Our leadership is suddenly into DORA and wants us to improve deployment frequency and lead time. The problem is our process is bogged down with approvals and checks at every stage. We end up batching everything into these massive releases which makes things riskier. I get the theory but in practice I'm not sure what makes a difference without creating more work for us. Anyone been through this and improved their numbers?

Hey everyone,

I have been a scrum master for some years with 13 years of experience in total. I call myself as sr scrum master.

I have been victim of politics where the client had pushed back when my team has asked tons of questions related to application, cloud infra which wasnt under our scope. Our team was brand new and these were legacy products. Our team got ramped down due to asking "too many" questions and they expected us to know everything. I have worked in team where even pointing out the story pointing is not done right or asking why comments arent present is something they didnt encourage. I once asked a senior why he isnt joining the meetings. I got dialed in on team with threatening tone since I had pinged in the group about him not joining leaving him exposed.

Fast forward to now. Am helping a team implement scrum now this team is not vocal except one member who pushes back on what I say saying this is not the way he,she did in last organization. This person is new to org.

Conversations like having product backlog refinement, slicing the stories, challenging if description isn't clear, telling we should be categorizing work in epics that can be closed every 3 months, doing story pointing per complexity is something they dont understand easily and sometime I have been told they dont care about and tell me straight away they dont care how i decide to do. I thought of building norms with team and i got no response back and had pointers to refer to from my last teams to start the conversation and the response was I shouldnt be writing them without consulting them ehicj i agree but the purpose of meeting was that itself and I had shared the page with a resource weeks back via chat. This same person didnt share the feedback with me on chat and decided to say it in the call that I should not bring these pointers to enforce it. My purpose was to discuss, get consensus and not enforce. I cleared it in agenda.

Note this person is the only one vocal and built out the whole backlog using AI and team vision which I appreciate but neither I or PO was involved during creation. This person is unprofessional in responding to conversations related to scrum. This person also brought all the pain points about unclear backlog, roadmap and priorities in 1st ever retro I had. It was all valid but I felt this person is criticizing and blaming. I mean that was our 1st sprint, backlog refinement and setting product goals arent a game of 1 day.

The manager is thinking scrum isn't working due to tough convos and team being silent but I feel product owner has to step up in owning backlog and avoid letting someone else hijack it. The knowledge of backlog isnt decentralized and only one or 2 people know about the stories created. I know PO should prioritize, story point with devs, and write them but in my org everything is done by SM along with coaching and enforcing scrum ceremonies and discussions, removing blockers.

How do I handle this team ? What should I do as SM ? Let me know what wrong am doing. Many Thanks for reading it and giving time.

Edit: I suspect this vocal person is either not enough experienced or playing politics. Manager has not any strong opinion on this person but I do have that this person isn't helping the team implement scrum.

The team wants lot of flexibility in terms of closing stories, pulling stories whenever they want because they dont know what's gonna come next and when, they may come to know what all they planned for in sprint isnt even right because its ever changing due to experimentation nature of project. We arent building user product. We are building support service that will support product teams.

This team had difficulty when I asked the team to update comments frequently (not daily) and faced push back. I never told anyone to update comment since then.

Hi!
I’m conducting an anonymous survey for my bachelor’s thesis on communication in multicultural project teams. It takes around 8–10 minutes.

I would be very grateful if you could complete the survey or share it with someone who fits the criteria.
https://forms.gle/vRbbCudhSe8rhqDE6

Thank you for your help!

I've inherited a product team that apparently never deletes anything. There are boards from projects that finished years ago, old sprint plans, duplicate roadmaps and workshop notes that nobody has looked at since they were created.

I'm trying to clean things up but I'm also wondering whether this is just the natural lifecycle of every collaborative whiteboard. Has anyone found a solution that scales well as teams grow?

The uncomfortable answer is that updating the tool is probably no one's actual job. It's everyone's implied job, which means it loses to real work every single day, and honestly it should.

What worked for shops I've been in: stop asking everyone to keep everything current. Name one person whose job is a 15-minute weekly pass asking "what on this board is no longer true?" They don't update everything themselves. They just flag what's stale and chase down the truth on the few things that matter.

The team usually stops hating the tool once it stops being a chore everyone shares and starts being one person's short, defined task.

One thing worth checking before you change anything though: is it that they don't update it, or that they update it and nothing ever comes of the updates? Different problems. The first one is the fix above. The second one means the updates go into a void, and people quit updating tools no one reads. That one gets fixed by you, not them.