Know your Agile Scrum project environment

[#1]

Project deliveries are planned and are tracked through a checklist or “To Do” items to ensure tasks are working as defined.

Here comes the Agile project checklist, which ensures the team are following the Agile Manifesto, Scrum Values and are not in traditional software approach. Which means, the next time you are allocated to project or asked to work in an Agile project, you can refer the following list as a reference to understand your Agile Scrum project environment.

Team composition and communication channels:

Scrum Master: One of their main focus is to work with PO in finding techniques, with development members to remove team impediments.

>> Is your Scrum Master assigned and certified?

Product Owner: One of their main focus is “to maximize return on investment (ROI), improve total cost of ownership (TCO), maintaining rapport with scrum team.

>> Does your project have one Product Owner or more than one?!

Development team members: One of their main focus is to maintain constant rapport with Scrum master and PO in delivering the product backlogs.

>> What is the composition of the development team members? Are they cross skilled/ trained and are certified?

>> Are the development team members training on domain, applications and soft skills planned and communication tools made available with stakeholders?

Project journey:

>> Is the product backlog identified and prioritized?

>> Is Sprint duration identified and agreed?

>> Are the Sprint duration stories made ready and are identified for upcoming Sprints?

>> Are the Sprint risks identified?

>> Is the team Velocity considered during Sprint estimation?

Managing meetings:

>> Is Scrum master holding 15-minute daily Scrum call?

>> Does the team Scrum call discuss on the following 3 points:

What tasks he or she worked on the day before?

What tasks he or she plans to work on that day?

What obstacles he or she faces in completing assigned tasks?

>> Does team perform Sprint review?

>> Does team hold Sprint retrospective?

Team tools:

>> Has your Scrum master set up calendar tool and shared with Scrum team?

>> Is your task tracking applications like Atlassian Jira, Confluence, Jira Align etc. are set up and team members are trained?

>> Are the development, production and testing environments ready?

This checklist items can be customized and detailed out as per your organization vision and Enterprise Agile Coach plan. However, the above said are the minimum checklist criteria's to know that the project is running on Agile model.

Activity:

Do post your thoughts, ideas, ways of working and project management.

[Imran Taqvi]

Hi @G subramanyam

Thank you for sharing this insight.

Could you please explain what you mean by Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and how it can be improved?

Regards,

[Summer Hogan]

Thank you for sharing this checklist of questions @G subramanyam! I am surprised that I can answer yes to almost all the questions above. We have a dedicated PO (that is me!) and our Scrum Master is shared across 3 teams, but it still works. We have a good spread of development and QA resources and we have been working heavily on cross training this year. It actually worked out nicely this week because many of our developers are out and the others can pick up the slack for those out because of that cross training we did earlier on in the year. All of the project journey, managing meetings, and team tools questions are great! Yes to them all!