💃 The Daily Salesforce Scrum🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Do you know a person who was raised in a religious household and then became atheist?

That was me with project management.

I started in a Waterfall environment. Pivoted to Agile. Mixed in some Scrum. Went back to Waterfall. Got my PMP. Sold services for a “hybrid methodology” of Waterfall and Agile. Watergile? Agifall?

😵‍💫

Somewhere along the way, I became a project methodology atheist.

Agnostic to project management, in general.

☠️ I’d worked on too many projects that went up in flames 🔥.

☠️ I encountered too many zombie, parking cone project managers 😐.

☠️ I saw waterfall where agile was the best choice, and agile where waterfall is required 🤦.

But there was one positive takeaway I had in all this experience 👀.

One thing I learned that I will stand on the highest hill and scream out to whoever isn’t wearing noise-cancelling headphones 📣!

Let me tell you what it is 👇

BACKSTORY

A Salesforce Scrum Story

First, let’s set the stage 🎭

I was a technical program manager supporting a team of developers. We had recently pivoted from waterfall to agile-scrum and….it wasn’t going well 😢.

The first few weeks of our transition had our hopes high - improved alignment, communication loops, and productivity.

But we soon realized it was our dialed up intensity ❤️‍🔥 - excited about our fresh framework and processes - that had us slaying Jira cards at high clips.

When that honeymoon fizzled 💔, we were back to checking off faceless boxes ✔️😶📦.

After two weeks of departing our daily scrum meetings with shoulders slumped and an infinite backlog, it was time for a change 🫡.

SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM….

The Daily Scrum Ceremonies

If you know, you know 🗣️

🗣️ What did you do yesterday?

🗣️ What are you doing today?

🗣️ What are your blockers?

The daily scrum pledge of allegiance 🫡.

It wasn’t working for us, we all knew it. Our senior dev called us out, and then, after a moment of reflective silence, he had this simple solution-

Why don’t we start with our blockers?

What matters more than our blockers?

How are we going to work on anything today if we’re blocked?

We should start with our blockers…

RIP NEEDLE

The Needle Never Had a Chance

With that very simple change, our productivity was transformed.

The needle never had a chance. We were pushing it off the charts 💥!

By focusing on blocker removal in our daily scrums, we created a minimal-friction development environment.

Whereas before, we were focused on “what I did yesterday, what i’m doing today” and lost all steam by the time we got to blockers.

Now, we were excited to deliver blockers in our scrum and support each other through removing them. And if that’s all we accomplished in our scrum, and never got to what we did and what we we’re gonna do, it was still a huge win.

Imagine playing basketball in boxing gloves. Those boxing gloves are blocking you from playing your best.

And then having those gloves removed and being free to shoot, dribble, and pass unencumbered. Glorious 🙌!

Look at your own project environment - do you have blockers?

Are you starting each day off addressing your blockers so you can free yourself up to shoot, dribble, and pass the best that you can?

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Blocker Examples

Flows

You’re on v43, still getting errors, and going cross-eyed staring at the squares and diamonds on the screen 😵‍💫.

Your fellow Salesforce nerds salivate over a Flow challenge 💯. Take advantage of their fresh eyes and minds and get a new perspective on your build.

Formula Fields

Another one that’s easy to get lost in the weeds and lose your mind over.

Present your blocker to the scrum and let your team reignite your creativity 🧑‍🎨!

Communications

Highly relevant if you’re a consultant - words matter A LOT! And you will be in tough scenarios where you have to communicate challenges to your clients.

Where better to source just the right messaging than from your fellow consultants?! Bring that mess to your scrum 🙌!

Net-new-to-you Stuff

As Salesforce professionals, you are constantly facing new-to-you challenges.

Applications like Zapier, Callrail, and Drift.

Frameworks like MECE, Agile-Scrum, and RACI.

Salesforce tech like Experience Cloud, Pardot, and OmniStudio.

But what is new-to-you may be old-hat to someone else…in your daily scrum 💥.

Data Migration

A huge lift with no shortcuts, data migration has blocked many a go-live.

Bring it to the scrum and find out how to generate more manpower to scrub, transform, and dataload.

Quick Poll

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes