Session: Brown bags, Circles, Top Code and Lanterns: Knowledge Management in Scrum

Friday, 10:15 - 11:05
Track: Agile

Summary
How do you manage competence development and knowledge sharing in a multi-team iterative
development organization? At bwin Games we have moved from sending employees on
external training to an in-house process for sharing knowledge between employees.

This paper describes four solutions that have been successfully implemented to increase
knowledge sharing and power to improve. Employee satisfaction with competence development
has also increased. While the solutions per se are not novelty this paper discusses our
experiences in implementing them and the benefits found.
One of the solutions described in this paper, the Lantern Day, also addresses our model for
continuous improvement in a multi-team scrum implementation.

Organization and process
bwin Games Studios is a IT development department consisting of 160 employees. We have 15
scrum teams totalling about 110 employees (programmers, QA-engineers, system verification
and scrum masters). The remaining employees are supporting the scrum teams (e.g.
Configuration Management, Project Management, Release Management and People
Management). The average developer has been with the company for 3.6 years and has 8
years of experience as a developer.
At bwin Games, our core product is a system for online poker, a domain with high
requirements on scalability, security and performance. We are using scrum as our development
process and it is open-ended; we do not have a feature scope for our product development.
Instead we are continuously adding features to our core product. The nature of this
development process does not give us any time between projects where it would be natural for
employees to focus on competence development.

Challenge statement
How do you manage competence development in an agile development organisation?
The traditional use of external open training classes provided by training businesses proved
unsatisfactory for us. There are several reasons for this. We have a large number of very senior
developers. These developers may well have more knowledge and hands-on experience in their
field of interest than the average external trainer. It was very common for our (average)
developers to return from external training only benefiting from the last 20-30% of the training.
We have also experimented with tailor made training provided by external training providers.
Although this approach is more efficient than open classes, it too is often not advanced enough
for senior developers. We have found that internal knowledge sharing is the most cost-effective
and rewarding both for senior and junior developers. Learning from peers also increases
knowledge transfer from senior employees, thereby facilitating Bus factor Management.

This paper describes four solutions implemented at bwin Games over the last 5 years. The
target of the solutions is to advance learning from your peers, provide opportunity for
employees to practice teaching, share knowledge from books, articles and conferences and
increase employee satisfaction.

Brown Bags
Starting in 2005, we have been running Brown bag sessions. These are internally known as
Lunch-and-Learn sessions and are an integral part of learning at bwin Games. A lunch-andlearn
session is a session where employees present a topic to their peers and then opens up for
discussion. The session takes place during the lunch hour and bwin Games supplies the food.
Lunch-and-learns can be both one-time occasions and span over several sessions. An example
of a one-time subject is Introduction to Maven. An example of several sessions is when a skilled
senior developer held 10 lunch-and-learn sessions about the Java Collections (including reading
a book on the subject). Lunch-and-learn sessions are working well to increase knowledge
sharing between peers. The most common way of the initiative of a lunch-and-learn is that one
or more employees approach a senior employee asking for a session.

The drawback of this approach on its own is that the senior employees are often tied up 100%
in activities that are critical for delivery of our products. This leaves little time to research new
areas and prepare the training. Hence, the allocation of resources to development activities
inhibits the knowledge sharing. It can be even harder for a first time teacher to find the time to
prepare and build up confidence to hold a session. This makes it harder for employees to grow
to become skilled at sharing knowledge to their peers.

Book Circles
At bwin Games we started our first department wide book circle in the spring of 2008. This
initiative started as a way to draw from the lessons learned during Brown bag sessions. A book
circle is a group of people that reads a technical book and discusses it once a week at a lunch
meeting over a period of two months. A book circle will be 8-12 participants per group with an
average of 10 groups at a time. The immediate benefits for the participants are:
• extending their knowledge
• having the same understanding of terms as other people - speaking the same language
• become more acquainted with the co-workers from other teams
• a lunch on the company once a week

There are also other more subtle benefits from the book circles. One employee is the organizer
of the whole set of circles and each group has a moderator. The group moderator is responsible
for keeping the discussion on the topic and guiding the participants through the book. This has
proven to be a good way of encouraging employees to step up and share knowledge with their
peers. The step to presenting a topic on a brown bag session is significantly lower after the
experience of moderating a book circle.
We are currently performing our 5th department wide book circle.

Top Code
In the fall of 2008 we introduced our internal development training, called Top Code. The
program aims at Top Code certifying a team. The targets for the certification are:
• Increase measurable quality of code.
• Increase confidence in the code.
• Increase possibilities for code reuse.
• Increase interaction between team members
• Decrease number of bugs reported and reopened.
• Decrease development time for new features and bug fixes

Our top code sessions are scrum team training sessions that take place over 2+1 days. During
the first two days, two very senior employees present software engineering practices that are
mandatory for development at bwin Games. All training is built on the teams own experiences
with their own code and challenges. A follow up session is performed after some months to
discuss the progress made by the scrum team. A number of benefits have been found from the
Top Code sessions. All teams get a common language to use to talk about software engineering
practices. This applies also to cross-team discussions. In the training a lot of focus is on
openness and confidence, to encourage developers to open up for reviews and criticism of their
code. We have raised the floor of engineering practices across the whole development
organization.

Lantern Days
In February 2009 we introduced the Lantern Day concept.

During 2008 management at bwin Games got the following feedback from employees in
regards to knowledge management; “We need more time to search information and time to
learn to use new methods, techniques or tools”, “At a previous employer we had time allocated
to gather people interested in an area and discuss improvements or share knowledge”
Management also wanted to improve the area of communicating and sharing knowledge
between teams. Some suggested actions to improve this were; Team knowledge sharing
(present ideas that works in one team to other teams) and possibility to have multiple teams in
retrospects to get mutual understanding and a common picture of challenges
At the time our development process was two-week sprints running back-to-back. The teams
completed the sprints with a demonstration on Friday afternoon and had their sprint planning
the next Monday morning.

In the fall of 2008, a research associate at MIT presented a comparative study on the
development situation at bwin Games. The study was done during the fall of 2007. One of the
major findings was that the IT development department was sprinting a marathon, and was too
busy to learn. While the situation had improved since the study was conducted, the scrum
teams at the time spent in average one hour per sprint for sprint retrospect meetings.
It was very rare that two or more teams had sprint retrospect meetings together. This meant
that impediments that could not be solved by one team alone might be overlooked or that suboptimal
solutions were designed to solve cross-team impediments.

Another type of input came from books and published research reports. Research measuring
how well employees are trained and developed [Delahoussaye, et al., 2002] showed that
organizations that make large investments in people typically have lower employee turnover,
which is associated with higher customer satisfaction, which in turn is a driver of profitability.
In the Human Equation, Jeffery Pfeffer writes that "Virtually all descriptions of high performance
management practices emphasize training, and the amount of training provided by commitment
as opposed to control-orientated management is substantial" [Pfeffer, Jeffery]. Facts like these
allowed development management to convince top-level management and the business
department of the rationale to focus one in 15 days on learning (approximately 7% of total
capacity)

Development management then increased sprint length to 3 weeks and introduced one “labday”
between sprints. All teams synchronised their sprints and the last working day in the sprint
is now known as a Lantern Day*. The Lantern Days are spent on reflection, learning and
development improvements.
All sprint retrospect meetings were moved to the Lantern Day. The format for sprint retrospect
meetings is still decided by the scrum teams but having more time gives several advantages:
• The teams have time to select one or more focus areas and do detailed root analysis to
find the best way to remove impediments
• Cross team retrospectives is easier to facilitate since the whole day is available and
development tasks are not competing for time
• Selected action points from the review meeting can be addressed at once after the
meeting. Being able to act immediately improves the teams’ sense of empowerment
and improve success rate for improvement

The Lantern Day has also provided a possibility to improve learning and knowledge transfer
without hurting product feature completion predictions. Performing knowledge transfer outside
the sprint time has given better accuracy in predictions, since it increases the time in the
sprints spent on producing deliverables and less on unplanned learning and knowledge transfer.

After the retrospectives all employees (including supporting staff and management) are free to
pursue any topic that they find interesting. This means that employees can spend the Lantern
Days to prepare presentation and research interesting topics. These presentations can be about
impressions from conferences, best practices from one team to another, system overview
information etc. Additionally, senior employees have time that is not allocated to product
delivery and can spend time researching and teaching.

Open Lantern Day activities are published and documented in a form of an Open Space Wiki
page. On the Open Space Wiki page a person or group can post a note stating their activity,
what they want to achieve and when they will discuss the topic. This format allows
programmers to explore new technologies, test proof of concept implementations, share best
practices etc. QA Engineers can experiment with new tools; discuss how to find issues in
undocumented systems, etc. Project managers can improve tools for communication, how to
present data that is meaningful for business and development etc. Management are actively
encouraging knowledge sharing by emphasising the importance to invite peers from other
teams to participate in Lantern Day activities.

Some concrete examples of benefits from the Lantern Days are
• Learning and sharing knowledge about new tools and frameworks
• Time for employees to read books and articles
• New test tools developed by employees
• Better visualisation dashboards for information from continuous build server

These are only a small sample of the results. The most important aspect of Lantern Days is that
it makes knowledge management and learning a process ritual. All employees know that they
will spend every 15th day on learning and improvement work. One year after the introduction of
Lantern Days, they are a natural part of our development process. Lantern Days are just as
accepted as sprint planning meetings, daily stand-ups and sprint reviews.

Current Benefits of the Knowledge Management Model
The implementation of the four solutions have improved the knowledge management at bwin
Games. While we have not entirely stopped sending our employees to external training, the
number of external training occasions measured from 2007 to 2009 is down with about 70%.
These cost savings have been used on other types of training.

We have increased our possibilities to send employees to conferences. There is now an
opportunity for more employees to go to conferences. All employees that go on conferences are
requested to present their conference impressions at a Lantern Day, which in itself increases
knowledge sharing.

We have also been able to invite interesting speakers to bwin. In the last 2 years we have
hosted full day workshops with industry giants like James Bach, Mike Cohn and Linda Rising.
When we have the need to do a training session aimed at more than 6-8 developers we can use
our budget to invite a technical guru to bwin Games and do technical reviews of our own code
and challenges. These sessions are typically much more hands-on our own problems and give
us better effect as well as more satisfied employees.

Conclusion
The four solutions described in this paper shows how a development department can increase
knowledge sharing, encourage improvement and facilitate employee growth. All solutions have
been implemented without increased spending on training. Instead our training budget has
been focused on the areas where it really makes a difference for skilled employees.

References
Delahoussaye, M & Ellis, K. & Bolch, M. (2002). Measuring Corporate Smarts. Training
Magazine, August 2002. Pp. 20-35.
Pfeffer, Jeffery (1998). Human Equation – Building Profits by Putting People First. Boston:
Harvard Business School Press.

*) The Lantern Day is named after the Lantern Festival that take place on the 15th day of the
first lunar month in the Chinese Calendar).

Prerequisites

basic understanding of iterative development processes and scrum

Expectations

How to implement knowledge sharing, continuous improvement and employee growth in a scrum organization.