What are 2 benefits of applying cadence?

San Francisco, CA – May 4, 2021 – By Erik Marvik, Business Agility Transformation Consultant & SPC, Project & Team

It’s a common scenario: Your company is developing a complex solution.  Multiple teams are each responsible for components of the overall solution.  But each team has limited resources, competing priorities, and a limited view of what the other teams are working toward.  How can management resolve these challenges and predictably deliver solution value?

The answer is, by applying cadence and synchronization.  Complex solution development is naturally uncertain.  But by applying cadence and synchronization, we can manage this variability and create a more stable, reliable, and predictable solution development process. 

Cadence provides the heartbeat of a development process by leveraging a rhythmic pattern of events.  Cadence creates predictable routines, allowing your developers to focus on the variable part of solution development.  By applying cadence, each development iteration (or ‘sprint’) has a pre-determined and predictable duration.  A preset duration enables you to balance each team member's available capacity for that duration with the total workload and to prioritize accordingly.  For example, if one team member has a capacity of x for a given iteration, but they’ve been assigned a workload of 2x for the iteration (all too common), it’s easy to see this isn’t a realistic plan.  Work can either be reallocated to other team members who do have available capacity, or de-prioritized and pushed out to the next iteration.  This example also illustrates how cadence helps control the intake of new work.  There’s only so much capacity a team will have in each iteration. Consequently, new work must continually be prioritized to determine what the team should focus on, and what work must wait for another iteration when the team has available capacity.  This helps keep batch sizes small and prevents the temptation to load excess work into the current iteration.  And developing on a predictable cadence makes wait times for new work predictable, another added benefit.

Your teams are likely already applying cadence in their Agile sprints.  But some teams might be running 2-week sprints, 3-week sprints, or even 1-month sprints.  So while each team is “sprinting” on cadence, the cadences are different, and the holistic solution is likely not evolving as planned.  While cadence is critical, cadence alone won’t allow you to integrate your overall solution, share customer feedback, or coordinate across teams.  

The missing piece?  Synchronization.  Synchronization causes key events to happen at the same time and ensures all your teams are “sprinting” as a whole.  When multiple teams are developing on the same cadence (2-week sprints, for example), are all synchronized (same start/end dates), and further synchronize with regular integration events (via solution demos), cross-team collaboration and solution value increase dramatically.  Regularly scheduled solution demos provide evidence of this.  Regular solution demos across teams allow multiple solution perspectives to be understood, resolved, and integrated at the same time.  For example, your teams may each be building components of an overall solution.  Individual components themselves have little value to your customers, however, and often customers have no idea the components even exist.  But if a component adds value to the overall solution, then it needs to iterate on the same cadence of the solution and be synchronized. 

When multiple teams integrate and evaluate together at the same time, it forces teams to regularly revisit and adjust their overall strategy and plan.  This manages variability by limiting it to how frequently the teams integrate and synchronize.  In other words, the more often you synchronize, the less deviation you’ll have.  

Complex solution development is an uncertain process. A shared cadence and synchronization across all development teams helps management predictably deliver solution value.  These principles also help manage team workloads, communicate customer feedback, create solution and cross-team alignment, prioritize top development efforts, and foster collaboration and continuous improvement among your teams.

When it comes to SAFe and Agile ceremonies, most of them come from SCRUM. There have been great resources created to help you understand the intent behind the ceremonies, and others to help you understand some of the structural best practices, but I often find scrum masters and teams need encouragement to apply cadence to their ceremonies, as they may not see or understand the benefits.

Too often, teams are continuously changing and updating the ceremonies, days, time, longevity, and agenda. While Agile encourages us to be flexible, I am not sure there is much benefit in the randomness of a poorly executed schedule. So, I challenge Scrum Masters to look at why we would want to apply cadence to these ceremonies, some of the challenges this will help them overcome, and the best practices in preparing for and planning them.

 This is a deeper dive into those best practices to help you understand why I encourage such a cadence.

Non-Cadence-Based Challenges

o  Scheduling conflicts when ceremonies are added late.

·        Can’t get the whole team there because their calendars are now full

o  Last minute reschedules due to competing meetings.

·        leadership and other meetings aren’t scheduled around the cadence

o  Last minute scheduling or rescheduling causing competing time priorities.

·        Completing work commitments vs attending a ceremony

o  Time management challenges for team members

·        Team members may not have planned for unscheduled ceremonies and allotted enough time to their competing tasks.

o  Missed meetings are more frequent.

·        Team members always have an excuse for not attending as they attend other meetings or have “higher priority” work.

·        Team members can’t schedule around their ceremonies that aren’t on cadence.

o  Collective Ownership of ceremonial success is greatly deteriorated.

·        Full Team member attendance is infrequent due to conflicts causing repetition of conversations and communications rather than a collective discussion. Reliance on catching up and team members follow-up causes challenges.

o  …And more

Cadence-Based BEST PRACTICES

Start and End Dates of Sprints

While this seems relatively straightforward, the need to properly think through when your teams start and end each sprint can have serious implications. One would think, and many do, that a simple Monday through Friday iteration keeps things simple and more manageable, however, this shortsightedness often results in greater challenges in execution brought on by missed ceremonies.

Fortunately, in the United States and many other countries throughout the world, corporations have adopted a holiday schedule that provides their employees “long weekends”. While nobody in the history of man has ever complained about a long weekend, they are not without their complications. Too often we do not factor these long weekends into our planning proposals and sometimes discover too late the challenges they have now bound us to.

As you will see by the recommendations to come, most sprint ceremonies should occur at the end of a sprint. If the sprint occurs on a typical workweek basis - Monday through Friday – then most of your ceremonies will occur on a Friday. However, because we have 10 federal holidays (and many other religious holidays that may/may not be celebrated), most of which are observed or fall on Thursday -Sunday, many companies will provide the long weekend beginning on Friday.

With so many holidays and long weekends beginning on Friday, we will need to move a significant number of meetings. While this seems easy enough, it disrupts the cadence, requires more regular adjustments to the calendar, and causes additional overhead in the form of time spent rescheduling. Furthermore, in my experience, those responsible for scheduling are not always that forward thinking that they remember to move those ceremonies early enough that scheduling is easy (everyone’s calendars are not already filled). Unfortunately, finding a time late is a significant challenge and often a reason given for cancelling the ceremony altogether.

Starting and ending your sprints midweek relieves these concerns almost entirely. I recommend a Wednesday-Tuesday cadence as this also ensures those Thursday holidays are accounted for.

Cadence through Recurring Meetings

Outlook makes it quite simple for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Product Owners to schedule ceremonies in a way that is on cadence. Using the “Recurrence” feature in Outlook you can schedule ceremonies indefinitely (provided your organization doesn’t impose restrictions) and get them on a cadence that provides everyone the opportunity to plan around them.

In a truly agile organization, everyone throughout the organization will respect the agile ceremonies. While this is not always possible, and higher priority meetings will always occur, having your meetings on a “set it and forget it” cadence will begin to resonate across the organization. Using many of the best practices described here your organization will discover the best times within a typical workweek to schedule All Hands meetings and others and not impede progress of the teams. As any agile organization will tell you, “we are all in this together” and must have collective ownership of delivery. Anything that impedes that (such as excessive or conflicting meetings) should be minimized

Avoid Conflicts

Share your ceremonial calendar with everyone. Provide transparency and visibility into your ceremonial cadence and have conversations with leadership and other stakeholders to help build some structure into your calendar. When everyone knows when your ceremonies are and have agreed to work around it as much as possible, other meetings can be scheduled to avoid creating competing priorities.

Work Around Schedules as Necessary

Sometimes within our teams we have unique or special cases for scheduling. We likely have team members who have families with children but may also have individuals who have negotiated special hours due to special cases within their own lives or families. While uncommon it does happen.

In such cases it is important to accommodate these schedules the best you can. We cannot simply expect that our team members are going to ignore their personal obligations but at the same time there needs to be some sense of commitment to the businesses needs. Try to accommodate the best you can. If someone cannot start work until 10am due to a late starting preschool, then have the DSU at 10:15. If another has negotiated a 4x10hr schedule, plan your ceremonies to accommodate, but negotiate with them on the day if necessary.

Additionally, we expect that everyone will work around the schedules we set. Once we get things on cadence, we do not want or expect that we will have to shift them every iteration; the expectation is in fact that they will work around them. Once we have gotten collective agreement from the team that these times will work and have added them to our working agreements, we should also add the expectation for everyone to schedule all other meetings around them, though there may be exceptions.

Summary

In most cases you will find scheduling a challenge. You will need to negotiate with the attendees to make the ceremonies and other meetings accommodating while minimizing the task switching and competing priorities that non-cadence-based scheduling always entails. Do your best, become increasingly organized and flexible, and everything will work itself out in the end.

Scheduling Best Practices for Team Ceremonies

Daily Stand Up (DSU): 

Mornings daily for 15 minutes.

While it should not matter what time of day you have your DSU, and many teams leave the timing to agreement, the time of day can impact outcomes. Having it first thing in the morning prepares everybody for the day to come while also providing them the opportunity to finalize any previous day’s effort. Psychologically, when we set a plan for the day and organize our time around it, we are more likely to accomplish the goals within that plan. Can these outcomes occur when a DSU happens mid-day or at days end? Of course, but they are more consistent when we begin our day focusing on the plan and work to come. 

Backlog Refinement:

Mid-sprint, off cadence from all other ceremonies; 1-2 times per sprint, as needed; early morning or later afternoon.

Consider scheduling refinement to be in the middle of your sprint week; if you run Mon-Fri then Wednesdays are best, whereas with a Wed-Tues iteration a Thursday may be best. This is one of the most flexible ceremonies as it may be added or removed as needed. It is more difficult to maintain cadence, however, setting it up and simply removing events as needed may be your best path. Since its more flexible, teams should put this where it will be least impacting to the team’s work and other ceremonial scheduling. Typically, this means putting it in the morning or late afternoon and not mid-day. Additionally, it should be noted, that you will want to have this at least once per iteration with enough time left in the sprint to ensure an additional instance can be added if necessary.

Sprint Review:

Afternoon of the last day of the sprint.

This one seems obvious. Since we are reviewing the progress made within the sprint, our goals, and products developed, we should do that as close to the end of the sprint as possible. In most cases, the afternoon of the final day is the best time to do this. In doing so, we effectively have allotted the team the entirety of their capacity to accomplish the sought-after goals.

Sprint Retrospective:

Afternoon of the last day of the sprint, immediately following the sprint review.

Another obvious one, the retrospective is there to discuss the positive and negative outcomes of the sprint. The best time to do this is immediately after we have reviewed those outcomes with our stakeholders. Doing so guarantees their feedback is fresh in our minds while also maximizing our time as we will find little need to have the same conversations as a refresher. We can jump right into understanding the challenges we faced, the efficiencies we created, and look at ways to improve upon our efforts in the coming weeks.

Sprint Planning:

Last day of sprint, following the sprint retrospective to plan in improvements.

This one could go a couple ways. In some shops, particularly those with localized talent, sprint planning could be completed the morning of the first day of an iteration with no less efficiency. However, due to the global nature of technology these days, and with highly distributed teams being in sometimes distant time zones, moving the sprint planning to the final day of the iteration, immediately following our review and retrospective provides additional benefit. 

With distributed teams, having the planning on the first day of a sprint may cause some team members to begin work before the plan has been finalized (as priorities may have changed). This could result in descoped work being completed or dependent work being pushed out. Moving planning back one workday, to the final day of the previous sprint, ensures that those on one side of the world will have a plan in place BEFORE anyone starts the plan. This should help resolve some potential challenges and better prepare the teams to always be working on the highest priority deliverables.

Cadence-Based Ceremonies Checklist

•  Start your sprints/iterations on Wednesday or Thursday and end on Tuesday or Wednesday, respectively (Wed - Tues iteration is best)
•   Schedule all your scrum ceremonies on a recurring basis as far out as possible
•   Verify that the times work for everyone (mostly) at the beginning of each program increment and reschedule only when necessary.
• Follow the Best Practices for all ceremonies, whenever possible.
•  Share your ceremonial calendar with your leadership to avoid scheduling conflicts.

Example Sprint Cadence – Based on Best Practices Outlined in this Series

Note the minimal interruptions this schedule provides the teams, allowing them to concentrate on their work, maximizing focus time, and minimizing task switching.