First Contact in a Rugby Scrum or a Team’s Sprint Zero (0) – A chance for Scrum Masters and Project Managers to Knock the Waterfall or Agile Rust from a Team’s Thought Processes.
In my youth I had the pleasure of playing Rugby, so I can truly say in a Scrum there is a crunching of bones and flexing of bodies. First time assemblies of a new Scrum Agile team are much like the first Rugby Scrum in that it is a unique team of personalities, of different talents and formed from old/new thought process and they sure can collide. The Forming Stage of a new Team is an important first step to truly perform. You have to give them the chance to Form. I use Sprint Zero to get the ball moving.
I like to use Sprint Zero (0) much like school teachers have to use the 1 week of school to get their students back into study mode, in so much as, I use Sprint 0 to get teams and people back into the Agile mindset. Have the team:
1) In the 1 Week start the Daily Standups (Just general stuff, even if it includes personnel forms and user access requests)
2) Build their work environment and have them act as Product Owner, since they are the customer of their environment.
3) Build a Backlog of User Stories for their work environment
- Brainstorm
- Groom
- Get into the practice of writing user stories
- Learn to split User Stories into smaller stories
- Sizing
- Planning Poker
- Ranking
4) Hold a Sprint Planning Session
- Picking User Stories to work
- Brainstorming Tasks for each User Story
5) During Sprint
- Daily Scrum have them pick stuff off the board and move it around as they talk to the 3 questions
- Limit the Work in Progress, so they can learn to get things done (people try to work too many things at once).
- Make sure as a team people review each other’s work, so as a team can declare it done before bringing in the customer. This way all learn the team is responsible for each other’s quality of work. If it fails, then all own it.
6) Hold a Sprint Review
- Use it to teach that they can be wrong and still survive.
7) Hold a Sprint Retrospective
- Get the team to start improving their processes early and talk out their rusty spots.
Some things a project manager/ scrum master can do:
1) Get the Team into the Daily Scrum mind set within the first week: What did you do yesterday, Plans for Today and Obstacles.
- Keep reminding them to keep it brief.
- Get the team in the habit of documenting what they accomplished at the end of the business day
- Get them in the habit of planning their day
2) Again, let the team create User Stories, so they now play the Role of Product Owner. It allows them to understand the amount of work there is to be a good Product Owner
3) Relearning that it is ok to be wrong – so many people want to get things exactly correct (the nature of technical people), so they want too much time on estimating and a solution maybe quick time box activities.
- Quick sizing activities: Small, Medium, Large, Ex-Large for Stories, don’t let them debate the size go with the 1 or 2 round average results
- Quick Story Point generation: Again quick games of planning poker and pick the average scores by 1 or 2 round
4) Work with Product Owners, the team and yourself to groom the User Stories that team will be working in the next Sprint.
So many times I see how quickly new teams, forget the concepts of:
1) Breaking User Stories into small achievable products,
2) The Simplicity, yet difficult, job of getting things done by working one or two things at a time
3) Not jumping around from task to task (the most important one)
Lastly Use the Information Radiators to help focus people on what to do next and see things get Done!
The pictures I posted are from a recent new team kickoff. To save my fingers from writing out user stories and tasks I used an agile software program, Excel and Word to print out labels which then I attach the laser label to yellow stickies. I use smaller stickies and labels for tasks. I use the software to help store user story artifacts.
Cheers and Have Fun.
