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One of my favorite things about Agile and the Scrum framework is that you are encouraged to, and should, constantly inspect and adapt to improve things about the project. So, take a look at all the things done in the previous sprint and how they were done to see if there is some way that the task could be more efficiently completed, or if there’s just a better way for the team of people you’re working with to handle things and work together.
Often times, what will be discovered is that the team would like to make use of the sprint task board differently, or there isn’t a clear focus on how the estimates of remaining tasks effect the sprint burndown tracking chart. You might hear about how impediments to development could have been avoided or handled in a different manner. However, that type of inspection is only going to come from an established Scrum team, one that understands and knows how to operate within the Scrum Framework.
Sometimes, though, you have to inspect what’s happened before you even started the first sprint. Therefore, the most important thing about implementing Scrum is educating all of the people involved right at the beginning, before the first sprint. That doesn’t mean that every person needs to be shipped off to Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training in order to effectively implement Agile and work on a Scrum team. What it does mean is that every person needs to get a basic foundational understanding of the Agile methodology and the Scrum framework. It’s pretty hard to do something right, or at all, if you don’t know how to do it... Unfortunately, a lot of troubled implementations involve people just being told that they’re now on a Scrum team, we’re doing things like this, and be at the daily scrum at 8, thanks. Without the general knowledge of what Scrum is, those people are much more likely to want to fight the change. After all, who likes to make a change to something that they might think is working just fine, or that they’re really comfortable with?
When all of the people involved understand the what and the why of Scrum, it’s easier for them to start to adopt the framework as their own and feel more like a part of the solution and reason for the improvement. Since sending your entire team to CSM training is unrealistic with timing, travel, and costs, I think a better solution could be to bring in a CSM or two to run those training workshops with your team. If you’re planning on implementing Scrum across more teams, eventually, it might also be very helpful to have the CSM run the first couple of sprints while training a new successor to follow as the Scrum Master.
Teach your people how to fish, give them the general knowledge so that they’re primed and ready to hit the ground running and you’ll have more productive and creative sprints from the beginning. You’ll realize real improvement in your new product development by the third or fourth sprint that way, and your team will be that much better for the bit of effort spent on training them!
