microveldt.com

We've been running Portfolio Scrum since the end of March - we are now in our 10th two week sprint. The teams have become comfortable with the process of Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums and Sprint Review. We are seeing a heightened focus on the development staff on both our teams, and in a lot of regards, heightened visibility of the balance of our work in process. We are still struggling with getting clear pipeline visibility however.

Yesterday, our usual sprint planning routine of a cross-team coordination meeting, followed by two teams doing concurrent sprint planning was changed up due to a client's launch schedule. So we had a 20 minute cross-team coordination meeting followed by one team sprint planning session and then, late in the afternoon, the other team did its sprint planning. This enabled me (the ScrumMaster), and our two in-house Product Owners to be more constantly present in both planning sessions than we usually are.

• The purpose of data is to enable meaningful decisionmaking
• Data will show the weknesses in your practice like nothing else will
• Data will help you see an abstracted view of the total picture - but remember it's an abstraction. That's why it's important to remember why you started collecting it in the first place
• Data can help you be more effective, especially if you actively work it
• Data gives you a great big "You are Here" marker. When it's really good it helps you figure out how to move from here to there

1. Takes ambiguity out of execution
2. Allows for flexibility but requires discipline
3. Makes hard choices transparent - it's not magic beans
4. Commitments are shared
5. Puts business decisions on business developers and business owners
6. Requires diligence and open communication - it's not rocket science
7. Provides 360 degree view of projects and project queue
8. Project manager becomes an information radiator rather than information holder and interpreter