The end of the year is nearby, time for some New Year’s resolutions!

Last year we provided some help to get started for Change Agents, the year before we got the Scrum Masters started and long time ago the busy Scrum Product Owners, this year we want to support your entire organization to adopt Scrum as it was intended to.

Here are 20 new year’s resolutions to get you started in your organization

1. Stop using tools to manage work (ditch JIRA!), tools that help you to get work done are OK (ex: InteliJ, jenkins, weave…)
2. Ban email for a day for yourself and between team members (talk instead).
3. Remind everybody to read the first sentence in the Agile Manifesto: “Uncover better ways”
4. The main purpose of the PBL is to provide transparency on the future, there might be something better than a single flat list. Experiment and “Uncover better ways”
5. Slow down to speed up.
6. The main purpose of the Sprint Backlog is to provide transparency on the ongoing, there might be something better than a 3 column table. Experiment and “Uncover better ways”
7. The main purpose of the Sprint Review is to complete the empirical process control loop and thus accept learning on product level. Don’t use it just to show work has been done, but instead use it to accept learning. Your Product Backlog should be adjusted accordingly.
8. The main purpose of the Daily Scrum is to complete the empirical process control loop and thus accept learning on execution level. Don’t use it as a status meeting but accept learning, your Sprint Backlog should be adjusted accordingly.
9. Keep reminding yourself that the highest value is only achieved when the life of your target audience is positively impacted not when it is handed over to DevOps.
10. Remove something from your process, especially meetings/workshops that don’t fit the basic Scrum Events.
11. Remove the broken-telephone or Chinese whispers syndrome within your workflow, let teams directly work with users/customers.
12. The Scrum Master is not a secretary and is there to make Scrum work for the organization, not necessarily for you as an individual.
13. Refinement is not about splitting, it is about getting the context of your target audience better understood. One might consider some kind of white board talk and design, it might be even more appropriate than splitting cards.
14. Track improvement experiments in a celebration grid.
15. Remind people that there is no value in discussing what is an Epic, Theme, Capability, Feature, Story, Task, Sub-Task and so forth, they are all items in the Product Backlog somehow. One might be bigger than another and that’s about it.
16. Start a Kudo wall in your company.
17. Making sure things are so detailed that “I know what to do” and “You know what to do” is putting collaboration in a process, start with true collaboration by moving to “You help me” and “I help you” so that in the end “We do it together”, truly.
18. Be present, never type or look at your phone when somebody is talking to you.
19. Make their day, let others smile at least once a day.
20. Play! Find ways to make work fun to do.

Oh… wait… wait… what’s here? Bonus advice! Tsjing Tjsing.

Bonus advice: Attend a Certified LeSS Practitioner training, you might discover you misunderstood Large-Scale Scrum completely.

 

And now a funny Xmas song for you to enjoy