There is an argument, and an effective one, that all projects should be broken down into smaller 1 – 4 week mini-projects and executed through a technique called Scrum resulting in high quality projects developed by in-communication IT teams. This is known as Agile Software Development
By breaking a project down into one to four-week mini projects, ignoring the corporate hierarchy and downloading the responsibility for tasks and how they executed to the team members you encourage people to organize themselves, plan tasks and execute daily. Holding loosely organized stand-up daily meetings, called Scrums, help to keep everyone working together and enable the process.
Scrum immediately addresses and solves the project management problem of lack of communication between project team-members, managers and sponsors. It also helps to give contextual, multi-dimensional, background technical information for all members of the team, alleviates over planning, encourages responsiveness and reduces big traditional documentation phases.
The Rules of Stand Up
- The first rule of Stand Up is, you do not talk while someone else is talking.
- The second rule of Stand Up is, you DO NOT talk while someone else is talking.
- You talk fast and you keep it moving fast.
- Tell us what you did yesterday.
- Tell us what you FAILED to do yesterday.
- Tell us what you will do today.
- Tell us who is BLOCKING you today.
- If this is your first day at Stand Up, you have to talk.
While the benefits of this model are known it is not without controversy. Problem such as elevated team member stress levels; not everyone is cut out for this type of team. Leaders known as Scrum masters are required and they must be strong. The short, stand up meeting at the beginning of the day can be a real de-motivator or degrade into detail and the Scrum Master needs to keep it on track. Some think that Agile/Scrum actually reduces responsibility by letting people move things that are tough into the backlog while grabbing easier to do tasks. Traditional project management methods like waterfall rely heavily on business process for successful projects while Agile/Scrum doesn’t, potentially affecting other parts of the business and the quality of the work.
Tips for Scrum Stand-up
- Meet daily at the same time
- All members of the team stand, including those that are on video conference
- Everyone contributes the following:
- What did they do yesterday
- What are they doing today
- Are there any roadblocks
- The Scrum Master has a number of responsibilities:
- Assembling the tasks for the project
- Protects the team from over committing itself
- Protects the team from complacency
- Protects the team from overly ambitions product managers
- Ensures that everyone contributes
- Manage meeting – keep everyone on task, focused, and out of the details.
- Update the project
- Escalates backlogged items
TeamHeadquarters helps with Agile/Scrum
Many users of TeamHeadquarters, Integrated Helpdesk and Project Management software, use it to manage their Agile/Scrum projects. By creating projects with tasks Scrum Masters and project managers can quickly add all the known tasks and any new tasks and assign durations to them.
Once the tasks are known, member of the team can self-assign (grab) tasks and execute them. Roadblocks and forays into the business are handled through tickets. Tickets can be added and assigned to people, teams or to the project manager to push through the organization or escalate. Team members also track their real time on projects using tickets. Using TeamHeadquarters the project manager/Scrum master can create comprehensive, up to date burn-down charts and reports.
The benefit of TeamHeadquarters is capturing the time, tickets, tasks, enabling communications and providing a tool that everyone on the team can use. Additional benefits include the management of operational work and of the helpdesk/IT team. Sign up for your demo now.
Additional Resources
- Stand up Scrum from Active.com, Good leadership in this meeting that makes the meeting roll along quickly
- Stand Up Scrum from Nova Software, Well worth watching. Here is a group that don’t worry about ego and are asking for help during Scrum
- How to hold a daily stand-up meeting, Used in law firms, stand-up, Agile/Scrum meetings with great explanation
