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Coaching new born Scrum team

Last post 12:48 pm March 27, 2023 by Nicholas Gabrichidze
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Nicholas Gabrichidze
12:48 pm March 27, 2023

How you guys feel about following methodology of coaching new - born Scrum teams, who have little or no experience with Scrum/Agile?



1. Starting with the short, 1 week long sprints, for the first two or three weeks, so team can adjust to the methodology.

2. To avoid dependency on Agile software, and to ensure the understanding of core principles, team should be running the very first Sprint MANUALLY whenever possible. It means having physical Backlogs with user stories ON paper or white board present in office; physical Kanban board, burndown chart too, and having all other artefacts physical: on paper or white board.

3. On a second and third sprint team should use some old, familiar program, to create backlogs, charts and Kanban and to move user stories from product backlog to sprint backlog. I suggest Excel

4. Avoiding story points at this two sprints Team should estimate the tasks in hours or days at the first sprint(week 1). Difference between ideal days (work without obstacles) and real work days should be explained.

5. At the second sprint(week 2) planning session, the idea of relative, not exact measures for upcoming efforts should be explained. It will help to ask the team to estimate the scope of tasks in "T shirt sizes": like "extra small effort", "small effort"," medium", "large" , "extra large" etc.

6. At the third sprint panning(week 3) the chart to convert "T shirt sizes" into Fibonacci numbers, like XXS effort=1,XS=2,S=3,M=5, L=8, XL=12 and so on should be presented. Explain and play the Story point poker ON PAPER, using white board as display. This way team can start learning to estimate tasks in story points. They should keep using Excel or other familiar soft for this sprint again.

7. At the fourth sprint planning (week 4)ask the team to Download Jira, monday dot com or other relevant software. developers will be already familiar with terminology and process, so using of soft will come naturally, with little explanation,

Normally your team should fly on after that...

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