been so successful?
Dave: Of course it depends on how you measure success, but I think we can at least say that Scrum has changed the face of how teams work, and in particular how software delivery teams work. Rough estimates say that Scrum is practiced by over 18 million people everyday. Scrum.org trains thousands of people each month and if you review Amazon.com for Scrum books you will find over 200 with Scrum in the title or in the description. The terms Sprint, Daily Scrum (originally stand up), Backlog, Sprint Review and Retrospective have become standard terms for teams. And, you can not argue that stuff is being delivered by these teams. In fact, I am sure that the Scrum Teams are somehow involved in software we are using to do this interview. 

So, why has Scrum become so successful?
I think there are three parts to that answer: 

1. Scrum is simple to learn and easy to follow – of course that does not mean that you are embracing the real ideas of Scrum and actually delivering valuable stuff frequently, but every team can easily adopt the structure and basic ideas. That then leads to being able to slowly become more agile. 
2. The commercial model – I know that many people bemoan that ideas of certification and licensed trainers as “all about the money”, but frankly, without a commercial incentive the ideas would have been written about and then delivered by only a small group of people. Building a commercial model drove adoption, the ideas got into the world and spread. This also allowed for a more consistent delivery approach because those initial trainers all came from the same source. 
3. The time was right – We are moving out of the industrial age and that approach to product development and project management. Scrum is a perfect fit for the complex world and digital products and projects. Being in the right place at the right time provided a great opportunity, the commercial model and the simplicity to learn scaled that adoption. 

Q2. The COVID-19 pandemic is hurting business around the world. Please suggest some small business solutions for pandemic challenges.
Dave: Wow, I am not sure I am the authority on that topic. But I can tell you what we did at Scrum.org and how Scrum and our agile / community approach helped.

At the start of March our in person training business slowed to a crawl as Europe and America both stopped in person events and put the populations into lock down. Our 330+ trainers were faced with a very difficult situation. How could they deliver in person training when you were not allowed to, and when ‘in person’ was a high risk event. It was clear that we needed to pivot quickly to support Live Virtual Training (LVT). Over the last 4 years we had run a series of experiments with this form of training and had already learned a lot. But, we had never pulled the trigger on adding virtual because our in-person training was doing well and our community was super busy with that. This was an opportunity to take that learning and quickly execute on building out and delivering virtual classes. And to do that required trainers to be trained on how to do soand customers needed to be trained.  We executed on that rapidly taking advantage of the size of our community and the large number of customers they were connected to. We delivered virtual classes, learned from those deliveries and then updated our materials. We had multiple virtual meet ups to discuss our learning and we had Slack groups capturing real time observations and experiences. I think every business can learn from this experience and apply the three main ideas:

1. Focus on your customers – Engage with them, see what they need. Though the pandemic had reduced the number of clients that wanted training, it is still worth talking to them.  By connecting with them we quickly understood their needs and learned. 
2. Engage your channel and community – We have 330+ trainers who work all over the world with many different companies. This gave us a massive reach, and allowed us to ask questions and test ideas rapidly. We did not go to them with solutions, but actually made them part of the solution. 
3. Be prepared to change everything rapidly – We tried stuff that did not work, and rapidly changed. We used data and metrics to drive learning and everything was up for change. 

Q3. Briefly share your thoughts on the difference between Professional Coaching and Agile Coaching.
Dave: When looking at professional coaching the difference is that a Professional Coach is focused on helping an individual fulfill their potential. To deliver on their goals. Agile coaches are focused on helping teams and teams of teams deliver value in an agile way. I recently delivered two webinars on the topic with Maaike Klasen who is a Scrum Master and a ICF certified coach. We discussed the differences in detail and how the two bodies of work are very complementary. Many of the coaching skills such as powerful questions are fantastic when working with individuals. Also the idea of a coaching agreement is valuable as it makes the act of coaching transparent to the team, and other key stakeholders including the sponsor. 
The bottom line is that professional coaching means you have a professional certification certificate from a body like ICF. Agile coach does not imply that, but would benefit from the rigor that professional license requires. A good Agile Coach would take advantage of professional coaching and other skills such as facilitation, teaching, mentoring and evening management practices. Just learning Scrum is never enough. You have to use the ideas that it provides as a foundation for lots of skills to help the team, organization and ultimately the customer. 

Q4 We hear lots about Flow. Is the future of Agile flow?

Dave: It is clear that understanding the dynamics of how work, ideas and value is generated is crucial for any organization. That was part of the motivation for our work on the Professional Scrum with Kanban class. It shows clearly how the ideas of Kanban and flow can augment any Scrum approach. But I do not think that the future of agile is flow. I think that agility has introduced us to the power of self managed teams, empirical process and a maniacal focus on improvement. The reality is that to deliver value you have to do lots of other things. Things like care about the customer with Design Thinking and Lean UX. Deliver frequently and inspect your work with practices from DevOps, and lots of other things. It is a fundamental tenet of Scrum that you should always be improving, adding ideas to your understanding and trying them out. The great thing about Scrum is that you get the opportunity every Sprint. And the team has the power to decide on trying new things. I would love to value streams, flow metrics and all of the great work of people like Donald Reinertsen to be better understood and used, but I do not think that replaces Scrum but in fact makes Scrum work even better. 

Q5. What are the three things you recommend organisations to work on in order to be prepared for future challenges?
Dave: There are lots of things that organizations need to do to be ready for the future, but the most important thing they can do is put in place inspection and improvement loops so that they can inspect and adapt when things change. At the heart of all agile approaches is that inspection loop. But to take advantage of these loops requires a few things:

1. Outcome based measurement – Most organizations are focused on motion measurements such as productivity, or cost. Those things are important, but if you want to shape your response to something then you must determine what the outcomes you seek and how you are doing against them. 
2. Alignment to customers and outcomes – Too often organizations align to the internal system making it very difficult for a team or individual to see the value they are delivering. The most successful teams have a clear line of sight to the customer and outcomes. Being focused on the customer rather than the internal systems or even products provides teams with a future proofing approach as the needs of the customer changes then their products and services change as well. 
3. Empowered / self organizing teams – It is almost impossible to build a perfect organization for the future. But it is possible to align teams and then empower them to deliver value. Ultimately future organizations need to reframe their model from one of hierarchy to one that provides an environment that supports teams focused on outcomes and customers.  

Q6. How do you connect Innovation, Agility and Transformation?
Dave: I think they are all connected. To be innovative requires agility because it is complex and unknown. To be agile requires most organizations to transform. The one mistake is to think that transformation is a project – transformation should happen continuously – It never stops. When you stop changing or trying new stuff, then you are not innovative or agile. Change needs to be the norm. That is why simple process models like Scrum are so successful. They provide some stability when everything else around can change. 

Q7. One question you would like us to ask you. Please answer as well.
Dave: What would be the one thing you can do to improve your agile adoption? I think that we often concentrate so much on process, tools, frameworks and organizational models that we forget that agility ultimately is about people working together in different ways to deliver value. The best teams are so much more important than any process or organizational construct. And teams are composed of people who all come with their own experiences, personalities and sometimes baggage. By trying to improve yourself and focus on something you can do to make your team more effective you can ultimately help your team and organization and customers. 
For me the one thing I am concentrating on at the moment is listening – I often respond before really listening. I am trying to approach every interaction from a learning perspective rather than a telling one. I believe that if I do this, not only will other members of my team have an opportunity to better share their ideas, but other teammates will also listen more. And, I believe that the world would be a much better place if we listened more and talked less! 
But that is me – I ask everyone reading this to ask themselves, “what can I do to create a better environment for agile to succeed?”

Dave West is the product owner and CEO at scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object- Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then as VP, research director Forrester research where he ran the software development and delivery practice. Prior to joining Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company’s executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100.

In our recent edition, we feature Ivar Jacobson and discuss about Essence and his vision for future. He shared his views on how Essence came into existence, major development steps taken, value proposition in adopting Essence and a lot more.

Let’s read;

Q1. Tell us a little bit about the birth of Essence. How did it come into existence?
Ivar: The history of Essence is quite long, but I will be as brief as possible. It began already around 2000, when my baby RUP was at its peak of popularity. I was treated as a guru and my words had much more impact than I was comfortable with. People adopted RUP because it was very popular. However, I felt relying on gurus was a clear sign of immaturity of the software industry. At the same time XP started to become immensely popular and I could see that we had a new paradigm shift on the rise. Although I saw great value in the human aspects of agile, having paradigm shifts was another example of immaturity of the industry. And, of course, the method war, with people belonging to method communities (sects) fighting one another instead of collaborating, emphasised the foolishness in the situation. Even if I realised the software industry needed something to replace RUP for large-scale software systems, I didn’t want to go down that path again. Instead, I became more and more convinced we needed to do something more fundamental than creating yet another method. A first step towards what became Essence was when I realised that every method was just a composition of some ‘atomic’ mini-methods, called practices, such as use-cases, user stories, components, tests, continuous integration, organising teams. With a library of such practices it would be possible for the team to create their own way of working by selecting practices from the library and composing them into a method. I presented this idea at the XP conference in 2003. And this is when I would say that Essence was born.

Q2. Essence became an international standard through OMG in 2014. Tell us about the major development steps taken to get there?
Ivar: I founded my current company Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) in 2004 and a year or so later we had started our journey in creating what today is called Essence. Around me I had gathered a team of very practical, competent and creative people who all contributed to make Essence what it is today. Among these people were Ian Spence, Pan Wei Ng, Brian Kerr, Roly Stimson and Stefan Bylund. 

Given our huge ambition the journey has been long but fruitful: 

1. In 2007 we demonstrated concretely how the important part of RUP could be redesigned as a composition of eight practices, which we called EssUP (Essential Unified Process). We gave EssUP a better user experience than traditional handbooks; every practice could effectively be described by using poker-sized cards. Several clients around the world adopted EssUP so we were inspired to take the next step.
2. A year later we realized that we could apply the same idea for all methods in the world, not just for the Unified Process. However, we first had to identify a common ground which they could all share. We did that and the resulting common ground included a Kernel of essential things to work with, essential things to do and essential competencies to have, and a simple Language to describe the Kernel and practices/methods. We used the common ground with clients, such as Munich Re and Fujitsu UK, with very successful results among process engineers, but at that time with difficulties when deploying it amongst teams. 
3. In 2009 together with professor Bertrand Meyer (a world-class computer scientist) and Dr. Richard Soley (chairman of OMG, a standard setter) and I founded the SEMAT community, with support from about 40 other famous software industry figures (methodologists, software engineering experts, computer scientists, etc.) and equally many corporations and universities. Thousands of other individuals signed up for the idea of revolutionizing software engineering as a rigorous discipline, based on a kernel of widely accepted elements. More than 30 active members from SEMAT made a fabulous job of completing, clarifying and formalizing the work originating from my team of people and the resulting proposal, called Essence, was adopted by OMG as a new standard in 2014. A few people made seminal contributions to get Essence to what it is today: Ian Spence, Paul McMahon and Ed Seidewitz. Many others have had significant impact on Essence, but here I can just mention a few and I am afraid I miss someone. I have given a complete acknowledgement in the book ‘The Essentials of Modern Software engineering’.

Q3. The Essence standard is now six years old. What has happened since then?
Ivar: After we got Essence accepted as a standard, I quoted Winston Churchill “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” To make an analogy, Essence is to practices and methods what an operating system is to applications; without applications on top of the operating system there is no value to users, and ditto if no practices defined on top of Essence there is no (or little) value to teams.

1. Having a standard Essence, with a simple language to describe practices, many companies including IJI were released to develop libraries of practices and methods. This happened around the world and to IJI it took us into 2017 until we could publish our practice library (https://practicelibrary.ivarjacobson.com).
2. Several well-known methodologists have wholeheartedly embraced Essence and redesigned their practices and method frameworks using Essence. As an example, classical Scrum as represented by the Scrum Guide has become Scrum Essentials. Essence doesn’t change the intentions of Scrum; it just make it easier to learn, easier to adopt, easier to modify if needed, and maybe most important easier to use in daily work. What more could you ask for? Well, as you will see further down (point 5) there is more you could ask for.
3. The adoption of Essence in the academic world is also growing fast. ‘Essence Education Forum’ chaired by Jöran Pieper with more than 30 university teachers committed to develop course material including games, examples (both small and large), quizzes, examinations, for teaching Essence and its use cases; I will also discuss the use cases further down.
4. We have made great strides with practices, methods and libraries; method experts and process engineers clearly saw the values that Essence gave to methods and have willingly adopted Essence and its use cases. However, many teams (including product owners and scrum masters) had problems in adoption for the same reason that we always have had method adoption challenges by the people who eventually had to do the job. One thing is learning from books, papers, web sites, yes even from lengthy classroom training. Another thing is to use that knowledge when you actually need it. The acquired knowledge falls back and people easily go back to old, familiar ways of working.  Thus, we understood that something fundamental was missing. 
5. That missing piece is what we call Live Guidance™. The different members of the team need to learn what they need when they need it, they need to get guidance when they do something, they need practices at their fingertips or in the palm of their hands. Scrum Essentials provides exactly that as described in a recently published paper ’Scrum Essentials Cards – Experiences of Scrum Teams Improving with Essence’ by Jeff Sutherland, Ivar Jacobson and Brian Kerr, in ACM Queue. https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/publications/articles/acm-queue-mayjune-2020-scrum-essentials-cards-experience-scrum-teams-improving

Reading this paper must convince every Scrum practitioner that Essence makes Scrum significantly better.Thus, our latest step in the journey has been to develop what we today call Essence in Practice™. 
In summary, the journey has been very long since our ambitions were very extensive. We have been many participants on this journey – organisations and teams, academics and method experts. We have been very successful in getting process engineers to love what we have developed. But engaging practice users (practitioners and teams) has been a longer journey. I think every participant feels we are on the right path, maybe we need some small corrections, but eventually Essence and its use cases will give us better software, faster, cheaper and with happier customers and teams.

Q4. Tell us about the value proposition in adopting Essence.  
Ivar: Essence offers many use cases for many personas. For the industry the most important ones are personas such as the team and the team member, the method expert or the champion, the sponsor or the executive, the program and the project manager, the coaches or the scrum master. For the academics the most important ones are the teachers and the researchers. In brief, a large group of people, both from the industry and from the academic world will see dramatic consequences when adopting Essence.

I and my company have worked with all these personas and more in mind, but we have focused on three key personas in the industry: the sponsor, the champion and the team. Any transformation requires support from these three personas to become successful. How Essence supports them would go too far in this interview, but you can find it on our web: https://whyessence.ivarjacobson.com.

Q5. What are some of the approaches you recommend organisations take in the current situation during COVID-19?
Ivar: IJI has extensive experience in virtual training and consulting.  Please read about it in these blogs here;
https://www.ivarjacobson.com/publications/blog/dispersed-planning-part-1-preparation
https://www.ivarjacobson.com/publications/blog/dispersed-planning-part-2-facilitation written by one of my colleagues and SAFe Fellow Brian Tucker. 

The testimonials we have got are telling in a clear language: it works very well, in some cases even better than traditional classroom training.

Going back to the Scrum Essentials method framework. Once Essence in Practice, which now is in user test mode, is launched, teams will be able to work distributed applying Scrum Essentials and soon many other practices too. Practices can be loaded into collaboration spaces called Team Rooms and used to actively guide and drive the team’s work, including their plan, do, check and adapt cycles.

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Dr. Ivar Jacobson is the creator of Use Cases and the Unified Process, a widely adopted method. He is also one of the three original developers of the Unified Modelling Language. This work was around 20 years ago widely adopted in the software industry. But all this is history. Ivar founded his current company, Ivar Jacobson International, which since 2004 has been focused on using methods and tools in a smart, superlight and agile way. This work resulted in the creation of a worldwide network, SEMAT, which has the mission to revolutionise software development based on a kernel of software engineering. The kernel has been realised as a formal OMG standard called Essence.

Ivar has authored eleven books and written hundreds of papers on subjects related to software engineering.