How you can use the insights of Disciplined Agile to improve your Scrum practices

 

This is a follow up to yesterday's post "Why You Should Use Disciplined Agile If You Are Motivated to Improve Your Team’s Methods But Are Having Trouble With Scrum”

Step 1: Go beyond empiricism and add a model explaining why Scrum works. Learn the core concepts of Lean (use small batches, remove waste by removing delays, build quality in) and flow (manage queues, focus on time of value delivered)

Step 2: Understand the objectives of Scrum’s practices in light of this theory

Step 3: Identify the practices you’re having trouble with. For each practice, look to see if the theory above provides insights on how to do it better or if it suggests using another practice. Do not just abandon it. Meet the objectives of the practice by doing what works for your team. Don’t worry whether you’re following the Scrum guide

Step 4: If your team can’t reach agreement on a new practice, try an experiment for a sprint. See what happens and adjust

Step 5: If you can't finish stories in a sprint, go to 1 week sprints. While counter-intuitive this helps because 1) it forces a focus on finishing small stories and 2) you don’t waste time analyzing and planning stories you never get to (those that roll over)