Brest facliitation practicies of checking progress toward the Sprint goal
Since the release of Scrum Guide of 2020 the 3 optional questions to facilitate the conversation of progress towards have been removed from the Scrum Guide.
"The Developers can select whatever structure and techniques they want, as long as their Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work. This creates focus and improves self-management."
Could you share your best practices how you facilitate the inspections of progress toward the Sprint Goal?
As of now, I hear what teams can do in order to check the progress:
1. Integrate the question "How confident are you that we as the team can reach the Sprint Goal".
2. At the beginning to the daily scrums someone reads the sprint goal as the reminder.
Thank you.
My most successful teams have never used the 3 questions. They use the 15 minute Daily Scrum to discuss anything discovered since the last Scrum that could impact the rest of the Sprint and then plan work for the current day. Any further discussions would occur after the Scrum in what is mostly referred to as the "Parking Lot". All of the teams arrived at this entirely on their own. I didn't participate in any of the Scrums. I focused on helping them understand the benefit of having the Scrum. How I did that varied per team. I had one team that did not see the benefit and would often want to skip having the event. But they frequently found themselves in situations where one person had discovered some new information that impacted others. But since they never took the time to discuss, they were not able to adapt their work based on the new information. This was the first team to decide on the format that I mentioned above.
Could you share your best practices how you facilitate the inspections of progress toward the Sprint Goal?
As I stated above, I did not facilitate anything. I let the teams decide the best way to get value out of the event. I let them determine the method of inspection and adaption that worked best for them.
Could you share your best practices how you facilitate the inspections of progress toward the Sprint Goal?
First take a step back, and ask:
- How is transparency over progress being established by the Developers?
- Do the Developers understand the data they are seeing, and realize they own it?
- Can the Developers correlate this data to real things actually going on in their lives?