Do you work with Scrum and feel like your team, despite regular retrospectives, isn’t tapping into the full potential of continuous improvement? In this two-part blog series, I’ll show you where traditional Scrum retrospectives fall short, why so many problems remain unsolved, and how you can empower your team for real, lasting change. In this first part, I’ll cover the common obstacles that get in the way of continuous improvement. In the second part, I’ll introduce you to PopcornFlow – a method that makes it easier, more flexible, and more impactful to create improvements in your everyday Scrum routine.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an agile framework that helps you develop, deliver, and continually improve complex products. Scrum’s strength lies in empirical process control: you gather experiences, inspect them with your team, and continuously adapt how you work together as new insights emerge.
At the core of Scrum are three pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
- Transparency ensures that you and all stakeholders always understand all the essential aspects of the process.
- Inspection helps you regularly review results and workflows with a critical eye.
- Adaptation gives you the ability to respond immediately to problems or changes.
Transparency means openly sharing all significant aspects of the process with everyone responsible for results, and using language everyone can understand to foster shared understanding. The combined goal of inspection and adaptation is to spot weaknesses in the process and detect insufficient quality of Scrum artifacts as early as possible. Scrum prescribes the following events to support inspection and adaptation: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.
Scrum Events for Continuous Improvement
During Sprint Planning, inspection and adaptation focus on the Product Backlog items, in other words, the business content of the upcoming sprint. In the Daily Scrum, you shine a spotlight on the work completed since the previous standup and forecast what needs to be tackled next. That is, how you’ll actively execute the tasks at hand.
The outcome of the previous sprint is critically reviewed in the Sprint Review. Depending on how many of the originally planned user stories were delivered, the Product Backlog is inspected and, where necessary, adapted.
The most interesting event for inspection and adaptation is the Sprint Retrospective. In the retrospective, the development team takes a hard look at itself. The team discusses what processes went particularly well, but also what didn’t go optimally and could be improved. All identified aspects that need improvement are prioritized by importance and/or urgency. For the highest-priority topics, you develop improvement suggestions, which are then scheduled for implementation in the next sprint.
The Sprint Retrospective: Essential, But Not Enough
The sprint retrospective is absolutely crucial in Scrum for making your way of working continually better, more effective, and more fulfilling. Improvements in product quality go hand-in-hand. However, in practice, retrospectives alone don’t provide a truly efficient continuous improvement process, the very thing you’re aiming for.
It’s positive, of course, that retrospectives give the development team the chance to engage in honest self-reflection. However, these major problems typically remain:
- The interval between sprint retrospectives is often too long to solve urgent issues that pop up. These problems require quick fixes and can’t wait until the next retrospective.
- Problems identified in the sprint retrospective are prioritized, but often only the most important ones get improvement measures. Lower-priority issues remain unaddressed, sometimes forever, even if they’d be easy and quick to solve.
These insights prompted my Scrum team to look for an approach that would overcome these limitations, especially since Scrum clearly allows for additional processes and techniques within its framework. A look at the Kanban board quickly showed that this wouldn’t solve our problems. Kanban provides a clear overview of the status of all work packages and the overall project’s progress. This helps you spot bottlenecks early and take targeted action. But when it comes to the question “How can we actually improve our way of working?” the Kanban board comes up empty. Our problems remained unsolved.
PopcornFlow—Continuous Improvement for Scrum Teams
So, in my search for a better solution, I came across an interesting method: PopcornFlow by Claudio Perrone. PopcornFlow is a pragmatic, lightweight approach for agile teams to drive improvements quickly and visibly. It maximizes transparency, uses short feedback loops, and has a low barrier to entry. This lets your Scrum team experiment and grow flexibly and autonomously, the essence of true agile working.
In the next post in this series, I’ll show you exactly what PopcornFlow is and how you can put it to work for your team.
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