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What is the next step for a team new to scrum

Last post 04:59 pm November 11, 2019 by Johan Wemmenhag
5 replies
12:11 pm November 5, 2019

Hi,

As a scrum master I've introduced scrum to a tiny team of developers. They have done a great job and have welcomed the structure that scrum brings. But, how do we take the next step from this basic level where we have all scrum meetings, sprints and so on that works great. What is to achieve next?

Pretty general question (without any real problems identified) that might be hard to answer. But what is your experience after the first months of scrum, what did you do next?


01:40 pm November 5, 2019

What types of things are coming out of the Retrospectives so far? 

I've typically seen new teams quickly discover current organizational / team patterns that prevent them from achieving the Sprint Goal that can be addressed. I usually encourage tackling items that are within the influence of the team initially while building a longer term strategy for tackling larger organizational patterns with help from leadership. 


02:42 pm November 5, 2019

I would focus on continually improving your processes as a whole. You've focused on the structure of the framework but are you doing more to improve? Are you consistently delivering value to your customers? Are you meeting the sprint goal and delivering a DONE increment each sprint? Are you adding in automation? Continuous delivery? Is the team overall growing, not only in their skillset but as a team? I love the excitement that you bring but you have to realize that scrum is MUCH more than just the artifacts and events. 


03:52 am November 6, 2019

Is the team you're standing up a "stealth scrum team?" I ask because this has become common in organizations, especially non-profits, where leadership doesn't want to make their agile intentions known.

One way to move forward is to setup a Community of Practice. This could be in an online web application that supports a discussion forum-like format or it can be regular brown-bag lunch sessions. Make sure that the in-person sessions happen someplace with a webcam so remote team members don't feel left out. Here, you would ask other interested teams (small teams or representatives) to attend and have somebody from your Development Team discuss a topic. Topics like "what worked well," "how their work has improved," and other similar topics. The idea is to "make scrum viral." And please ask the organization to cater the lunch. Nothing fancy but it's a small investment for increased productivity, quality and innovation.


07:15 am November 6, 2019

But, how do we take the next step from this basic level where we have all scrum meetings, sprints and so on that works great. What is to achieve next?

What lessons are being learned from the release of work into production?


01:00 pm November 11, 2019

Hi guys and thank you for your replies (sorry mine is a bit late)!

 

Tony>> The retrospectives have mostly highlighted things that went pretty well. Like decisions we've made, that the team spirit is positive and that we have achieved the sprint goals and so on.

The few things that have not worked have been about communication internally/externallly but especially the former has become much better. Still a bit slow response from the customer which is an impediment though and something we need to improve.

It's a very small team (three developers became only two after a month...) which makes it a little bit hard to come up with tons of positives/negatives on the retrospectives. I'm hoping for a larger team but I don't know what's in the works.

Curtis>> Very good point about value. I guess that our process is alright for now but we should now focus on delivering value to our customer.

We have achieved the sprint goals and we've had a very slim but fully functional increment done since sprint 1. Our customer was impressed by this and liked it a lot. Since then we have just added to the product and always kept it functional.

Yes, skillset is improving but I'm not sure how our three (me included) man team can improve, its a difficult question. Our roles are pretty much cemented but maybe I as a scrum master can be more involved and help the two very skilled developers more in some way? 

Mark>> The organization tries to make profit (and does) and also wants us to be agile, so no problem there. Big support from management.

Ian>> We have not had a production release yet so we will have to wait for those issues until late winter/spring. :)

 


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