Before SPRINTING !

Are you ready for sprinting?......

SCRUM is built around 'MOTIVATED' individuals. So if the team is not enthusiastic, dont even start 'SCRUM'. Fail fast!

Enabling SCRUM @ Kochi

From our experience, we are able to transition a 10 member team to SCRUM in just 5 days time - which include training and working along with teams in implementing the SCRUM best practices.

Congratulations Antony Benito - Certified Scrum Master

Congratulations to my dear team mate Antony Benito for becoming a CSM. Now we have two certified and experienced scrum masters to serve our clients better. Congratulations Antony. Keep up the good work.

It is wonderful - when the team SCRUM !

# 11 Implementing Agile

Sprint planning meeting agenda

Total hours : 8

Sprint start date : ?????? End Date : ??????

Objective of the meeting

• To agree and commit to a set of features that will be 'done' during the sprint
• To agree on the demo date, time, participants and the acceptance criteria
• To estimate the story points for the features agreed upon
• To estimate the activity level effort requirements to complete the agreed upon features
• To agree on the daily scrum (stand up) meeting place and time
• To set the tracking board
  
  First half
  
  1) The scrum master explains the agenda for the meeting
  
  2) The product owner shares the 'theme' of the sprint to the team
  
  3) The product owner shares his/her priority of the features with the team
  
  4) Discussion time on the features (reference material - user stories)
  
  5) Derive the points for the features
  
  6) Lock in the features for the sprint
  
  Second half
  
  1) Decompose the features into activities
  
  2) Estimate the approximate effort required to complete the tasks
  
  3) Set the tracking board for the sprint
  
  4) Decide the daily stand up (scrum) meeting time and place
  
  5) Decide the demo date

#10 Implementing Agile

Reality Check - Sprint-0

The team is selected, the scrum master is identified, scrum training is provided to the team, product owner has explained the 'product vision' to the team and every one is ready to get into the first sprint. Are we really ready?. It is a good time to do a reality check with the team. Here is the questionnaire;

1) Do I really understand the product vision?. Do I need further clarity on this?

2) Do I understand the scrum framework?. Do I need further clarity on this?

3) Do I understand the technology to be used in the project?. Do I need any formal training?

4) Do I have the facilities and equipment to do my work properly?

5) Do I understand the definition of 'done' within this sprint?

6) Am I clear about my responsibilities within the sprint?. Do I need further clarity?

7) Can I commit to this sprint?. Will other known priorities affect my availability to this sprint?

8) If other priorities are going to affect the availability, please mention;

8.a) How many hours / day I will be available to the sprint?

8.b) Which are the hours I will be available to the sprint?

If the scrum master can get this filled up by all the team members including himself, the will be able to take care of lots of known unknowns :-)

#7 Implementing agile

Right attitude

" Obstacles are the things we see, when we take our eyes off the target "

Agile is all about risk taking, and making things happen. Making this happen in an offshore / out sourced environment is quite challenging, as the work environment is not conducive for risk taking. There is no silver bullet to achieve this. The team leader, the team and the HR should work on this together.

# 6 Implementing Agile

How elaborate the user stories should be?

While writing the user stories, one will always get into a dilema on 'How detailed, the user stories should be?". There is no silver bullet answer to this. The user stories should be estimatable. The user stories should contain enough information, so that one can estimate it. If the detailing is less, the conversations will be higher, which is actually encouraged in agile circles. This is perfectly allright, if the product owner has the details to provide, when the conversations happen. If tyhe product owner gets struck at this stage, without answers to the queries, then that can become a bottle neck for the project progress. If the degree of clarity of features is lower with the product owner, then it is a good idea to expand the user stories as detailed as possible. This will make the product owner think through and prioritize features.

In an off shored environment, it is always better to have detailed user stories for the initial sprints, till the team members and the product owner gets a hang of it. During the later sprints, once the product owner's and the team members understanding are in sync, then the user stories can become leaner.

#5 Implementing Agile

Product backlog readiness

Product backlog is the list of feature wish list, maintained by the product owner. These are all just reminders to the features to be developed. While implementing agile, some of the key questions to be addressed include;

1) How much of the product backlog should be available, before planning the first sprint?

• All the key (must have) features should be identified
• All the features, that has an impact on the architecture should be identified

#4 Implementing Agile

Team orientation

" Dont forget to orient your team to the agile values, principle and method."

#3 Implementing Agile

Cultural synchronization

Very often we get to work in teams where multiple cutures are involved, which if not understood well can lead to politics and improper teaming. There could be 'Iam Ok, You are not OK', 'I am Ok, You are Ok', 'I am not Ok, You are Ok' and 'I am not Ok, You are not OK' attitudes. This need not be at individual levels. It can exist at My culture Vs Your culture, My country Vs Your country, 'My office Vs Your office', 'My team Vs Your team' levels. To deliver as a team, all of us need to have 'I am Ok, You are Ok', 'My Culture is Ok, Your culture is Ok', 'My country is Ok, Your country is also fine' attitude. Team socializing is a must to break the ice, and it has to be a continuous process. In my view, there should be atleast one celebration during every sprint....and it has to happen naturally - not as a programmed activity. Cut loose and celebrate, whenever there is an opportunity...or rather create those opportunities to celebrate :-)

#2 Implementing agile

Like any other project management methodology, proactive stakeholder management is key to the success of all agile projects. After identifying all the stakeholders, they can be categorized into the following groups;

• High power - High interest
• High power - Low interest
• Low power - High interest
• Low power - Low interest

Once this stakeholder identification is done, then it is easy to identify the key risks. Dont think that agile project management is risk free. The political, technical, structural, process and cultural risks have to be managed proactively to implement agile project management. Everything starts with stakeholder identification, categorization and management.

#1 Implementing agile

First of all, one must start with the definition of a project; every project has a definite start and end date, are performed by people, constrained by limited resources, delivers unique products or services at the end. I took it from PMBOK, because it fits in well. In an outsourced environment, the typical project durations can be between 1 day to => 6 months. Here the million dollar question is "What is a project?".

In agile, if we have to make some meaning out of a sprint, it has to be atleast 1 week duration "5 working days". This will give some room for "project management". The definition of a project in an outsourced environment should be;

" Any meningful work (cohesive set of activities), which can deliver value and will take atleast 5 working days or more to complete by a team"

Trying to manage individual activities (cycle time 8 hours), is an over kill. If it is an exception, it can be managed by including it as an unplanned activity in the current sprint. If majority of the work comprises of discrete activities which need less than 1 day to complete, it is better to manage them using a task sheet.

SCRUM at John Deere, Pune

Where are you in agile? WAYINAGILE

I dont have any profound ideas of developing another agile capability maturity model, becuase I personally believe in the need for 'capability immaturity', which gives freedom to innovate and experiment, yet we need a repeatable system in place for organizations to exploit the power of agile in it's entirity. From my consulting assignments, this is the pattern I am seeing with most of the organizations, when they go for agile.

At level-0 , everything is adhoc

At level-1 , some agile practices are implemented (most popular is the stand up meetings)

At level-2, all the agile management practices are implemented (product backlog, sprint planning, daily stand ups, demo meetings, velocity calculations, lessons learned, user stories, story points)

At level-3, the focus is on adopting the engineering practices (build automation, test automation, coding standards, refactoring, code reviews, pair programming)

At level-4, the emphasis is on aligning the H.R practices with the agile values and principles

SCRUM training at EMC, Bangalore

Just completed a two day workshop 'Agile project management using SCRUM' at EMC, Bangalore.

Agile project management using scrum - workshop

Agile project management using SCRUM – workshop structure

Day -1

1) Overview - Projects? Nature of Projects.Discusses different types of projects, their characteristics, when to go agile and when not to go agile.

2) Overview - PDCA Vs PDSA (How the conventional project management concepts and the agile methods compliment each other?) .Discusses the synergy between the conventional project management wisdom and agile methods. While the conventional wisdom is valid for planning at a macro level (project, release), agile is the way to go during execution and tracking. Demonstration with an exercise.


3) Let us develop a feature list (scope will be given) and estimate the effort required (work in teams) . Using conventional wisdom, estimate the effort required for the scope given – exercise

4) Overview - SCRUM framework
The SCRUM framework is explained including Agile manifesto, values, scrum principles, product backlog, sprint planning meeting, sprint board, burn down chart, scrum meeting, product demo, lessons learned, work volunteering, product owner roles, scrum master roles, team member roles.

5) Teach product backlog
In-depth discussion on product backlog, feature prioritization risk driven Vs value driven.
Exercise – develop a product backlog

6) Teach agile project planning
In-depth discussion on how to plan at the project level, release level and sprint level.

7) Teach User stories and story points
Exercise – Expand the key features in the product backlog in consideration to user stories.

8) Teach Sprint velocity calculations. Exercise on sprint velocity calculations

9) Teach sprint planning meeting. Exercise on sprint planning meeting

10) Teach daily scrum meeting. Exercise on daily scrum meeting

11) Teach sprint review meeting. Exercise on sprint review meeting

Day – 2

12) Mock project

12.1) Perform sprint planning meeting
12.2) Develop the sprint board and the design board
12.3) Perform daily scrum meetings

12.4) Perform sprint review meetings

13) Experience sharing on ‘Challenges while implementing’

14) Experience sharing on ‘Scaling scrum across multi location teams’

15) Discussion of tools and demo

16) Lets plan your projects ( The participants will bring in their cases), Lets do it the scrum way)

17) Discussion on the implementation strategy

Duration of the program 2 days

Requirements
· Participants will be grouped into teams of 5
· Maintaining the time lines is very important
· Each team will be provided with a white board or a flip chart and yellow post its large and small sizes + marker pens
· Each team will have access to the internet
· Ideal audience size is 15 persons
Profile and contact details of the instructor at www.abrachan.com

Agile project management using SCRUM @ AOL

We had this 'Agile project management using SCRUM' workshop at AOL, Bangalore. It was really exciting!.

Scrum @ Zylog, Chennai

PMRI, conducted a two day workshop "Agile Project Management Using SCRUM" workshop at Chennai on the 9th and 10th of Jan,2009, which was attended by around 30 managers from Zylog and we had a gala time during the workshop. During the workshop, the participants mastered the right scrum skills.

SCRUM @ Zylog Chennai