Technology Details

I think the retrospective is the only essential part of the process as without that you miss the greatest gift – the ability to inspect and adapt. True, the others are important, but here's why I think less so.

Sprint Planning: With a well groomed backlog, I have seen great success in the Pull method, where the stories are pulled in order from a never ending list of must haves. This is particularly useful in large projects where the MVP is way off in the distance.

Demo / Review: With an overactive product owner :) and constant customer feedback on a CI environment you gain little from this meeting in my view other than using it as a tool to focus the team on a deliverable. However, that can be achieved in many other ways, including Cakes.

Daily stand-up – ok, so this is pretty important however I observe much waste in stand-ups. With a team of ten I see no reason why this meeting couldn't be turbo'd to a literal 5 minute experience. 30 seconds each on what (story) they have committed to delivering today, any blockers to that commitment and if they have spare seconds, what they did (of note) yesterday.

I find the amount of downtime produced by the Scrum meeting overheads one of the biggest problems in gaining the buy-in from the board when taking an organisation through the adoption of Agile. Cutting back the fat to bare mussel in this way I think helps to focus the stakeholders on what it is they have achieved with their adoption of Agile – the ability to see everything, and learn from their (organisations) mistakes

We used to run Review/Retro on Wed. morning, and Kick-Off on Wed. afternoon. It was exhausting.

Now we Review/Retro on Friday morning, with Kick-off on Monday morning.

Friday afternoon is dedicated to off-project professional development to keep us all up-to-date on trends.

The Mon-Fri approach has improved morale and productivity incredibly. Doing both sets of meetings in one day is torture.

It's the time when the group can have real input in how the process works best for them leading to a happy and productive team.

Some tips I found useful were to review the previous retrospective to make sure we had actioned points and were moving forward, have an area near the scrum board to put items we wanted to talk about in the retrospective ( I also included people we'd like to thank ) and arranged a darts comp at the end of each sprint which brough both the dev team and the business together.

Like any good manager, listen to your troops, action what you can and they will follow.