“We don’t want C-level at the Sprint Review - they may get the wrong impression”

Are you Serious? — episode 65

“Oh no! Don’t invite our CEO. She would only be disappointed with how little we did and would be taken aback by the problems we discuss!”

Fred — Sarah’s manager — just heard about her ultimate goal, to make the Sprint Review an event for every stakeholder, including the CEO. He’s clearly not happy with what he heard.

“WE know what a Sprint Review is about. But higher management has no clue. They expect steady, predictable progress on our products. So any discussion about what holds us back on our journey and what we learned would be catastrophic, to the extend that she could decide to pull the plug from the initiative.”

And then he adds: “Scrum is for the development department. As soon as C-level understand what it entails, they will stop it. And we don’t want this to happen. So best thing to do is to leave them in the dark about it.”

From Pixabay

Sarah is flabbergasted. Did she hear this right? Are we keeping C-level in the dark about how we create our products? Is this all a charade? She responds: “But how else can we inform them about our progress and include them in the discussion what to do next?”

“The Product Owner and me will be at the Steering Committee. This is what C-level wants. This is how they see themselves involved. So this is what we give them. Call it a charade if you want. But sometimes you have to play along.”

Sarah is disheartened. She doesn’t know the CEO well enough, but she expected a bit more vision from someone at this level of the organisation.

It just so happened that the next day Sarah facilitated a company-wide event to address the widespread bad-style meetings. And the CEO also decided to participate. Sarah and her colleague used Liberating Structures (TRIZ and 25/10) to identify bad meeting style examples and generate ideas to tackle these issues. The session was very successful and the CEO was impressed. So much so that she approached Sarah to thank her for this awesome hour.

“You did a great job here. Congratulations. I’m Maria. You’re Sarah, aren’t you?”

Then Maria said: “You know what I don’t understand? Your team is working with the Scrum framework, but we still have a Steering Committee for the important discussions.”

Sarah immediately grasped that this was her chance to make her point: “I also struggle with that. I believe that with Scrum we have an event that is very much suited for what you wish to achieve with a steerco. Where the Scrum Teams and stakeholders meet to discuss what was built and what to do next.”

“The Sprint Review”, said Maria.

“Exactly! My aim is to involve C-level in the Sprint Review to make the event even more effective than it already is.”

“Great idea! Send us an invite. And let’s then immediately stop with this awful Steering Committee.”

Sarah was confused: “But I understood that you wanted to have this Steering Committee to be involved in the process.”

Then Maria said: “Oh no! Absolutely not. I hate them. The wrong people are discussing the wrong things. We only have them because Fred said that our presence at the Sprint Reviews would hold the teams back from being open about what they learned.”

“I know my team”, said Sarah. “They would only find it awesome when the CEO would be at the Sprint Review. They would feel it as an acknowledgement that they are working on important things for our company.”

“Right”, said Maria. Fred assumed he knew what we thought. You assumed that we weren’t interested to join the Sprint Review and we assumed that the team wouldn’t like it. Assumption is the mother of all failures. Next time, let’s verify our assumptions before we see them as the truth. I am looking forward to the next Sprint Review!”

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