Welcome back to the professional Scrum foundations series.
As introduced last week, empiricism is one of the underlying concepts of the Scrum framework.
Scrum is founded on empirical process control, and transparency is one of the three pillars.
During each of the Scrum Events, and throughout the Sprint itself, the Scrum Team and the stakeholders need transparency so there is a common understanding.
Transparency as such is way more than bringing “visibility”. It is about reaching ”a common understanding”.
PS. I will repeat the above few lines in the coming blog posts: repeating = learning. ;-)
Let’s take Sprint Planning to start with.
Common understanding about what?
At least...
- about the goal for this Sprint. What does it mean? How do we know we reached it? What are the metrics we'll use? ...
- about the Product Backlog Items that will help the team achieve that goal. How do these support the Sprint Goal? How will users benefit from these? How are they expected to use these items? ...
- about a forecast of what is possible to realise. What will we as a team target to develop for our users? What are the assumptions we are making? How will we deal with these? What is our past performance? How likely is it we'll have more or less the same performance? ...
A lot of topics to have a good conversation about to raise this transparency; to get to a common understanding.
And very likely more questions will arise during the Sprint Planning session. All helping to make the team members understand the same.
Common understanding amongst who?
Amongst the entire Scrum Team: the Product Owner, the Developers, and the Scrum Master.
Summary:
At the end of your Sprint Planning, does your Scrum Team have a common understanding about the Sprint Goal?
Prompt:
Have a good conversation with your team about:
- What does Transparency mean to you and your team?
- And how do you and your team use Sprint Planning to raise Transparency?
I hope you find value in these short posts and if you are looking for more clarifications, feel free to take contact.
PS. Next week we'll discuss Transparency and the Daily Scrum.
If you want to take a deeper dive into the core concepts we are covering in this blog series, then surely check out our Professional Scrum MasterY workshop. We have some scheduled in the coming period.
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