Don't forget to groom your story wall


One of the most common practices in Agile is the daily stand-up or scrum. The term scrum, adopted from the game of rugby, is a daily opportunity for team members to unite and share:
-         what they did yesterday,
-         what they’ll do today, and
-         what is blocking them from delivering value to their customers.

The reason it is also called a stand-up is because the participants stand. Usually taking 10-15 minutes, this gathering forces participants to stand and encourages them to be brief and provide only relevant information for their team.

In most circumstances, the standup works well. However there can be times when the team members start to discuss trivial or irrelevant matters about what they did or will do. There can be various reasons for this, including perhaps a self-induced pressure to say something rather than nothing, or to be viewed as “contributing alot by speaking alot”.

While the scrum master or iteration manager (facilitator of the daily stand-up/scrum) can remind team members to keep updates relevant, another solution is to occasionally ‘groom the story wall’. In this technique, rather than allowing everyone to answer the above three (3) questions, the scrum master simply points to each story card with the status of In Progress or Sign-off/UAT, and specifically asks the card assignee(s) for an update and any blockers on that card. This practice keeps the team focused and highlights any cards that may have stalled while In Progress or Sign-off/UAT. I’ve found this technique useful when deployed unannounced at least once per week. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Employing value streams in Enterprise Service Management

Image
Introduction Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the technical extension of pre-existing Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) to other areas of an enterprise (e.g. Corporate or Shared Services). Successful ESM balances efficiencies gained from employing standardised process management, tooling and reporting with the nuances of organisational capabilities such as Finance, HR, Facilities and so forth. ESM leverages the industry proven service management concepts from ITSM that have been available for more than 20 years. Further to this, ESM operations implement similar concepts as ITSM including a service desk for 1st level support, end to end process management, request/issue management software, self-service knowledge bases and more recently chatbots and AI. Value streams are born from Lean manufacturing and comprise of a series of steps an organisation undertakes to create and deliver value to customers, typically in the forms of products and services. In the IT co
Read more

Using the Lean Canvas for an IT solution proof of concept

Image
I was assisting a client with sourcing some new IT solutions. For one particular IT need, the client had shortlisted a potential solution with a trusted vendor but they needed to explore the potential solution further to understand its capabilities in more detail. They were unclear as to whether they should directly source with this vendor or go to the wider market (with a Request for Proposal (RFP)) to address this particular need. Further to this, it was unclear how long this project would run for so it was important to understand the time and effort that may be involved without consuming too many resources.  The client was seeking to employ a specific approach for this potential solution, where a “fail fast” lean Proof of Concept (PoC) would be conducted to rapidly test whether the potential solution was fit for purpose without spending unnecessary time and effort required to conduct a RFP. To start, we confirmed the following principles to guide the PoC: Do not develop
Read more

Improving your IT service delivery and operations with ChatOps

Image
Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. In response, IT leaders are seeking to leverage technologies and delivery models such as cloud, infrastructure as code, Continuous Delivery (CD), Big Data and IT Process Automation.  This intersection of contemporary concepts is deriving new IT delivery patterns which are impacting on traditional IT service management (ITSM). From my recent experiences working with Australian enterprise-sized IT organisations, it is my view that ITSM & Operations teams are not keeping pace with their peers in application development to meet current business demands. ITSM and Operations cannot remain effective and efficient if the teams continue to work in disjointed practices that are underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. To remedy this situation, ITSM & Operations teams need
Read more