Scrum Master and Agile scrum project management are two words that go together and almost make one feel as they are synonymous. Nevertheless, practicing agile without a scrum master is unheard of and would just delay in reaping the benefits of the methodology.

And this why Scrum Master is a crucial role in the agile project management scheme of things.

At a very high level, Scrum Masters are considered as:

Leaders – have the skills to motivate and lead the team practice agile successfully.

Experienced – have thorough knowledge of the agile principles and stay true to them throughout the course of the project.

Coach/Mentor – have the role of coaching and guiding the teams through agile adoption.

Organizers – as the crucial responsibility of ensuring coordination, communication, and collaboration within and between teams, product owner,s and business stakeholders lies on them.

Now this gives us a good glimpse of the various hats that a Scrum Master has to wear to enable his teams implement agile project management successfully.

Let us take a quick look at the Scrum Master role to then understand what they do, how and why.

Role of a Scrum Master

To begin with the core responsibilities of the Scrum Master include but not limited to:

• Scrum Masters are now seen as the True Leaders and no longer the bearer of servant leadership as per the Scrum Guide 2020 update.
• Introduce the team to the world of agile, events, artefacts, sprint goals, products goals and commitment.
• Help teams to run scrum events within the prescribed time limits
• Influence the overall organization culture with rapid agile transformation and change management.
• Help the Product Owner with improved backlog grooming & prioritization and defining the product goals.
• Accountable for building self-organizing and self-managing teams.
• Coach them on delivering quality product increments & ensure they meet the definition of done.
• Build the team’s understanding of complex as well as the overall backlog items.
• Most importantly build a high trust work environment where teams communicate and collaborate freely.
• Ensures that the development team and stakeholders understand & respect each other’s perspectives.
• Prevents distractions for the team and keeps them focussed on the sprint and product goals.

Quick tips for an Effective Scrum Master

Agile is a framework! Remember!

Truth is, agile principles are basic guides and best practices recommended by experts Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. They give you an indicative approach to start with.

But do not get hung up on it. It is ok if your daily scrum takes 30mins instead of 15.

The idea of a daily scrum is to understand what worked yesterday, what needs to be done today and what can prevent the progress today. And as long as the teams collaborate on these aspects successfully, they have conducted a meaningful scrum meeting.

Yes time is a guideline too and if they end up with hour long daily scrum; that is where you jump in to show how it’s done!

Hence, focusing on the key objectives of the scrum events and artefacts is crucial.

Help the team understand and practice them successfully.

Make your teams flexible and agile

The name of the game is agile. As a scrum master ensure your team is ok with uncertainties. They are not bad always.

Because, when there is uncertainty, that is when one gets to improvise, innovate!

If the teams aren’t flexible enough to handle an emergency mid-sprint then how are they going to support the product in the long run.

Guide your team to synthesize the uncertain aspects of the backlog items, brainstorm, validate and finally estimate to add to a sprint.

It isn’t done, ‘til it meets Definition of Done!

One of the most critical responsibilities of a Scrum Master is to ensure the team understands the definition of done also referred to as acceptance criteria.

Act as a bridge between the product owner and the team and help them both define the definitions of done or the user stories.

This will enable greater collaboration and deeper understanding of the product and product goals.

When the product owner, business stakeholders and the scrum team work together on the acceptance criteria a solid foundation is laid for the product success.

Because, chances of all being aligned to a common goal increase manifold and unwanted pressure & distractions are proactively prevented.

And teams are equally motivated to meet the sprint goals as they execute sprints after sprint.

Prevent expectation overload

If your team gets burdened due to an aggressive product owner and business stakeholder then the agile principles fail.

Because the undue pressure will lead to significant decline in quality thereby causing rework or in harsh terms – sprint failures.

Hence, ensure that dev teams and the product owner are well aligned on the team velocity, story estimation as well as the backlog refinement.

Product development and management is a high energy game. Hence real time collaboration and transparency at all levels is the key.

More than anything understanding the impact of each backlog item on the product goal, project costs and schedule will help iron out a lot of understanding gaps.

As a scrum master do ensure this!

Experiment, Improvise & Excel

Know full well that experimenting with your processes iteratively and constantly will always help the team to improve.

It may be on the turnaround time, sprint duration, quality product increments, and better estimation techniques.

The objective is continuous learning and improvement.

Conduct effective sprint retrospectives and take up each learning items in terms of what they should do more, stop doing and start doing.

As, there will be activities that may not hold good for all sprints.

This opens room for further experimentation and improvisation.

More the team experiments, more it learns and greater the quality of deliverables!

Conclusion

Practicing agile is all about high transparency, collaboration and adopting change. And to do this, as Scrum Masters you should be able to showcase facts, cause and effect relationships for the team to assess themselves thoroughly.

And to do this having a centralized agile project management software on your side expedites the whole journey.

You get to prevent distractions, see the value of your works and the impact of the outcomes in real-time.

Thus it’s easy for teams to stay on course and execute with precision.

Bring your product owner, the team and business stakeholders together to achieve the product goals faster!

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Today’s digital technology has simplified several ways of our work; sometimes it also brings the complexities in the day-to-day workflow operations. And for managing these complexities efficiently, Kanban system was adopted in several workplaces.

Nowadays, Kanban is being used by every professional including freelancer to small-scale businesses and global enterprises as well.

The implementation of Kanban is based on the sources, in which you will have a clear understanding of how accurately to improve your work processes;

• Begin with the existing process
• Grant to track incremental adjustments
• Consider all the current processes, tasks, and responsibilities
• Support acts of management at all levels

What is Kanban

Kanban is the visual overview of a workflow. Here you can steadily maintain your progress to improve productivity.

Or you can say, this is “the” way to visualize the team’s work, recognize and reduce complexity and deliver operational improvements.

Here work objects are described visually, enabling team members to view the state of every component of tasks at any time.

So, it provides real-time broadcast and full transparency of the project.

Being a productivity tool, this popular framework has been used by agile and DevOps software development workplaces widely.

How to use Kanban for Better Project Management

Kanban is the widely used project management methodology. It almost suits to every team and their objectives.

It helps you in accomplishing the flow of activities as your team works on shared goals.

By applying the Kanban methodology, the project management workflow becomes transparent and visual.

So, each team member can view the task status and track – TO DO, TO BE DONE & DONE!

Benefits of Kanban Methodology at a Glance:

• Can divided entire work into manageable tasks
• Collects all the important information that is needed for a task
• Can adjust to your team and process
• Gives you a proper work status under one roof

These days various Kanban feature-enabled project management tools have arisen in the market now. But viewing the complexities and demand, it is important to pick the correct tool for your workplace needs.

List of Kanban Software

1. Orangescrum Kanban Board

Orangescrum provides the Kanban board view to run various types of projects. E.g. bug tracking, task tracking, Kanban projects, scrum projects (scrum board), and much more. You can define custom status that meaningfully represents your tasks lifecycle from start to finish. So your teams get absolute clarity of to-dos, timelines, and expectations on the task assignments.

The other offering features include:

• Agile Project Management
• Task Management
• Kanban View
• Time Tracking
• Resource Management
• Reports & Analytics
• Project Template
• Custom Task Status
• User Role Management
• Gantt Chart
• Slack Integration
• Google Calendar Integration

Pricing:

$9/10users/month

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2. ProofHub

ProofHub is leading Task Management software, here you can add task lists and subscribe tasks to team members on those lists. You can also determine whom to subscribe to on a specific stage. With an online Kanban board, you will get the choice to connect a workflow with this list as well.

3. Trello

A common Kanban-style rule in Trello has three columns To-Do, Doing, and Done. The first to-do column has cards with a task that requires to be done. As you choose the task that is committed to you, you can move it in the performing column. When a task is closed, move it to the done column.

 4. nTask

nTask is a strong project management tool used for plan and team collaboration. It provides kanban boards to manage workflows of various projects, both for simple and complex projects as well. Users can use the default columns or set custom columns as per their need.

5. Hygger

Hygger is a Kanban tool for software development teams that perfectly suits tech and non-tech companies. The platform offers friendly Kanban boards with Swimlanes, WIP limits, time tracking, and Scrum support. You’ll get a chance to apply the other kinds of project boards such as a Sprint board, to-do lists, and a timeline. Hygger also offers handy prioritization frameworks and colorful roadmaps based on Gantt Charts for advanced planning and scheduling.

 6. Productboard

Productboard is a Kanban product management methodology that allows your entire team to be joined in the advancement cycle. Customizable boards provide for teams to have the right stability of compliance and guidance.

 7. Forecast

Forecast is also a comprehensive platform to handle your project workflows, especially if you’ve outgrown Trello. It goes beyond most of the Kanban board tools by providing you the knowledge to create project timelines, schedule resources, register time, and monitor budgets – all in sync with your boards.

8. Kanbanize

Kanbanize combines Kanban-style features with business automation into one platform that refers to be a great Agile project management software. Kanbanize has the ability to improve workflow while offering a visualization of key components and breaking them down into hierarchal levels of work items.

 9. MeisterTask

MeisterTask was created to meet the needs of agile project teams. The software accommodates different kinds of workflows including Kanban systems, software sprints as well as simple static project boards.

10. Taskworld

Taskworld is one of the good tool for Kanban boards while also allowing you to keep track of your work progress. Although it should be noted that the iPad and iPhone versions of this tool could use some improvement.

Use of Kanban in Orangescrum

Orangescrum’s Kanban board is a Project Management feature that provides the power of visual information.

It helps to end the use of sticky notes on the whiteboard.

Orangescrum Kanban board helps project managers or project owners to see the collaboration and experience its progress in a better way.

It also helps team members to efficiently interact with each other.

The 3 main principles of Orangescrum’s Kanban board:

Visualization of work:

The visible prompts of Kanban help team members interact instantly and efficiently regarding every perspective of a project.

Work-in-progress limits:

When there are many tasks in process at a time, nothing appears to meet the finish line. the PM features help team to maintains their progress of work so that more is achieved in less time.

Maintaining flow:

The workflow should keep a proper flow from “to do” to “doing” to “done” in an effective way. The visible nature excludes complexities and chaos.

Overall, Kanban feature assists you to take the confusion out of your performance. Teams have better accuracy of task progress and are well furnished to handle delays.

It also gives the team the necessary freedom to do impact analysis, prioritize tasks to get better outcomes and increase customer satisfaction.

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Kanban project management method has been implemented widely in the last decade. And majorly without the full understanding of what Kanban method actually prescribes.

Most users are just driven by the quick fix that it is highly visual task management and makes it easy to understand where tasks stand and how to close them fast.

Teams put a few status columns to represent their task flow and begin with “agile task management”.

Well, this is exactly what Kanban is not!

Kanban is all about the flow – the way your work or processes flow today.

As a first step you need to take a holistic view of how your work flows today, is it in align with the end goal i.e. meeting customer expectations.

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Kanban is developed with a service oriented approach enabling teams to meet customer expectations timely and consistently.

Making your work easier is just a side benefit and not the objective of using Kanban.

With that in mind, let us focus on how we can optimize the use of Kanban for our teams, improve our service delivery and knock those customer satisfaction ratings out of the park!

Review Your Current Flow

Before implementing Kanban it is important that you take a hard look at your exiting process and the flow today.

The flow is nothing but the steps that your tasks or key activities (work items) go through from start to end.

You must identify few things in your flow

• Types of activities
• States/status through which each of these activities flow
• Lead time of each activity
• Work items delivered per cycle
• Work in Progress activities

Types of activities or Work Items –

are your distinct activities that you perform to deliver your services. You must identify all relevant activities and club them accordingly.

States and Status – Not all activities have the same lifecycle. Hence the need to club and optimize the states to refer to on your Kanban board.

Lead Time – the time taken from start to end to complete one activity.

Work Items delivered per cycle –it is the number of activity types or items you delivered in a specified time. E.g. no. of tickets closed per week

Work in Progress Activities – your active queue at any given point of time.

Once you have understood the above, you can now identify the gaps and loopholes in your current process and see what needs improvement.

It can be the, #of work items delivered per cycle or the work in progress activities or reduction in the lead time.

Hence a thorough understanding and review of your existing operations is a must to start with.

Remember Kanban is not a rule, it is an approach and guidelines that evolve with every experiment.

Optimize the Flow

This is where you try to fix things, make improvements and implement helpful changes.

Basically, once you have identified problem you are going to fix you try an experiment with changes to the existing flow.

e.g. you want to optimize the cycle time and ensure each activity is closed within 2 days instead of 4.

Here, you check what are the impediments, and try a process that either removes that impediment, minimizes it or circumvent if found to be not applicable.

The idea here is to see if the experiments are successful and if yes you continue that path else revert the changes.

The key objective of using the Kanban method is to ensure timely and consistent results. E.g. you know each week you will deliver 100 items or 5 new features etc.

And all of this is directly tied to the customer expectations. Predictability is the desired outcome here so that customers know what to expect at end of each cycle.

Make the Teams Self-Organized

One of the hallmarks of the agile project management approach is self-organized and self-sufficient teams.

With the Kanban board in place, teams know their tasks, are ready to pull tasks in their queues when ready and ensure not to push to prevent choking of the other states on the board.

Every member is aware of who is doing what, what is expected to complete when and when something will come to their queue.

The high transparency in the overall system enables teams to perform and deliver predictably.

This leads us to another key concept of “Limit WIP Items” – the hallmark of the pull system.

To maintain consistency in your quality of service and delivery rates, it is important that your flow isn’t chocked up with a high WIP items.

Hence, assessing the team’s strengths and its delivery rate is critical to an optimized Kanban implementation.

As an analogy, if the highway is full to its maximum capacity in terms of no of vehicles then the result is a traffic jam. Hence, a 100% utilization is not preferred. There has to be slack in the system to prevent delays and ensure quality deliverables.

Take Feedback and Collaborate

Constant customer and stakeholder feedback is a must to optimizing the overall Kanban approach.

As you continue to experiment with improving your core Kanban metrics as explained above, implement a closed loop feedback mechanism.

See what worked well, which results though good weren’t the customer’s first choice and how did the teams react to the changes in the experiment.

Was there a performance dip instead of improvement?

Did the quality improve but lead time increased?

These answers will pave the way for accepting the changes to the existing flow or experimenting further.

Kanban is not about radical big bang actions. It is agile, iterative and evolves as you make progress.

Feedback will lead to removal of major impediments, refining the flow, add or remove states from the work item flow. All of which are important to delivering consistently and meeting the customer objectives.

Common feedback tools used are daily stand up or review meetings, retrospectives and planning meetings to pick up what to work on next.

It is the feedback mechanism that makes the whole process all the more inclusive and leads to increased team collaboration and productivity.

Summary

Focus on incremental changes so that the team is able to run with the changes smoothly. Keep in mind that changes are not meant to disrupt a system that work fine though with scope of improvements.

The whole concept of Kanban is to deliver with predictability to meet customer expectations.

And not to put a group of statuses and knocking off tasks from the list.

True that Kanban project management helps with quick visualization of your task boards and progress but that doesn’t solve the bigger objective.

As a recap

• Review existing flow
• Optimize your flow
• Enable teams to be self-organized
• Take feedbacks, collaborate and improve incrementally.

Sure, you would need a Kanban project management tool to help you with the implementation.

Take a look at Orangescrum collaborative task management software with robust agile project, time and resource management capabilities in a single platform.

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2022 has been a year of remote work management with remote team productivity being the number one priority for organizations across the world.

Increased accountability is a must for remote team to be successful.

Accountability is a culture, a deep ingrained characteristics among great teams. And it need to be always practice right from the top to the bottom.

A bottoms-up approach won’t work as employees will soon lose track if the same level of accountability is not displayed by the managers and leaders of the organization.

What is Accountability?

Accountability is about meeting your commitments or delivering on what you have committed. Be it about responding to an email within the said time, finishing a report or completing the tasks and projects at hand.

Stay true to your word! That’s accountability.

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Ownership and accountability go hand-in-hand. Owning up to one’s mistakes, or if you are a manager owning up for a team’s fiasco and leading the team forward is a great example of accountability.

Imagine your manager shirks away responsibility or distances himself when a project goes awry. Nah! That’s not right.

The idea is to put the project’s, the team’s and the organization’s best interest before self!

When a leader is able to do that, others follow and it becomes a company-wide culture wherein everyone need to committed to the organization’s growth and success.

Which also means, delivering exceptional customer service, building a high performing work environment and contributing to the community you live in.

Why is Accountability Important for Remote Productivity?

Productivity is about delivering tasks in time with high quality. If there isn’t accountability, teams tend to lax in their efforts.

Tasks get delayed, quality levels degrade and leads to remote team conflicts.

As a result overall performance of the team is impacted leading to project failure.

Accountability is must for all team members to hold and deliver their part with utmost sense of urgency and responsibility.

Imagine where a lapse on one team member’s end causes the other team members to stretch, rework and stay late to meet pending deadlines. Surely not a happy environment.

This also causes a trust deficit within the team making the overall work environment very toxic.

And these problems compound when you work in a remote team setup

Hence, ensuring your work is completed in time and doesn’t hinder the other team member’s progress is a must.

You tend to build the much required trust and a motivated team that is willing to contribute more and help each other complete their tasks where needed.

This way there is increased collaboration, faster issue resolution and all round productivity rise.

How to Ensure Accountability in Project Management?

Accountability is directly linked to the project success. Project Managers will have a hard time ensuring their project is executed as per plan within the agreed timelines and delivered in accordance with the acceptance criteria.

What is required is for team members to be clear of their roles and responsibilities on the projects, clarity around their task assignments & timelines and the overall project schedule.

To start with, deploying a work management tool like Orangescrum is a must for:

• Robust task breakdown
• Resource management and planning
• Monitoring task progress
• Constant review of project KPIs
• Time tracking
• All round collaboration in real time

In addition to the above, project managers can take some tactical steps using project and task collaboration tools to increase project wide accountability.

Setup user Roles and Responsibilities

Having a well-defined custom user role permissions management within your task management tool proves helpful in ensuring teams can access info in accordance to their project roles.

This ensures, they aren’t distracted within the tool and get straight to the information they need to complete the task at hand in time.

Clarity on their roles and expectations ensures there isn’t scope for error and leads to increased accountability.

Transparent Task Management

Having centralized task management helps in working off of a common list. Defining tasks with clear

• Due dates
• Estimated hours
• Task types and task labels
• Custom reminders
• Task linking

Gives the team all the info they need in one view. Thus eliminating guess work or dependency among the team members.

Teams are self-sufficient and can execute their tasks on time.

Moreover, the task list is visible across the team so that all project members know who is working on what plus how one’s tasks might be linked to other.

A public task list thus puts an added onus on the team members to complete their tasks so as not to be seen lagging behind other team members. Plus it creates a sense of healthy competition as well to stay on top of their respective tasks.

Conduct Daily Stand-ups or Check-ins

Reviewing the team’s progress via quick 15-20minute catch-up meeting is a great way to maintain the required accountability within team members.

Kanban boards are great tools to visually track and review task progress.

Depending on the nature of your project and the team style you can conduct the status reviews twice a day as well i.e. beginning and end of the day.

Teams can highlight any impediments or call for help for the tasks of the day during the morning call and present their accomplishments at the end of day check-in.

This way the team remains focused on delivering their tasks within the timelines and be ready for progress update at the end of day.

Celebrate Small Wins and Share Success Stories

All work and no play is no fun either! To keep the momentum going, make it a practice to highlight team accomplishments.

Your daily stand-ups are great place to highlight success no matter how small. It can be

• A consistent employee delivering his tasks without delays
• A team member who solved a long standing issue or found a fix for a critical issue
• A process improvement that reduces the tasks cycle time
• Customer appreciation etc.

Success begets success! Team members will be more inclined to be a part of the success story and hence will be more accountable to their role.

Conclusion

Remote team or not, productivity is a crucial KPI for project success. Driving efficiency at all levels within the organization calls for increased accountability. It starts with the leaders at the top.

The more the leaders display exemplary behaviour and act with accountability through all their responsibilities, the more it helps to drive an accountability driven culture throughout the organization.

The other thing equally important to drive a sense of accountability is the use of the right project management tool that supports the team’s working style and the overall org culture.

Not just any tool will do it. You are well off by reviewing a few and deciding on one that is closely aligned to your business flow and processes.

You can provide deeper transparency to the teams with a centralized collaboration tool so that it is easy for teams to be aligned with task deadlines, quality requirements, customer expectations and the overall project goals.

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