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SCRUM

I have found at a lot of organisations the morning stand-up is just a box-ticking exercise for the project manager and very little is actually achieved.

Having a project manager is a box ticking exercise for some other senior manager, and very little is actually achieved.
 
yeah if done properly the SCRUM meeting (in my book) should be short and sharp.

If a team member is really struggling take it off line and do it after but it should just be

1) Are you up to where you should be and so are we still on for target date of x?

2) What are you doing today to hit target of x

3) What is stopping you hitting target of x

4) OK go hit target x.
 
yeah if done properly the SCRUM meeting (in my book) should be short and sharp.

If a team member is really struggling take it off line and do it after but it should just be

1) Are you up to where you should be and so are we still on for target date of x?

2) What are you doing today to hit target of x

3) What is stopping you hitting target of x

4) OK go hit target x.

5) Don't get captured.
 
I'm an erstwhile Agile coach these days. I'm running several concurrent scrums at a City based client.

Scrum has very few rules which not surprisingly makes it very difficult to implement well. Nearly everyone is running "Scrum but....." rather than Scrum.

What people forget about standups is that you are not reporting to anyone - you are making a commitment to the rest of the team as to what you are going to complete today and whether your commitment to the team regarding yesterday's work was successful. I will pull up developers if I feel they are reporting to me rather than to the team as a whole.

The whole Scrum ethos is based on the core set of values so if you're not promoting those you're just going through the motions.

Sorry about the serious post in General and it's just my 2p worth.
 
The reason scrum is popular is because it actually gets things done.

It gets things done because it makes people accountable for their portion of the project.

It also means you can go round your dev, test, rework cycles more quickly and so get more testing done and therefore get the product to market in the least possible time.

It's just a shame it often comes at the end of two years worth of funking about gathering and refining requirements when if you had taken your 80% requirements and done a Beta you would have go to that point a lot earlier.

Ho Hum
 

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