It's been way too long since I wrote the last entry. Things at work have been kind of hectic. In the last four weeks, we reorganized, pushed out our third release of the year, reorganized again. Hopefully, the organization will stabilize enough so that we don't have to reorganize again before Thanksgiving.
In terms of the Scrum, we're moving forward. We see benefits, but our old habits continue to haunt us. We had to rearrange priorities during our release to handle those last-minute show-stoppers. Performance challenges after the release due to a fairly major architecture change required some additional reprioritization.
Overall, scrum works. The daily scrums are great at communicating progress. Every day, each team member communicates the tasks he or she is working on, the tasks planned for the next day, and obstacles that are preventing progress. That works great! We try to keep interruptions at a minimum. This has been somewhat successful. The team has now come together very well, and they're taking ownership of things that need to get done.
But we have encountered a few big challenges. First, while the daily scrums are great for communicating progress, they aren't so good at ensuring that everything is finalized, and tasks are actually completed. We haven't been good about communicating estimates. And we have a challenge with communicating between our on-shore scrum team and our offshore non-scrum team.
I contact Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of the methodology. Our model is similar to what he calls a "Type C Scrum", where the priority list is constantly rearranged. His company, PatientKeeper, has been successfully executing Type C Scrums for about two years. He sent me an advance copy of a book he's been working on. We'll be reviewing it both to provide feedback to Jeff and to see if we can apply some of the lessons learned by someone doing this a lot longer than we have.
Stay tuned for more updates.
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