Etiket: Product Owner

How to handle a failed Sprint and how to avoid it ?

Let’s imagine a typical Sprint of 2 weeks duration. If the team is delivering software continuously since more than a year it means that the team had run around 26 Sprints past year. Do you think it is feasible that each and every Sprint has been finalized with success? Obviously, it is not surprising that a number of Sprints fail to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Well, even though it’s not the best scenario, a mature Scrum team is supposed to manage mentally and emotionally the consequences of a failed Sprint.

Every professional aims to be successful at personal level. Similarly, everybody enjoys  being part of a winning, successful team. Nevertheless, it is very likely that a Sprint could not achieve the targeted Sprint goal and fails due to several reasons such as bad planning, dependencies, challenging Sprint goals, changing scope etc.

Okumaya devam et “How to handle a failed Sprint and how to avoid it ?”

Why is Refinement key for effective Sprint Planning ?

As a best practice, I organize Refinement meetings every second week of our 2 weeks long Sprints. This is really key in order to run an effective Sprint Planning event.

I prefer to use Refinement but not Grooming as the latter has a recent negative meaning.

At the invitation I send to the team for Refinement event, I briefly mention about the PBI that we will talk about. These are mostly the items those have the highest priority  and have not been yet estimated.  Refinement sessions could potentially get postponed if the team is working intensely to accomplish the Sprint Goal and short in time. That’s why it’s a good practise to schedule it to the very beginning of the second week in order not to jeopardize achieving the Sprint Goal.

Okumaya devam et “Why is Refinement key for effective Sprint Planning ?”

How do you feel about your Scrum Board?

Every single day, like any other Scrum team in the world, we spend 15 minutes (max) in front of our Scrum board for the Daily Stand-up event. On behalf of the team, I’m confident to share that we really like and enjoy our Scrum board! Here is why;

  • We designed it ourselves. More precisely,  Projera, the company who is coaching Turkcell during the agile transformation process, proposed a few draft layouts to give us an insight. Following that, we, as a team, gave the team a funny name (Maraba Televole)  then designed the logo and the board as well as the layout indicating the various stages of a typical Sprint (PBL, SBL, In Progress, Done, Live, Performance etc. )

Okumaya devam et “How do you feel about your Scrum Board?”

Who should be your product owner?

Who should be your product owner ? Let’s assume that your organisation didn’t build Scrum teams yet. Should be the ideal product owner the legacy Business Product Manager or Technical Product Manager ?

I think I’ve hit to the million dollar question, right? In many organisations which are going through an agile transformation and building brand-new Scrum teams, this might be a question causing long discussions. At least, this is my feeling based on my experience in my company, Turkcell. Don’t get me wrong, I really think that this is a healthy discussion and the right decision changes according to the organization’s culture, industry the company is competing in, the size of the company, the management structure and even to the potential PO candidates, among many others.

Okumaya devam et “Who should be your product owner?”

My favourite Scrum event: Sprint Retrospective

This week, 6th of February Tuesday was World Retrospective Day. I’m quoting from the website:

World Retrospective Day is a volunteer-based, globally coordinated effort to share in the power of retrospectives.

People from different countries around the globe organized and participacted in order to celebrate it.

That’s why I thought that it would be a good idea to write a down a blog post about how our team performs it, perhaps the most fruitful event of Scrum framework.

First of all, this is an entirely internal event lead by the Scrum Master closed to any stakeholders . Typically, we organize it just after the Sprint review scheduled for 2 hours (we run 2 weeks long Sprints). At the very beginning, we have a quick chat about the past Sprint followed by the D.A.K.I. session. DAKI is the abbreviation for:

  • Drop
  • Add
  • Keep
  • Improve

Here below you can see the output of our last Retro session.                                                            

Okumaya devam et “My favourite Scrum event: Sprint Retrospective”