During this project we are working with scrum, in this post i will first list how we structured our weeks with scrum and list how it has helped our production, some problems we ran into and how we solved them and also some problems we ran into but never solved.

Week structure

Sprint planning, Monday at 10:00.
During sprint planning we all decided on the goal for the week and picked items from the backlog to work on that matched the goal.
each member also got to estimate the hours it would take to finish the item, we picked items so it would give all members 20 hours of work-time during the week.

example of a sprint planning backlog.

Sprint review, Friday 16:00.
During the sprint review we went through the sprint review backlog and checked each item that we had agreed would be done the Monday prior.
-Is it done?
-Are we happy with it?
-How many hours of work did it actually take?

Daily stand-ups, everyday at 12:10.
Show up and answer three questions.
– What did you work on yesterday?
– What are you working on today?
– Do you need any help?

How scrum was helpful

Communication communication communication. I cannot say it enough times, communication is key to successes and scrum has helped with that immensely, both planning and daily stand-ups tells each member in the group what everyone else is planning on doing or are currently working on, it also gives all members a chance to express there current feelings for the project and a forum for discussions.

The backlog was also very beneficial even if boring and annoying to work with. Especially for me as the project manager to get a good overview of how the project is proceeding, And i also noticed it could be used as a motivational tool at some points when the motivation of the team faltered. Just by showing the team a backlog for the alpha with all green boxes filled in with “Completed” I think gave a good feeling for the group and a realization that a lot was actually getting done even if at some times it did not feel like it was.

Problems

One of the first problems we thought about early on was the daily stand-ups, what happens if you don’t show up? And how could we as a group enforce people to show up?
As a team we decided to write in our group contract that if a member misses a daily stand-up he owns the group 5kr. The money will then later be used for “fika” when the group gets together for the last time before the course ends. Adding the fee for missing stand-ups was very helpful and instead of getting “-yeah im sorry i missed it” the group members started saying “-oh shit, fuck.” and would make sure they always knew were we were going to meet and to be on time.

We also had some problems with the sprint planning meetings were they would collide with some lectures held on Mondays, this would force us to move our meeting to late Monday afternoon which in turn led to noone knowing what to work on during the bigger part of a whole day. This was never solved both because the lectures were not happening every Monday, and at points the moral of the group was already low as is and telling them to show up at 8 on Mondays would not help productivity.

Over all i recommend using scrum in all projects even your own everyday life. And i do think that our end product would not end up with the same quality if we wasn’t using scrum.

Thanks for reading.

About Vidar Grönros

2017 Project Management

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