Agile coaches and scrum masters are fans of face to face communications. They’re great because we can read nuance, emotion, body language and osmotic communication.
What happens when we can’t do this and end up having a video conference or, worse still, a telephone conference?
How do you overcome analysis paralysis? John Harvey Jones advised: “Ready, Fire, Aim”. In describing the reason he said “I’m more interested in speed than direction. Once you get moving, you can veer and tack. But the important thing is, you’re moving”
This can be aptly applied to scrum implementations. We need a plan and we need to get going. But, how much planning do we need to get a scrum implementation started?
I was working with a team of project managers recently and discussing how scrum works. One of the audience asked me how scrum teams handle third party dependencies. I answered as completely as I could but her response left me temporarily speechless.
The three pillars of empricism are: Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation. Without transparency, your inspection is rendered worthless and any adaptations based on that inspection are flawed. This is basic and obvious. Everyone can understand it. Yet many scrum adoptions suffer because of it.
Why do we make such an obvious and fundamental mistake? Here’s one perspective, and one solution.
When creating a Product Backlog, the Scrum Guide tells us each item should have a Value attribute. How do you calculate Value for a Product Backlog item? Here’s one way.