Scrum Day [Subscript out of range] – Time for a minor reset, I’m pushing back the Sprint Planning Meeting by a week…

I just finished reading Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) and am now starting on The Enterprise and Scrum.

At this point I’m feeling better than I did yesterday. It’s interesting how having a little bit more of a complete picture helps dispel the fear, uncertainty and doubt. Still I’m going to push back the “official” start of our Scrum’ing. I’m going to push back what I thought was to be our Sprint Planning meeting by a week.

Why?

a) I only scheduled an hour long meeting for the “Sprint Planning Meeting”. Doh! (These are supposed to be time-boxed at 8 hours, 4 for Product Backlog selection, 4 for prep’ing the Sprint Backlog). So yeah, this scope of a meeting needs to be communicated and agreed to.

b) For the project/product I’m starting to Scrum with, I have some ideas for a Product Owner, but I’ll need to talk to them first (obviously).

c) I want to work with the Product Owner (if they are will to accept the position) and flesh out the Product Backlog a little more. Also I want to brief him on Scrum, his role and responsibility, etc.

d) I want to chat with the Team and talk about Scrum some more. Discuss the three roles (Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Team), how we can work together to succeed and what’s in it for them, for our department and our company.

e) I need to learn to let go… I’m very much a Type-A, directive manager (I should have, “Lead, follow or get out of the way” or “Make a decision! Right one, wrong one, but MAKE one!” tattooed on my… err… um… body… somewhere… ;) I don’t, well try not to, micro-manage, but I have been very directive in the tasks, features, dates, etc. Now I have to learn to let go and to empower my Team to self-organize. They are some outstanding people, so I have little doubt that they will be able to do this, but it IS different and a pretty big change…

f) Chat about my ScrumMaster’ing rules (i.e. Don’t be late the the Daily Scrums… MAN I hate when people are late to meetings! That they value their time more than they do the people who make the effort to arrive on time… It’s just fricken rude… But that’s just me… LOL ;)  Also as to work out how we’re going to do our Daily Scrum’s when I’m, or we’re, working remotely.

g) Work with the Dev Leadership to ensure we have a cross functional team (i.e. that QA is part of the team… this is what I want, but our QA is a “shared resource” so may require some horse trading, discussion, and so on).

h) And finally decide if the product I picked for our first Scrum project is the right one… Based on my understanding of intent of Scrum, I’m thinking I may could picked the wrong project. It’s one that needs to be done, that’s important to our users and will provide a good return on investment, but is also not the highest priority, nor the highest ROI.

I picked it because it DOES need to get done, but is also a lower risk project if it fails. Also the team is still new, both to our company and to .Net as well. While they are getting up to speed very quickly, I also thought to use this project as a further tool to help get them up to speed, get us used to working together on the same project, provide a spring board for getting QA integrated into the team, get used to Continuous Integration AND up to speed with Scrum and the new TFS Template.

sigh… I’ll discuss it with the Team and Product Owner(s as the two may have different Owners… maybe) and see where we are.

 

So I think next week will be “interesting”…  lol…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Scrum Day 0 – The Search for ScrumMaster
Scrum Day –1 – Infrastructure Day
Scrum Day -2 - The Decision is Made