Intro

This document provides a set of guidelines to implement Scrum as an approach to the agility-based project management. These guidelines are separated in three sections:

• Section I: this is the first section and provides foundational concepts about Scrum, no more than what can be found anywhere around, but gathering those concepts and aspects that are most valuable for the organization at this moment.

• Section II: this section describes the recommended way to implement Scrum in a team, as a set of activities, tools, and artifacts that can be used throughout the entire process to achieve the expected results.

• Section III: provides some useful resources and complementary techniques to be used by the teams when implementing scrum.

Important

These guidelines and the concepts, tools and artifact gathered here can (and they likely will) change over the time, as long as the adopted practices and culture move towards a more advanced implementation stage or broader adoption of agility concepts. Therefore, it should always be considered as Work In Progress.

What do we expect from agility implementation

• Improve the overall ownership sense
• Higher motivation of teammates, PM and managers
• Promote working cultures that always looks for excellence through continuous improvement of processes, techniques, and tools
• Standardize (as much as possible) management process across company’s team and projects
• End up with better: Solutions, Quality, Efficiency

Why Scrum

Scrum is a very mature agility framework, it is empiric (learn-by-doing) and provides a small amount of guidelines and rules to work with it. It’s easy to understand, but not to master it, because there are no prescriptions on how to implement it. Therefore, its implementation aspects must be tailored down to the context to have a feasible implementation path. Something to notice is that some steps towards its implementation have already been done in some teams, and nowadays they are doing one o more activities of the Scrum framework, making the transition to a more pragmatic adoption of the expected Scrum practices smoother.

Scrum as a learning loop and innovation

During the sprints execution, a set of activities are carried out that lend us to make improvements all the time. This way, improvements can be done on the product being developed and on the team and tools used to develop it. We really want to embrace this model, because it allows us to be more proficient, sprint after sprint. And innovation takes place all the time, not only regarding team and tooling, but also in product features, that are going to be reviewed and discussed very frequently with the customer, team, and perhaps other stakeholders, as a whole.

Innovation takes places at every single stage, it is a first-class citizen for the process, and it allows us to deliver better results, leveraging permanent collaboration between the team and customer.

Scrum is empiric

If we compare defined process control model with empiric control models adopted by Scrum, we will realize that the whole team and customer must be in continuous interaction, with a deeper (and shared) understanding about the state of the project, expectations, restrictions, etc.

Empiricism is needed when:

• We don´t know the exact outcomes at the time we begin
• We want to control the results and keep quality high
• Steps are not always repeatable

Note

Empiricism really is about making decisions based on evidence and experimentation, rather than projections.

High performance teams

Better results are produced by high performance teams, that:

• Reflect on themselves and their performance quite frequently
• Consistently produce superior results
• Regularly go above and beyond the goals
• Consider success is the reward

Leaders need to be focused less on tactics but more on strategies, because they will be removing impediments for the team to be successful and continue improving all the time.

Some changes being perceived of Scrum's adoption

• Focusing on people, teams, and motivation.
• Being self-critics, always looking for quality improvement by removing impediments, having better processes, tools, and techniques.
• Being thoughtful honoring time-boxing, this will pay back afterwards
• Promoting collective intelligence, avoiding personal egos
• Keeping everybody on the bus, focused on sprint goal (mini-projects), with high degree of commitment
• Always deliver what is adding significant value to the business, it means that backlog must be prioritized every time according to what customer consider most valuable