Resources/Articles Archives

Scrum Makes Sense For Startups: Part Two

In our last blog, we discussed how the Scrum framework can be helpful to startups who are looking to get the most amount of work done as quickly as possible in order to get it on the market as soon as they can. We also talked about how Scrum is an adaptable framework that can change the way you think about your final goal.

In today’s entry, we will talk about why moving towards iterative development can be so beneficial for your startup team in an age that demands speed and flexibility. If you want your team to start working more efficiently, call us at Big Orange Square. We offer public classes about Scrum and agile development as well as personalized training programs built specifically for your team. We have trained more than 15,000 people over the last 10 years and we can help you, too.

Iterative Development

Iterative development is the cyclic process of developing a prototype, testing it, and then refining the prototype after analysis. While this might not sound much different than the way that products and some software is traditionally built, it is actually a different process. While traditional development focuses on taking steps in order, iterative design instead looks at the final product as a collection of products that must each be built in order for the final product to function correctly. By accepting this model, teams don’t have to wait for other pieces to be completed in order to complete theirs. Instead, teams work in parallel to build the products that will then combine in the end for the final product that you want to take to market.

Each team works on their own product separately but they all come together frequently to share their findings and to show the others how their product will eventually fit in with the others. By repeating this process of prototyping and refining, each team is solving problems every day that might otherwise take weeks, months, or even years, to be discovered. The iterative design and development process basically creates a large number of scenarios that mirror the actual use of your product by users without having to risk the bad press that follows broken software or a product.

At Big Orange Square, our approach to teaching Scrum is tailored to both software and physical product development. Our method will help you work through the processes and make your work move more quickly by actually engaging your minds with hands-on training. We have found that tactile training yields the best results by showing teams that the prototyping process is much less scary than they think it is and that it yields faster results with better solutions.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your startup team get off on the right foot. We have years of experience helping software development teams get started with agile Scrum and we have tailored these processes to work with physical product development in a way that hasn’t been done before.

A Professional Pivot Creates A New Purpose

Before The Pivot

Hubert Smits teaching at our new headquarters.
Class time with Hubert Smits. There are a few slides – but not a lot.
I’ve been working with Hubert over three years. He loves all things Scrum and teaches Certified Scrum Master classes. My job is to promote his work through various marketing activities. We had our ducks in a row: great looking website (www.smitsmc.com), Twitter followers (@hubertsmits), a happening LinkedIn profile and company profile – all working in his favor. Business was good!

But, I could hear it in his voice that Hubert wasn’t really happy.

Then, one day, about a year ago as of this writing, he called me. And nothing has been the same since that phone call.

In February 2016, Hubert joined some friends at a Train the Trainer class in the Seattle-area. Joe Justice, a well-known and respected agile trainer for Scrum Inc., was teaching Certified Scrum Trainers how to use Scrum to build products, namely a Wikispeed car. The class and the concept clicked for Hubert in such a way that he saw exactly what needed to happen next. He needed to do this. He needed to combine his passion for creating, with his passion for teaching, with his passion for Scrum.

He Pivoted And Now I Can’t Keep Up With Him!

BOS HQ LongmontFast forward one year to February 6 – 9, 2017. Hubert and his new business partner, Peter Borsella, held their first class at their new Colorado Headquarters!

(The week prior, both of them had led a class onsite with our client, CISCO. Pretty cool!) This week, they were working with ARCA, a manufacturer of cash automations technology for financial institutions and retail customers. They are an international organization and they brought a big team for this training: we had students here from England, France, Italy and the US! Two of them were here last August, when we held our first class in Boulder, Colorado in conjunction with our Scrum4HW gathering. (Link to that page). I couldn’t wait to see them!

I drove right to the spot that had been described to me: an unassuming warehouse-style building in the tiny town of Hygiene, Colorado (just north of Boulder, Colorado).

No One Is Asleep And One Team Skipped Lunch

I walked into an incredible experience. It was day four of the training. I’ve been to day two of training for other classes and it always looks the same: glassy-eyed, yawning students sitting under buzzing fluorescent lights as slides fade in and out on the screen while the instructor tries to keep everyone’s attention. I didn’t find this happening. Instead, students were asking questions, talking with the instructor, Hubert, and he was writing on a flip chart and not even using a projector! Throughout the next 30 minutes, I confess, he did show a few slides, but the focus of the class wasn’t on those slides: it was on the content. “Can this really be day four?”

Lunch arrived. Rather than running for the boxed lunches and grabbing their cell phones, the students opted to meet together. They met around the whiteboard and moved sticky notes from “doing” to “done” and “to do” to “doing” and each team held a short stand up reviewing what they had done and wanted to do and whose help would be needed. Finally, they broke for lunch! (I was so relieved because I was starving!) Oh wait, not all of them grabbed lunch. One team put lunch off because they really wanted to figure out their wheel assembly. I overheard a team member, Jason Schreuder, say, “I want to get those wheels on. I’m going to skip lunch until I get that figured out!”

Here you can see some photos. Photos really don’t tell the whole story. The shop is large and accommodates a classroom on one side and a workshop on the other. Beyond the workshop is another large warehouse we also use. As you can see, Hubert organized every tool so that students can find and use what they need quickly and easily. There are garage doors throughout the space, which allows the students to move equipment where they need it. It also gives them an incredible view of the Rocky Mountains.

I talked with the students and found that they were all staying in Boulder, Colorado, a breath-taking, beautiful 40 minute drive from the shop. At night, they partied! During the day, they worked! Hubert told me that they arrived at 8am and stayed until 6pm – even though he’d planned a 9am to 5pm class – because they couldn’t wait to learn the Scrum framework and try it out on building the car.

The ARCA folks were enjoying their training experience and they were learning a lot. Christopher Curley, an experienced Certified Scrum Master, shared with me that his team, which was focusing on building the floor and adding the seats to the car, had learned over the four days how to self-organize. “At first, I was very involved coaching them on how to work together, make decisions and now, I can just stand here and watch them work. They’ve totally got this figured out.”

I couldn’t wait to catch up with my friend from last August, Dawn Guttman. Dawn doesn’t like the spotlight, but you can see her in this photo from our August class: drill, baby, drill! She’s a manager at ARCA and, although Dawn attended last summer, she came this time to develop relationships with more ARCA team members who work with her team, but in other countries. Dawn is based in the US and works on the software-side of the business, and interfaces with manufacturing and finance. I asked her how the training was going. “It’s great! I really like the new space and it is making such an impact on everyone to have class time here and then walk over there [to the shop] and apply what we’re learning. Everyone’s really getting it.”

Hubert had Panera bring in breakfast and lunch every day, so the students ate well and had plenty of good coffee. But, if a student needs a break, Hygiene offers so much more than your typical business park or hotel-based training. The views of Longs Peak and the Rocky Mountains will refill your lungs. And if you need a coffee boost or a nibble, the Crane Hollow Cafe is right across the street. Another real bonus is the Purple Door, just a few steps from the Big Orange Square’s front door. It’s a cool market that provides yummy organic, local food and gluten-free baked goods.

I shared these other juicy tidbits about the location of our training facility because it’s another aspect of this training that makes it unique. I mean, that’s in addition to how unique our class is in the first place: it’s unique to build a car as you learn how to Scrum. When I took my CSM class, it was in a hotel conference room. We played a few cool games and had some good discussions. But, I’ll take training at the Big Orange Square (BOS) headquarters over that training if I have a choice. And, yes, of course I’m biased: I’m the marketing person for BOS. But, I’ve delivered training for IBM, taken the CSM class [from Hubert!] and so I do have some perspective. THIS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT XTREME CLASS ROCKS!

The Benefits Of Empiricism And Teams In Product Development

The base concepts of Scrum are empiricism and teams. With empiricism in Scrum, decisions are made based on information we continuously collect, observe, and/or experience. With teams in Scrum, we believe that working closely and in tandem with our teammates from all the various disciplines collects the best information to make empiricism work. Classic Project Management Falls Short in Product Development In classic (or waterfall) project management, empiricism and teamwork are foreign concepts; inspections of the working results happen late in the project and people from different disciplines are separated by stage-gates.

A Stage Gate Workflow

In classic project management, projects begin with detailed, upfront planning. Designs are handled by one group of people and weeks or months later specifications are handed off to the next group who has to take care to get the designs into a product, only to be handed off to another for supply chain completions or back to the first because of detected problems. These series of handoffs result in very late feedback and the people are separated into silos. By silos I mean, one group could take care of design, another the electronics or mechanical work, another the supply chain group. I’ve worked with clients who are stuck in this sequence for years: some don’t get products out to the market for seven years or more. A new car model is about seven years in the making. It takes seven months to change specs in a simple product, like a whiteboard marker.

Agile Delivers Faster Results In Product Development

Enter Scrum: every two weeks a working version of the product is ready, and all the people work together to achieve this. The designers, the developers and the testers (to fit the same story as above), are meeting daily, discussing the project, working through issues together. The new revolution is to apply Scrum beyond software. We are successfully applying Scrum to product development: and we mean industrial product development. Now product development is discovering the benefits of empiricism and teams. With empiricism, designers, engineers, supply chain people and manufacturing people, learn together in short cycles what works in their design and what does not. Results show that this level of collaboration gives big productivity benefits, which far outweigh the perceived cost of not bundling work per function. Changes are required in the development process in order to produce inspect-able results every few weeks: different suppliers and, most of all, different thinking about what a product increment is. Combine the two and you achieve our slogan: Twice the product in half the time!™ (Fifteen years ago, when I started to work with Scrum, the practice of empiricism and teams were foreign to software people. Remarks like, “that is brilliant, but it won’t work with our big system,” were common. Fast forward to 2017 and all possible software development projects are running with the Scrum framework. No surprise as we bring Scrum to product development: product developers are using exactly the same arguments as software developers a decennium ago! They argue: they don’t have a need to bring mechanical and electrical engineers into the same development team; an increment is too slow and too expensive to build in two weeks; they can’t inspect and adapt when the entire product isn’t finished. It’s familiar to me and I know we’ll get there.)

Industry Benefits From Scrum

My colleague, Peter Borsella, and I have developed classes in which the above concept is explained and practiced. As we teach Scrum, our attendees actually build a product (a full size car) during class using the Scrum framework. The effects are far beyond our wildest dreams! One of our clients brought in their product teams from all over the world to our training headquarters in Colorado. As as a direct result of the class, they saved a year’s worth of time and $100,000 of investment developing a new product! (We are working on a full case study to share with you). The client is now developing products using empiricism and teams. They are also sent more product teams to us for training and coaching in February. If you can kick it, you can scrum it mottoIn Summary, what worked so well for software development is working for product development. If you’re designing and developing something – a phone, a car, a plane, a bike, a tool – you can use Scrum and you will save time and money. It takes a minimum of three years to design a car. It’s a complex project with many members and stakeholders and multiple compliance issues. However, designing a car – or any product – using waterfall project management is cumbersome and it does not produce timely results. Scrum is designed for complex projects with multiple stakeholders. The practice of empiricism and focus on healthy teams results in dynamic work.

An Inside Look At A Build Party

In August 2016, we hosted a Big Orange Square Build Party outside of Boulder, Colorado. We met in a large four-car garage – almost a pole barn, really. A panorama of the Rocky Mountains greeted us along with coffee, fruit and bagels. After some instruction, we split into several teams and began working the backlog to build a car. The following video and photos will give you a peek into what that awesome day was like!

Meet Some Of Our Big Orange Square Build Party Members:

A Review Of The Nummi Car Plant

The story of the Nummi car plant, the joint venture between Toyota and GM is well known, almost legendary. It didn’t work out entirely well for GM. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons—until it was too late. Find the This American Life recording here. Lean Product Development, or Toyota Product Development is a core part of Big Orange Square, it provides many practices and experiences to the concept of how to Scrum industrial product development. Tesla now owns the plan, makes you wonder which lessons learned from Nummi they are applying in their production system.

Big Orange Square Build Party – Retrospective

Modules & Stand-Ups

Working for a full day with an international team on a real product generates unique insights. Scrum contributes to product development, and to teamwork. Here are a few first remarks from attendees. After the first CSM for Hardware class the whole team participated in an extra day with a Big Orange Square Build Party. About 20 people, mostly in product development, and the youngest only 14 years old, worked on a real car. This fun Saturday brought the theory and exercises from the class to the real world of building a real car. You can find the ideas and structure here on the website.

Retrospective Item

Organizing the the product in segments (modules) and creating teams around each module is experienced as a big plus. It brings focus for the team and with that focus quick delivery of results is visible and measurable. Pairing happens almost automatically. And: teams need more Scrums and Scrum of Scrums to coordinate the work on the different modules. The ideal time according to this group: every 1-2 hours! The teams need these breaks not only from a self-organizing perspective, but also as a plain physical rest, self-organization drives up their motivation and with that their pace. The team called this “inter-team swarming” and they found it necessary to explore issues and solutions on the interfaces between modules. For example: one team is going to mount suspension modules on the frame and needs to drill holes. Another team mounts the steering mechanism on the same frame, also drilling holes. They can block each other (there is only so much space) and they found out that one team had specs for metric bolts, the other team for inch sized bolts. The two-hourly Scrum and Scrum of Scrums found these issues and solved them. And it resulted in a standardization for the product: “Go Metric” My observation and lesson learned: I went into this Big Orange Square build day with the idea that a one-day Sprint would be short, and that we would produce inspect-able results. It turns out that results are ready for inspecting in a matter of hours, and that in-team and inter-team coordination needs to be much more frequent than once a day. Although the car components were prepared, there were so many problems to be solved, and frequent and formal communication proved necessary. This reminds me of the Toyota Way where a similar practice is embedded – the manufacturing area has a space where people can gather at any time to discuss an issue. And it shows that two-week Sprints in a hardware space is more a maximum length to get real product out than an obstacle to implement Big Orange Square! Scrum on, more retrospective topics to come!

Gathering 2016 Presentation: Scrum For Life: A Tale Of 2 Journeys By Mark Buckner

Scrum for Life: A Tale of 2 Journeys

by Mark Buckner

SUMMARY:

We’ll take a look at the Scrum Journey and lessons learned of two very different groups: the Power & Energy Systems Research Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s largest multi-science laboratory working on some of the most challenging problems facing the modernization the electric power grid, and FIRST Robotics Competition Team 4265 the Secret City Wildbots, a team of high school students who in just 6 weeks design, build, and program a robot to compete in the premier “Sport of the Mind.”

Mark Buckner Scrum4Life – Dr. Mark A. Buckner is Senior Research Scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Leader of the Power and Energy System Group (P&ES).

DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION

Gathering 2016 Presentation Learnings From The Trenches By Jeanne Bradford

Agile For Hardware – Learnings From The Trenches

Jeanne Bradford, TCGEN
Best practices in applying Agile methodologies to hardware products are still evolving. But some of the best companies are blazing this trail, and there are great lessons to be learned and shared. This talk will be based in real case studies of how companies are applying Agile to their hardware product development process, specifically, how to translate Agile to work in a hardware, some of the unique challenges and solutions to ensure organizations get the most out of their Agile implementation.

Jeanne Bradford is a Founding Principal of TCGen, a product innovation consulting firm, based in Silicon Valley, California. She is also the co-author of the book, Innovate Products Faster: Graphical Tools for Accelerating Product Development. Prior to consulting, Jeanne led global organizations to deliver compelling products and technologies for some of the industry’s leading companies, including Apple, where she re-architected Apple’s new product development process (ANPP), building the core capability that allowed Apple to quickly deliver innovative new products to market.

One specific area of practice for Jeanne is building Agile capabilities in companies delivering hardware products to market. Through the translation of Agile methodologies and an emphasis on high performance teams, Jeanne has led transformations that have allowed teams to accelerate product delivery and increase customer delight.