Part 2: Daily Scrum, Interdependency, Planning, and Mutual Adjustment

“Hi Kishore, do you know where Lee is? I haven’t seen him since last week” Maria entered the Kishore’s cubical with one more person.

“Hi, Maria, nice to see you after a long time. Didn’t you know he is on paternity leave? He will be back next month,” Kishore replied.

Initially, Maria was puzzled but suddenly smiled after digesting the message, “Oh, that’s excellent news; I will email him a congratulations email when I return to my desk.” She stopped for a moment and then started, “I have one question for him; he helped me a lot in our last conversation; can you please help me.”

“I can try my best,” Kishore replied.

“Well, let me first make an introduction,” he pointed out towards the gentleman standing next to her, “he is our product owner, Mike; no matter what I tried, I am not able to convince him of the importance of daily scrum.”

“Nice to meet you,” both Kishore and Mike said and shook hands.

“I am going to meet Ms. Khan; why not you come with me? I am sure she will explain it better than me,” Kishore proposed.

“Ms. Khan,” her face became a question mark.

“Dr. Khan, head of the Learning and Development department,” Kishore replied, smiling since everyone in the company called her Dr. Khan.

They walked together towards the Dr. Khan office, one of the company’s biggest offices, for the apparent reason of several bookshelves full of books. Mike seems taciturn and didn’t speak much during the whole time.

“Aha, we have guests today,” Dr. Khan warmly welcomed all of them into the office. Soon after the introduction, Maria asked the same question. She listened patiently, then moved towards Mike and asked him, “what makes you think that Daily Scrum is not giving much value?”

Mike, who was quiet till now, started speaking confidently, “In my opinion, the team should use that time and do something important.”

Dr. Khan didn’t speak anything immediately and kept thinking while looking at Mike; then asked, “Let’s take a look at it from another angle; suppose, just for the sake of argument, if it is just a one-person team, what do you think the value of daily scrum would be in that case?”

“I don’t think there is any value in that case,” Mike thought for a moment, then replied; Maria nodded in agreement.

“Hmm, so it means that daily scrum has something to do with a team; let’s explore it further,” She paused, then asked, “can you tell me what are the basic elements of a team?”

“Lee explained it very well during our last conversation; it is a common goal, dependency, and mutual accountability,” Maria replied with a proud smile, and Mike nodded.

“Interdependency, not dependency. Team has a common goal, mutual accountability, and interdependency,[1][2]” Dr. Khan politely corrected her.

“isn’t it the same thing?” Maria asked with surprise; however, Kishore started smiling, which Dr. Khan noticed and replied with a smile.

“Kishore, why not you explain it if I remember correctly? Your next presentation is on a similar topic,” Dr. Khan proposed.

“Sure, but I am going to use the whiteboard since I am a visual person, “he smiled and stood next to the whiteboard. He drew two circles on the board, connected them with an arrow, and wrote “depends” on the arrow. It was something like this.

Kishore asked, “What do you call this?”

Maria thought for a moment, then replied, “If I am reading it correctly, it means “A” depends on “B”, and started looking at Kishore for a response.

“Yes, you are right, and what do you call this?” Kishore added another arrow, this time back from B to A. It looks something like this.

“It means A depends on B, and B depends on A,” Maria replied.

“Isn’t it a circular dependency?” Mike asked even before Kishroe replied.

“Maybe, but what about trade between two countries? They might depend on each other but for a different thing or commodity?” Kishore asked.

Maria and Mike thought for a moment but didn’t say anything. Kishore started after a pause, “The first one is an example of dependency, and the second one is interdependency. In simple words, dependency is one way, interdependency is not one way,” he returned to his seat while speaking.

“But how is this related to the daily scrum?” Mike asked, looking at Dr. Khan.

“Seems this time, I have to stand up,” she said, drawing a diagram on the whiteboard.

“Let’s take a look at these ones by one. What is our common goal in the sprint?” Dr. Khan asked.

“Sprint Goal,” Maria replied instantly.

“Good, now how Common Goal or, in your example, Sprint goal will be impacted if there is no daily scrum?” Dr. Khan asked.

“We might not be able to achieve the Sprint goal and probably know this very late,” she replied, sensing where the conversation was going.

“Let me rephrase my question, will it change my Sprint goal if we are not doing daily scrum?” Dr. Khan spoke calmly.

“Assuming there is no need for negotiation, I guess no Sprint goal is not going to change, regardless of the daily scrum,” Maria spoke very slowly, almost one word a time while thinking deeply about it.

“And what about mutual accountability?” Dr. Khan asked.

“No, that is also not going to change regardless of the daily scrum; they are still accountable,” this time Mike replied, probably sensing that he hadn’t spoken in a while.

“And what about the last one, interdependency,” Dr. Khan kept asking.

Including Kishsore, everyone started thinking about it but didn’t speak, and Dr. Khan patiently kept waiting. After a long silence, Kishore began to speak, “to the best of my understanding, although the interdependency will still be there, it might be changed, like now person “A” might be dependent on “C” instead of “B” during the sprint.”

Dr. Khan was still quiet and let them absorb this; after a few seconds, Maria started speaking, “What I understand is that our sprint goal and mutual accountabilities remain the same, but interdependency might be changed during the sprint.”

“But how is this related to the daily scrum?” Mike thought for a moment, then asked.

“There is more than one type of interdependencies,” Dr. Khan said and added few more circles in her diagram, now it looks like this.

“I learned this from one very short but sweet article by Roger Schwarz in Harvard Business Review[3],” Dr. Khan educated them. “Not only that, he also mentioned the suitable coordination approach for different types of interdependency,” she added.

After a pause, she asked, “Now tell me, is your team working in such a fashion where they can work independently in parallel and combine their work at the end?”

“In the past sometimes, but not anymore, but isn’t it something like a group instead of a team?” Maria replied and asked a question at the same time.

“Yes, it is, a group with pool interdependence, and we need standardization in that case. Besides, this may not be a complex problem, and Scrum is suitable for complex problems,” Dr. Khan replied. “Now, let’s go to the other side of the spectrum. Does your team go back and forth all the time?”

They thought for a moment; then Mike asked: “can you please explain what you mean by going back and forth?”

“Sure,” Dr. Khan smiled, “imagine like players in a soccer, hockey, or basketball team, where every team member depends on other players. They need to adjust their actions as soon as they learn about new information or situation changes.”

“Sometimes it happens,” Maria responded again.

“We need mutual adjustments in the case of reciprocal interdependence. Now comes to the third one, sequential interdependency; how many times the output of one person becomes the input of another one?”

“Yes, this is also a case,” Maria replied, and Mike nodded

Dr. Khan created this table on the whiteboard

“Now tell me, how can you do this if you are not doing daily Scrum? Daily Scrum is an opportunity for doing the planning and mutual adjustment to achieve the Sprint Goal.” Dr. Khan asked.

“I think I am getting the point, but couldn’t we do it anytime,” Mike asked.

“Because inspection is not free,” Dr. Khan smiled. “In fact, there is a sentence written in the old version of Scrum Guide; not sure why they removed it in Scrum Guide 2020; let me find it,” after spending a few seconds on her computer, she said here it is directly from the Scrum Guide 2017, “Inspection should not be so frequent that inspection gets in the way of the work[4].”

“That makes sense, and with the background knowledge of interdependency, I can understand it better,” Mike admitted.

“I not only learned the difference between dependency and interdependency, but their types and how it is connected to the daily scrum,” Maria added.

“And I got something new for my presentation,” Kishore added with a big smile.

“Thank you for your time,” they all said one by one to Dr. Khan and came out of the office thinking deeply.

References

1. The Flow System by John R. Turner, Nigel Thurlow, and Brain Riera

2. What Makes Team Work: Group Effectiveness Research from the Shop Floor to the Executive Suite by Susan G. Cohen and Diane E. Bailey

3. Is your team coordinating too much, or not enough? By Roger Schwarz

https://hbr.org/2017/03/is-your-team-coordinating-too-much-or-not-enough

4. Scrum Guide 2017

https://scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf