Tag Archives: scrum

Scrum Roles & Responsibilities

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There are Three Main “Roles” in a Scrum Team

Scrum is one of the main frameworks that make up Agile as we know it today – but it is not the only framework.

Agile has also expanded in use outside of development teams, and into general knowledge work, design, research, or anywhere else an iterative and incremental approach to delivering value is needed.

The heart of a Scrum Team is the Team.

The Team

The team are traditionally Developers, but today they can be anyone involved in creating the increment of value that the team are delivering. Team members are often “T-shaped”, where they have a broad range of skills and one deep specialty, like a capital letter “T”.

The Product Owner

The Product Owner is responsible for the value the team delivers. This is called the Product Goal. They do this by creating a backlog of usable, customer-valued features or “increments” that the team can deliver, and prioritizing this from highest value to lowest value (sometimes adjusting for effort also). This is called the Product Backlog.

They ensure the Product Backlog is transparent to all and well understood by anyone who needs it.

The Scrum Master

Is the “Servant Leader” – they serve the team by removing blockers (escalating to their network or helping the team problem solve as a neutral third-party facilitator). They also facilitate many of the team ceremonies such as the Daily Stand-up, Sprint Planning and Retrospectives – but they don’t have to if the team is mature enough to do this on their own. They focus on the team’s growth, looking for ways to help them improve in their chosen field (e.g. development, analysis, business value etc.) and in their Agile way of work.

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Five Core Values of a Scrum Team

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The Five Core Values of a Scrum Team

There are five Scrum values that all project team members, including the project manager (Scrum Master), strive to adhere to on a Scrum project.

Core Value 1 – Commitment

Each team member commits to the team, to each other, and to achieving the goal of each sprint.

Core Value 2 – Focus

The team focuses on the task at hand (avoiding the dangers of multi-tasking) and on the goals of the sprint.

Core Value 3 – Openness

The team is open and transparent – they share information freely and ask for help when they need it.

Core Value 4 – Respect

The team respects each other as capable, independent people.

Core Value 5 – Courage

The team has the courage to do the right thing, work through tough problems, ask for help if needed or say when they don’t know.

The Core Values of a Scrum Team

These core values of Scrum help hold a team together and form a contract (like a Team Charter) that creates a solid foundation as you work together towards your goals.

– David McLachlan

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Seven Steps to Leading a Scrum Project

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Seven Steps to Leading a Scrum Project

There are seven steps to leading a Scrum Project.

These are extremely useful to know if you are working on or within a project using Agile or Scrum.

Step 1

The product owner (representing the customer or end user) creates a prioritised list of everything the project might deliver.

This list is called the prioritised product backlog.

Step 2

The team and the Product Owner have a sprint planning meeting. The team decides how much work it can take on in the next sprint.

The team pulls requirements from the prioritized product backlog that it can achieve in the sprint. This work becomes the sprint backlog.

Step 3

The team decides who will do what and creates the task cards in the sprint backlog for the current sprint.

The team will meet each day for a 15-minute meeting, called the daily scrum (also called a stand-up), to share progress updates.

Step 4

The project manager, called the Scrum Master, helps keep the team working toward the sprint goal.

They remove blockers, bring people in to the whole team approach, and facilitate progress.

Step 5

A sprint review happens at the end of each sprint to demonstrate what the team has accomplished to the product owner.

Step 6

After the sprint review the team participates in a sprint retrospective to discuss what did or did not work in the last sprint.

This gives the Scrum Master and the team an opportunity to adjust the processes and work for the next sprint.

Step 7 

The whole process repeats itself by the project team selecting the next chunk of prioritized requirements from the backlog and getting to work in the next sprint.

Implementing Scrum

Implementing Scrum in an organization can be tricky, especially if no one in the organisation or team have done it before.

Show the value of Scrum through the results you get by using it, and more and more people will be interested in adopting the Scrum approach.

– David McLachlan

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Scrum – The Agile Practice Guide

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We’re looking at the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide, from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

What you’ll find is that there are many different Agile and Lean frameworks and ways of describing what are essentially very similar Agile practices. We’ve already looked at the core Agile practices and traditionally you could call yourself an Agile practitioner if you were doing those Agile practices, no matter what framework you were using in an organization. That’s why it’s important to understand what’s underneath these frameworks, and also the names of the frameworks that you might come across in your day-to-day work as an Agile practitioner.

There are a handful of core methods that you’ll definitely see in almost every Agile way of work, and then many auxiliary methods and even “scalable” methods because Agile has made its way out of software development, out of production in general and into the broader organization, into the Project Management Office and across the Enterprise as well. So we’re going to start with the core methods and the first one we’re going to look at is Scrum.

The Core Agile Framework of Scrum

Scrum is a single team framework for managing product development. In a project, we’re creating a product for a customer – something that delivers value for our customer. Now, we’ve already looked at this in the core Agile practice of the whole team approach, where it really matches up to what a scrum team consists of.

First we’ve got the Product Owner. The Product Owner represents the customer – they are responsible for maximizing the value of the product. The Product Owner represents the customer or represents the business and they help “groom the backlog of work” through the user stories, usually on a Kanban board (which we will see as well). In other words they put that work, in the form of user stories, into prioritization.

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