Self-organized Teams in Scrum

Self-organized Teams in Scrum

It is the people who develop great products or service and not the Scrum or any other production technique. Scrum requires the teams to be motivated, empowered and self-organized. Self-motivated employees accept the responsibility and do not wait for the superiors or managers to delegate or and assign the tasks. Hence they deliver greater value when the teams are self-organized.

Scrum teams prefer “Servant leadership” style of management style where in the leader or the Scrum Master facilitates the work and removes the impediments rather than dominating and closely observing and controlling the Scrum Team functionality.

The chief goals of self-organized Scrum teams are as follows:

Following are the goals of self-organized teams discussed in the SBOK.

   Understand the Project Vision and why the project delivers value to the organization. This emphasizes the need to superior organized goals than individual goals.

   Estimate User Stories during the Approve, Estimate, and Commit User Stories process and assign
tasks to themselves during the Create Sprint Backlog process. This helps them in timely delivery of the projects with minimum errors if not completely error free and in turns the satisfied customers.

   Create tasks independently during the Create Tasks process. Team members take the responsibility of dividing the entire project into tasks which are later moved into sprints.

   Apply and leverage their expertise from being a cross-functional team to work on the tasks during the Create Deliverables process. The team has members from different areas of expertise and hence bring the blend of skills required to develop the deliverables.

   Deliver tangible results which are accepted by the customer and other stakeholders during the Demonstrate and Validate Sprint process.

   Resolve individual problems together by addressing them during Daily Standup Meetings. These meetings help the scrum master to identify the difficulty faced by the team members.

   Clarify any discrepancies or doubts and be open to learning new things. They share their experiences and are socializing quickly and hence communication is established quickly within the team members.

   Upgrade the knowledge and skills on a continuous basis through regular interactions within the team.

   Maintain stability of team members throughout the duration of the project by not changing members, unless unavoidable. 

Visit my other blogs too:-http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/10/what-is-agile.html
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Product Backlog Prioritization

The Scrum aims at delivering maximum business value in a minimum time span. 

One of the most effective tools for delivering maximum value in the short duration of time is prioritization. Scrum, uses Value-based Prioritization as one of the core principles that drives the structure and functionality of the entire Scrum framework-it helps projects benefit through adaptability and iterative development of the product or service. More significantly, Scrum aims at delivering a valuable product or service to the customer on an early and continuous basis.

While prioritizing, following three factors are considered:

1.      Value

2.      Risk or uncertainty

3.      Dependencies

Thus prioritization results in deliverables that satisfies the requirements of the customer with the objective of delivering the maximum business value in the least amount of time. During prioritization risks and various performance issues will be closely analyzed, giving an early visibility regarding various problem areas which would surface later in the project.

The Product Owner is responsible for getting the Product Backlog ready and prioritizing the items in the Product Backlog. Once the Product Owner has received the business requirements from the customer and written these down in the form of workable User Stories, he needs to work with the customer to understand which all requirements are of maximum business value and needs to be accomplished first. Such user stories would take the top spot (in terms of priority) in the product backlog. The Product Backlog items should be ordered in such a way that the requirements with maximum business value would be completed first. Sometimes, a customer may insist all User Stories to be of high priority. While this might be true, even a list of high-priority User Stories needs to be prioritized within the list itself. The Scrum Master and the development team will use the Product Backlog as the basis for planning the Sprints based on the priority of the items listed. The Scrum Team also informs the Product Owner about any dependencies that arise out of implementation. These dependencies must be taken into account during prioritization. Dependencies limit the freedom to prioritize the product backlog and therefore dependencies should be sorted out wherever possible.

You can also visit my other posts:-

http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/11/agile-in-product-management.html

http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/10/major-responsibilities-of-product-owner.html

Agile in Product Management

Introduction to agile

It is often seen that Agile has been implemented successfully in different projects. But when it comes to Product Management or NPD (New Product Development), many people get sceptical regarding implementation of Agile. Now it has to be understood that Agile is not a methodology which can be used in a cookie cutter way across any organization. A lot of tweaking and customization is required to make it work. So, in product management, a proper assessment is required to see if Agile implementation will improve performance or not.

Here also, we need to see if the following two criteria are being fulfilled or not:

1.       Requirement Volatility : It is important to identify the volatility of requirements and whether working in Sprint will actually improve customer satisfaction, reduce uncertainty and help PM teams become more productive or not. If requirements are fixed in sand and are not dynamic in nature, it will not make any marked improvement even if the teams work in sprint. Also, Agile Product Life Cycle Management involves a lot of new learning, so it needs to be checked if the team will be comfortable in this transition or not.

2.       Frequent customer Interaction: External customers are big stakeholders in any Agile effort. In many product management scenarios, we have seen that customers just give their specifications and just go away for months and months. And finally when they come back for the product, it is completely different from what they expected, because market dynamics change and the expectations change as well. So the biggest benefit is actually to the customers themselves, and this is what the PM team should explain in details to the customers so as to get their buy in. Without their pro-active support, it will not be possible to implement Agile in any way.

If we are talking about New Product Development, then Agile actually becomes even more crucial and important.  

That is because neither the customers nor the PM team has any benchmark to follow. So, frequent discussions and brain storming sessions followed by change in requirements or prototypes will be mandatory for successful NPD. So, it is important to realize that Agile can be implemented successfully in Product Management as well, provided it is understood properly and used in the proper context. Also, management buy in and customer buy in are important components in this scenario, and a good AGILE coach will also be very beneficial.

My Other write ups-

http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/10/major-responsibilities-of-product-owner.html

http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/10/being-effective-product-owner.html

http://scrumsecrets.blogspot.in/2014/10/increase-roi-for-projects-with-scrum.html