Skip to main content

How to Improve Productivity

Last post 11:05 am August 21, 2015 by Ching-Pei Li
8 replies
02:57 am August 9, 2015

Am Sure, each of you would have spent some time in exotic & peaceful places in your life like spending a week in resort after a stressful work, how do you feel? You feel relax, calm, energetic, stress-free and rejuvenated. This is one of the great avenue to regain energy and keep going yourself..

Similarly imagine if you create similar conducive environments in office like practicing 1-2 hours as silence hours\day, no phone call, exchange of emails, meetings & chatting etc..just a dedicate time for yourself to focus on your work...Believe me my team is practicing this for last one month and reaping a lot of benefit, improved productivity...

Well, here are other enablers to improve productivities...

1) Visual Scrum Boards
2) Silence Hours
3) Eliminating NVA using LEAN, like Value Stream Mapping,
4) Huddle (Daily Scrum Meeting)
5) Cross - functional trainings
6) Leveraging Tools to enable continuous delivery
7) Unit testing, Functional Testing Automation
8) Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continues White box testing
9) Openness, Respect, Self Motivated.


01:03 pm August 17, 2015

And remember that improving productivity without a definition of done and a clear target that brings value is just whistling in the dark
Ken Schwaber


10:31 am August 18, 2015

A clear and unambiguous Sprint Goal defined by the entire Scrum Team should be the best motivation for the Development Team.


09:28 am August 19, 2015

Adding one more...

Distributing points as per the effort delivered by each member to inspire others to do best in next sprint,


10:20 am August 19, 2015

> Distributing points as per the effort delivered
> by each member to inspire others to do best in next sprint

Is there such a thing as effort delivery?

Also, if you could quantify the effort of each member, would you then have the collaborative and indivisible team effort that Scrum values?


04:39 pm August 20, 2015

I think this is quite risky, since unexperienced team members will be demotivated, and the personal gain might precede the team result, team members might decide to finish their own stories before helping a collegue finishing his high priority story, and stories should be a team effort.


07:04 pm August 20, 2015


Posted By Niels Dimmers on 20 Aug 2015 04:39 PM
team members might decide to finish their own stories


Hi Niels,
No body but the whole Development Team own the user stories.

If individual team members could have their own user stories, they did not follow the rules of Scrum.

During the Scrum Planning and Daily Scrum(if needed), user stories are break down to individual tasks/work.

The Development Team decide how to finish these tasks during the Sprint.
The work of a user stories may be done by more than one developer.

For example, a user story is decomposed to 5 tasks and assigned to 5 developers by the self-organizating, cross-functional Development Team during the Daily Scrum.

Even though most developers have finished their work, if there is a developer could not finish his/her job, it could not to say that the user story has "Done".

The entire DT is accountable for all of the User Stories selected to be the items of Sprint Backlog.


01:08 am August 21, 2015

But suppose the one lacking behind needs some knowledge or assistance from someone else, his team members would be inclined to finish their own tasks before helping him, possibly delaying the team goal. That's what I meant.


11:05 am August 21, 2015

If it occurs, the risk cost is likely one day.

During the Daily Scrum, the DT and SM will know the problem.

The SM will involve the whole team to tackle/remove the empediment.

Daily Scrum, I'd like to regard it as a Daily Planning, is a opportunity to inspect how work has been done and based on this to plan and to adapt(in needed) what and how to do next in order to meet the Spint Goal day by day.


By posting on our forums you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.

Please note that the first and last name from your Scrum.org member profile will be displayed next to any topic or comment you post on the forums. For privacy concerns, we cannot allow you to post email addresses. All user-submitted content on our Forums may be subject to deletion if it is found to be in violation of our Terms of Use. Scrum.org does not endorse user-submitted content or the content of links to any third-party websites.

Terms of Use

Scrum.org may, at its discretion, remove any post that it deems unsuitable for these forums. Unsuitable post content includes, but is not limited to, Scrum.org Professional-level assessment questions and answers, profanity, insults, racism or sexually explicit content. Using our forum as a platform for the marketing and solicitation of products or services is also prohibited. Forum members who post content deemed unsuitable by Scrum.org may have their access revoked at any time, without warning. Scrum.org may, but is not obliged to, monitor submissions.