Category: Agile Scrum

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 

This is How We Run Our Daily Scrum Meetings

First, we let everyone know that we are about to hold the meeting.
Second, we play this video

This is the world record Formula One pitstop, which is four wheels changed and a refuel, all done in UNDER TWO SECONDS!

While it’s playing, I ask, “How can we become more like this?”, “Where is the manager here?”, “Do you see anyone telling someone what to do?”, “Do you think they just turned up today and figured this out? Or do you think they might have practised?”

We have a discussion for a couple of minutes and see if we can come up with a small improvement that we can try during the next shift today as a little experiment.

At the end of the shift we have a very quick retrospective and if the improvements worked we find a way to share it with the rest of the Team.

This is normally done in one of two ways, either a quick note on the group WhatsApp page, or one team member will be instructed to write it up and make sure that each team member is informed/trained/educated. (For this we use our accountability document. Here’s our latest version. Everything starts in red, and as a drop-down which turns the field green when somebody has had the information/training/education.)

We then go through the daily checklist as usual.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

How many post-its

Fresh back from an amazing week with Joe Justice at the Bosch Engineering headquarters in Germany.

Just thinking about post-its and the scrum board.

The purpose of a scrum board is to MAKE WORK VISIBLE.

Therefore, the level of information should be enough to keep all team members and other stakeholders informed about what is happening, but not so much that the board is hard to read.