Situational Awareness

I have been exploring techniques to help my Scrum teams become more effective and one of the techniques I've been looking at is Crew Resource Management (CRM).

CRM came about because of a number of airplane crashes in the 70s that were attributed to human error. More recently, it is cited as one of the reasons there were no causalities in the US Air flight 1549 (Miracle on the Hudson).

One component of Crew Resource Management is Situation Awareness. A simple definition of situation awareness is how well your perception matches reality. There are a number of factors that can impact situation awareness such as complacency (I've done this so many times…), task saturation (too much work in progress), channelized attention, or poor communications.

I had a situation recently where my scrum master lost situation awareness. We were at the end of the sprint and he told me the team had completed 45 story points, more than any previous sprint. However, a conversation with the product owner a short time later revealed that really wasn't the case. The product owner wasn't satisfied with how some of the work was done.

What happened? The scrum master was fixated (channelized attention) on what the developers were telling him because he wanted to be able to show all the stories done for the sprint. He lost site of the definition of done, which included a review with the product owner before a story was marked done. 

Our kaizen for the week was a review of our definition of done and re-commit that nothing would be marked done without a product owner review. We took this idea into planning and included tasks for product owner review in each story so we could track these tasks to completion on our board so that the scrum master had additional visual cues to help him with his situational awareness.

So how can the team keep better situational awareness? Having a good visual board helps. In addition to tracking work thru the To Do/Doing/Done path, the board also has a place for impediments, the definition of done, release plan, and a burndown. For this team, the board is also in the team room, and any time I walk in, I stand near the board when I'm talking to the team and encouraging them to look at the whole board, similar to how a pilot is constantly scanning all their gauges so they don't miss anything (as opposed to the crew of Flight 173, who fixated on a landing indicator light and forgot to keep check on their fuel).