Essential Scrum

1. The Initiation Sprint: A Lean Approach to Project Kickoff

"The Initiation Sprint contains activities and exercises that are designed to address the three initiation dimensions mentioned above (Product, Process, and People)."

Efficient project initiation. The Initiation Sprint is a three-week period of intensive collaboration designed to kickstart Agile projects. It focuses on three core dimensions:

• Product: Defining the customer problem, business goals, and solution vision
• Process: Establishing how the team will work together and deliver value
• People: Understanding team dynamics, strengths, and working styles

This approach balances the need for preparation with Agile principles, avoiding lengthy planning phases while ensuring alignment on project direction. The Sprint includes activities such as defining success criteria, mapping current and future states, and developing initial product backlogs.

2. Setting the Stage: Assessing Project Context and Preparing for Success

"No two organizations are the same, and the history, people dynamics, complexity and many other nuances of a team and organization should play a big role in determining how you initiate the project."

Context is crucial. Before diving into the Initiation Sprint, it's essential to understand the project's context:

• People: Identify key stakeholders, their roles, motivations, and past project experiences
• Current state: Analyze existing customer research, process maps, and technical assessments
• Future vision: Review any previous discovery or visioning work
• Organizational background: Assess Agile maturity, culture, and past project lessons

This assessment helps tailor the Initiation Sprint to the specific needs of the organization and project. It ensures that existing work is leveraged and that potential challenges are identified early.

3. Analyzing the Current State: Customer Journey, Business Process, and Architecture

"To better understand how your customers interact with your existing product, and to envision how to improve their experience, work with your team to collaboratively develop current-state (as-is) customer journeys."

Understand the baseline. Analyzing the current state involves three key components:

1. Customer journey mapping: Visualize how customers currently interact with the product
2. End-to-end business process mapping: Document internal processes for delivering value
3. Current architecture analysis: Understand existing system components and interactions

These activities help identify pain points, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. They provide a shared understanding of the starting point for the project and inform the design of future solutions.

4. Envisioning the Future: Designing the Minimum Marketable Product (MMP)

"The Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) is the smallest piece of functionality that can be delivered that has value to the customer and the business and provides us with valuable feedback about whether we're building the right functionality and also whether we are building it right."

Focus on minimal viability. The MMP represents the first increment of the product to be released:

• Smallest set of features that deliver value to customers and the business
• Designed to gather early feedback and validate assumptions
• Balances the need for speed with delivering a marketable product

To design the MMP:

• Use the 7 Product Dimensions model to identify high-value options
• Create wireframes or prototypes for user testing and feedback
• Iterate based on user input to refine the MMP design

5. Breaking Down the Vision: From Epics to User Stories

"Epics are work blocks with objectives and measurable results, addressing pain points or gaps. The narrative/text of an Epic is short, simple, and describes—in the customer's own language—something that the customer wants or needs."

Decompose for delivery. Breaking down the product vision into manageable pieces involves:

1. Identifying Epics: Large, high-level pieces of functionality
2. Decomposing Epics into user stories: Smaller, implementable features
3. Estimating and prioritizing: Assess effort and business value for each story

This process helps translate the conceptual vision into concrete, actionable work items. It enables the team to start planning their development efforts and provides a basis for release planning.

6. Planning for Success: Release Planning and Risk Management

"Mapping high-level user stories to Sprints or months, after roughly calculating the team's expected capacity (the amount of work the team is expected to be able to take in within a specific timeframe) and the user-story effort estimates calculated earlier, could provide a rough answer to the question of whether the MMP plan is realistic."

Strategic planning. Release planning involves:

• Mapping user stories to Sprints or months
• Estimating team capacity and story effort
• Balancing MMP scope with realistic timelines

Risk management is equally crucial:

• Identify potential risks across customer, business, technology, and team dimensions
• Assess likelihood and impact of risks
• Develop mitigation strategies for high-priority risks

These activities help set realistic expectations and prepare the team for potential challenges.

7. Fostering Collaboration: Developing Team Working Agreements and Ways of Working

"Filling in the Team Working Agreement Canvas together is a great exercise to help forge a team identity."

Build team cohesion. Establishing clear working agreements and ways of working is crucial for team success:

• Develop a team identity: Choose a team name and motto
• Define team mission and values
• Identify individual and collective strengths and growth opportunities
• Establish norms for communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution
• Agree on Agile practices and ceremonies to follow

These agreements help create a shared understanding of how the team will work together, fostering collaboration and setting the foundation for a high-performing Agile team.

Last updated: August 11, 2024