How to Launch a Scrum Team – The First Steps

Part one, the basics

Interviewing the Master of Scrum in Hardware Joe Justice –  a quick overview of how to get started (under 4 minutes!)

Step one: Run a four values retrospective (it’s actually 5! Here they are)  – the Agile four values – with the team saying, “what’s the gap?” and “what are we doing well already?”, so the context is typically our last week of work together and specific to the place we are scrumming.

We ask how we can increase the positives and close the gaps and the answers become the backlog for the work for the team and the Executive Action Team.

Step two: After Step one has been exhausted which is typically a big deal, then we have a more detailed approach, the Agile 12 Principles retrospective which is run the same way, and that generates the next part of the backlog.

Step three: take The Scrum Guide – the 3 roles, the 5 events, the 3 outputs (3-5-3) And ask, “How are we in each of these?” “Are we missing any?” Or, “are some not as good?” “Which are we doing well? How are we doing them well?” And then we list these out, the list comprising of ways to reinforce what we are doing well and ways to improve what we are not doing so well, and this becomes our organizational backlog, and at the end of that, we now have an agile scrum group. 

See the 

What is Scrum?

Here is a great interview with Jeff Sutherland by the BBC Academy (under 5  mins) See the original Article here

Jeff Sutherland, Co-founder of Scrum

Great book on Scrum and the history of Scrum (Amazon Link)

The latest Scrum Guide pdf download  2017-Scrum-Guide-US

Agile Manifesto

Manifesto for Agile Software Development – Agile was born out of Scrum (see https://agilemanifesto.org/)

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

Continue reading “What is Scrum?”