When organizations adopt agile/scrum practices, they have a tendency to want to standardize things. Things like, how does velocity look from team to team? What range of story points are we using from team to team? Are we using the same or vastly different ideas? How do we roll this up into overall reporting for the organization?

I truly believe that organizations should inspect and adapt their practices to their hearts' content, and that can include standardization. Inspect-and-adapt is the essence of agile. However, I visit so many teams who are given many 'rules' by scrummasters (and others) and yet are not given the fundamental principles behind the rules. For example, I was talking with a team a few weeks ago who was really confused about the purpose of the sprint demo. They told me that they only currently demo to a product owner, who sees the functionality during the sprint anyway. Since nobody else comes to the demo, they didn't understand why they had to formally book and hold this meeting. We had a discussion and I reminded them that the demo is a time for the team and the product owner (and other stakeholders) to inspect and make collaborative decisions about the emerging product. And they reminded me that the product owner is doing this with them all the time, in real time during the sprint. We then discussed the other types of folks who also might be interested in seeing the emerging product, like training, services and support, and (gasp!) actual users.

The team's collective lightbulb went off. They realized that inviting Support to their demos would be a great way to start involving folks who sometimes become a bottleneck to product release; in fact, the team said that sometimes Support will know more about the users' needs than the product owner themselves (interesting idea for another blog on a different day). They decided that demoing to an expanded audience would be really useful, but it was only by reminding them of the basic principle of the demo that they were able to rediscover the value in this meeting. One team member even wrote down "demo=product feedback" in his notebook. Prior to this discussion, they were just going through the demo motions because the organization said 'every team must demo'.

For you ScrumMasters, the next time you give your team a Scrum rule to follow, make sure you understand the agile principle behind it, and help your team understand. Team members, challenge your ScrumMasters and others in your organization who are asking you to standardize or follow a rule that from first glance doesn't make sense. And then, inspect and adapt your approach. Folks, this is what it's all about.