Common problems while adopting scrum

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Have you heard someone saying “I tried scrum and it didn’t work. Scrum is not working at all!” I heard that many times. It is difficult to admire that it was not the methodology fault, it was your fault that everything failed. The big challenge is that there is no out of a box solution, which suits anyone. You need to go through all the way from the learning to mastery, face a lot of difficulties, overcome them, master the copying and them move to adopting the process for you – changing and improving it. So let’t discuss the problems PM can face while adopting new methodology (you know what I talking about ^_^) All these promlems are from my and my colleagues experience.

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Retrospective – Team Energymeter

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

I have heard from a lot of PMs that it is hard to involve the team into retrospective process. Team members are usually enthusiastic about discussing complaints, what the idiot is the customer (yes, I know that you don’t have that in your team, as all of you respect your customer, you have a great atmosphere in the team. But I do have these problems in my teams). When I try to ask the developers some more constructive questions – I get something like “Everything was ok” from the developer. How to get more?

Sometimes I am standing in front of the team, which is comfortably sitting in the chairs and looking at me, with their faces showing “Hm..one more meeting…what does that PM need? We didn’t have this crap with the previous PM!”. And I am thinking how to awake them, make the part of the process, share their thoughts (you’ll be surprised, how many great thoughts can developers come up with).

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The most boring meetings ever

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Hey, PM, how often do you hear “Those meetings make me crazy…They are so boring!” from developers? I hear this phrase while having my lunch in the office kitchen, while passing by developers, comfortably sitting on the sofa, and so on and so far… It can happen up to 10 times a day, if your company is big enough. So, PMs, let’s be honest, our meetings often suck.

I will try to analyze why that can happen and what can be done.

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How to perform great demo

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Are you as frustrated when you have to perform a demo to the client as me? Hope, I am not alone) I think, that the sprint demo is one of the most important meetings in the scrum process. It is the time to show our work to the product owner and make our progress transparent. For the team it is very important to celebrate their achievements and see what that achieved. Also it is a chance to receive valuable feedback.

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