„If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.“ – Salil Jha
Imagine this situation: you came to the office and started your working day. Tasks are coming, meetings are (in most cases) boring, you have a weekly or monthly schedule and reports, but still something is missing.
Having Scrum in your organization is a fresh and currently a very interesting change. Or you don’t think that? But, if your organization finds a lot of benefits of the Scrum, you’ll be definitely surprised by these interesting facts about Scrum:
#1 Why standups? Really standing or…?
Someone would say those daily standup meetings are pointless. But, besides the fact you’re standing during this 15-minute meeting, there’s a good reason for that: researches show that standing between people (and in front of Scrum board) increases productivity by 15%. All team members are moving and trying to give their best in order to accomplish the goals.
#2 Who is grooming in Scrum?
There are hairy things in Scrum, but not with real hair. 😊
Backlog Grooming is an important session where backlog items are reviewed and prioritized by Product Owners, and the rest of the team in order to keep the backlog up-to-date. This step is necessary to ensure that next sprints will contain valuable user stories. Also, by grooming we’re getting a proper Sprint Backlog with important updates and activities.
#3 Review and Retrospective, wait what?
These meetings can sometimes be painful (not that pain!). They’re similar, but with meaningful differences. Sprint review is a meeting at the end of the Sprint where team members are discussing what they did the best, good or terrible (yeah, terrible). Immediately after the Review comes the Retrospective – the long meeting about what went well and wrong during the Sprint and what can be improved in the next one. And yes – both events are crucial in understanding why Scrum helps teams and organizations across the globe.
#4 You’re confused with self-organizing and cross-functional moments?
This actually isn’t so confusing because cross-functional teams must be self-organizing during the whole Sprint. Cross-functional teams are group of people from different areas of the company – we have for example specialists in sales, customer care, marketing and IT. On the other hand, self-organizing team doesn’t wait for the managers to organize, identify and manage all tasks that are required. They’re doing that on their own.
And look for these amazing guys, how they handle their Daily meetings:
So tell us: what can you improve while you’re doing Scrum? Are you interested enough in understanding why things are functioning in this way? Higher productivity and higher quality are just small parts of the benefits that this framework includes and we hope that Scrum gives you the best performances for you and your teamsters.