Scrum, Let’s party!

Compared to traditional project management Scrum has quite high RPM, that’s plenty of meetings.

Traditional projects have usually a single weekly meeting, sometimes two. In Scrum, you have at least five a week. Scary? If you already practice Management-By-Walking-Around (MBWA), you will see the benefits.

Grooming – This is when estimation (and Scrum poker) of the backlog happens. Not tied directly to the two-week cycle, can happen any time, but should before planning. You estimate a bunch of tasks on top of the backlog and you are ready for planning.

Planning – The team decides, which tasks they will take into the sprint. It is crucial that it is the team since the guys and girls are committing to deliver and they know best the capacity. Remember the Product owner only makes sure that the backlog is ordered.

Review – At the end of sprint, the stakeholders including the team do the review of what has been delivered. The incremental process makes sure you often confirm that the product is being developed in the right direction. You can see it as a customer acceptance part of the cycle.

Retrospective – is rather internal meeting. The team together with the Product owner and Scrum Master discuss what was good and eventually how improve the process. This is a valuable input for the scrum master to remove obstacles that are stopping the team from the delivery.

Standup – A rapid, rather internal daily status meeting. Each team member shares what he or she did, what is planned and if there are any issues to solve. Shouldn’t be longer than 15 minutes. If it starts to be long it is not a standup any more. Issue solving meetings should be planned at another time.