• Agile & Scrum Basics

Shopping list for starting a stable Agile team (part 2)

The shopping list is actually more of a questionnaire. If you can answer all the questions, you’re ready for the Agile Kickstart. By the way, those answers don’t have to be very detailed. There is plenty of room during the kickstart to clarify everything further. There are three sets of questions: substantive, process and personal. In total, there are 14 questions. I recommend taking no more than 30 minutes to answer all the questions. The first answer that comes to mind is good enough.

Process questions for starting an Agile team

It starts, of course, by choosing an Agile framework. That could be Scrum, Kanban or some other variation. If you have no idea, it’s best to choose Scrum and explore whether that works for you. After that, you can always change. With Scrum, you have very practical agreements to make:

1. Who will make and who will review?

Make sure that you have a stable team of people who are actively committed to achieving the mission at least three days a week. The people who still want to be involved but don’t have time to do work are called stakeholders. They have a stake in the success of your mission. Agree on which days of the week you will work on the team’s mission and clear your schedules. Can you only work one day a week for the team? Then it is difficult to work Agile. Try to save up your days and bundle them into one productive, focused sprint.

2. What is the rhythm of the Sprint Reviews?

Begin by determining what day of the week, you will hold the Sprint Review. Reserve space in everyone’s calendar, including those of your stakeholders. Many teams do their Sprint Review on Fridays, after lunch. They link their Sprint Retrospective and Sprint planning to it. You can handle these three Scrum Events just fine in one hour.

3. What time and where is the Daily Scrum?

Do you meet for the Daily Scrum or do you do it online? Is it at 9 a.m. or just after lunch? Do you do the Daily standing or sitting? Make it practical and block out the space in your calendar too.

4. How do you keep an overview?

Are you going to set up a Scrum Room and hang everything on the wall? Or will you use a digital tool? If in doubt, start in a physical room. After a while, you’ll know what layout you need to keep the oversight and you can digitize it.

5. Who wants to support the process? And who wants ultimate responsibility for productivity and value-added?

The first person can take on the Scrum Master role. The second is a Product Owner. They are just roles, so you can pass them around the team. When in doubt, choose someone together and try it for a while.

Personal questions for starting an Agile Team

The following four more personal questionsfor starting an Agile Team, I’m happy to share with you in the next article. Of course, you can also first scroll back to Part 1 of this series and review the substantive questions. Good luck and remember: don’t spend more than 30 minutes in total answering all the questions. The first answers that come to mind are often good enough. You can then explore the deeper questions with your team.