Let’s Not Fix What Isn’t Broken
A story shared by Nkengafeh Ekokobe-Mbezi with Michelle Pauk.
Nkengafeh Ekokobe-Mbezi was the fourth Scrum Master to join a team notoriously resistant to change. Over five years of working together, this team had established their own unorthodox process that wasn’t quite waterfall and wasn’t quite agile either.
The team’s manager asked Nkengafeh to lead the team’s daily stand-up call at 10 o’clock in the morning. There were several people on the call – business analysts, team leads, and some clients even – but not a single developer.
Nkengafeh asked, “Where are all the developers?”
“Oh,” a team lead replied, “they have their stand-up at 10 p.m. since they are offshore.”
Nkengafeh explained, “Okay, but as a Scrum Master, I’m supposed to work with a team of developers and the Product Owner. A Scrum team isn’t a Scrum Master, plus a few team leads and business analysts, and a couple of clients over there. That’s not how it works.”
She went on to suggest, “How about we include the developers in the morning standup call, instead of holding two separate meetings?”
The response? “Let’s not fix what isn’t broken.”
That wasn’t going to deter her.
Instead she replied, “Okay, I understand that maybe nobody has complained about this. But without the developers here, there isn’t a conversation for me to lead as the Scrum Master.
I don’t want you to be the bridge between me and the team. I can just talk directly to the team.
You can still have this meeting. That’s cool. But I’m going to set up one with the developers, or we can just invite them to this meeting.”
She even offered, “And if it turns out this is the worst idea ever, then I’ll understand and we can go back to the developers having their meeting at 10 p.m.”
Nkengafeh invited the developers to join the next call, and clearly this was not the worst idea ever. The developers were in fact very happy that they were able to communicate directly with her, and the rest of the team had no complaints.
With subtle yet assertive moves like this, Nkengafeh continued to help the team make improvements to their processes. Her next effort? Transforming the weekly projects status meeting into a Sprint Review. Stay tuned to learn how she did it.
