Understanding Scrum

• Scrum is a project management framework empowering team members to:
  • manage their timelines and define their workload autonomously with efficiency
  • maintain a clear focus, protected from additional changes or requests during the sprint
  • foster a culture of continuous improvement for everyone’s project management practices and professional skills.
• Sprints are set timeframes within Scrum where we steadily build or improve a product or project, step by step.
  • Best practices to determine Sprint-Length:
• User Stories are the tasks to be executed during the Sprint, unique as they are phrased to highlight the benefits a user will experience after task completion.
  • Some hacks to phrase good user stories
• Epics resemble projects as they usually involve multiple user stories and thus, have various team members assigned to them.
• Definition of Done - DODs are a mutually agreed checklist that confirms the outcome/state when a User Story is finished.
  • Some examples for DODs:
• Scrum Points: Each user story's complexity and effort is measured in scrum points. Assignees estimate the scrum points needed to finish a user story and use the sum of scrum points in a sprint to estimate their workload for upcoming sprints.
  • Scrum points are based on personal experience rather than time (even though it helps at the beginning to estimate scrum points in time). Comparing similar past stories aids in estimation.
  • Fibonacci Points: Points are given using the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.), emphasizing that tasks become more complex and hard to estimate as they get bigger.
  • Scaling Gaps: With the Fibonacci system, the gap between point values grows with task size, adding a safety margin for the growing uncertainty in larger tasks.
• Sprint Planning is a start-of-Sprint team meeting to determine the user stories to be executed during the sprint.
• Sprint Reviews occur at each Sprint's end to evaluate the work done and adjust the backlog if necessary. It's a chance for the team to reflect on what was accomplished and what could be improved in the future.
• The ideal size for a team to run sprints lies between 5-7. The more different departments are involved the better the mutual understanding of cross-departmental impact for everyone on the team, while at the same time the complexity to follow up on progress and lessons learned and moderation increases.

Executing Scrum

<aside> 🤓 Click here for a fully-fledged template to create & prioritize your Backlog in Clickup.

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1. Preparing User Stories - 90 Min.

1. Determine your average achieved Scrum points from past sprints. Deduct the points needed for meetings and evergreens in the next sprint. The resulting figure indicates the Scrum points available for user stories → This is your realistic workload for the sprint👌🏽

<aside> 💡 If necessary consider prioritizing user stories over meetings or evergreens. Consult the key result owner for guidance when in doubt.

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1. Select user stories for the next sprint from the backlog, favoring high-priority ones unless there's a compelling reason for another choice. Alternatively, write a new user story for the backlog if it's more promising to achieve the OKRs.

2. Estimate or re-evaluate already estimated scrum points per story trying not to plan for more scrum points than are available for your sprint

   • Some hacks to consider when estimating scrum points 🤓:

3. Make sure the user stories and their Definition of Done (DOD) are clearly defined.

4. If needed refine the story by adding DODs or phrasing more detailed user story descriptions to better understand purpose or execution.

5. Confirm the user stories for the upcoming sprint and update their status to 'selected for sprint'.

   

   Backlog example showcasing two user stories as ,,selected for sprint” Click here to view the detailed Backlog Example.