Before you pick up that next story (in Scrum)
Ahmed Avais
![Ahmed Avais]()
Ahmed Avais
Digital Transformation Leader | Chief of Staff Liaison | Business Agility Coach | Agile Project Manager | Modern Product Manager
Have you ever heard a team member say this during a sprint: "I have finished my work, now what?" - It's easy to have this conversation go sideways. What if we can have a guided discussion? (hint: there is a way.)
I learned a tip from Joel Bancroft-Connors at Agile Open Northwest that I'd like to share.
Help the team member self-reflect with the following flow of questions (instead of picking up new stories while the sprint is in flight):
- Can I help someone with a current task?
- Can I fix a bottleneck in the workflow?
- Can I work an unstarted task on an in-progress story (that I can finish in the sprint)?
- Can I fix some technical debt?
- Can I learn something?
- Can I start a new story in the sprint backlog (that I can finish in the sprint)?
- And remember that the team trusts you to make the right decision
I help organizations and teams evolve to identify and deliver customer value collaboratively, incrementally and sustainably.
8 年Oh, and the team-owned sprint backlog is a pretty standard Scrum concept, isn't it? I like to keep everything unassigned (e.g. team-owned) until it gets pulled into progress which helps reinforce the shared ownership mentality.
I help organizations and teams evolve to identify and deliver customer value collaboratively, incrementally and sustainably.
8 年Funny, I shared a very similar list in the form of an algorithm with my team this week. I like the bottleneck removal idea, I didn't think of it. I did include fixing a bug as possibility.
Fractional CTO & Advisor, Distinguished Engineer | Ex Microsoft | Legacy Code & DevOps
8 年Are you assuming that each individual is assigned stories at the beginning of the sprint, and thus picking up a story means adding something to the sprint? Because if so, I'd challenge that assumption. What does that cause for shared work? For handouts? For informal and emergent collaboration? What if you started each sprint with a set of stories owned by the whole team? And never assigned them to individuals. instead of putting the individual at the center, put the work at the center, and then several times per day each person finishes some chunk of work and asks where is the next most effective piece of work to do? What different results does that make become natural and automatic?
Sustainable Value Expert | Product Delivery Coach | More Efficient | More Effective | Certified Scrum Trainer | Passionate about making the world a better place
8 年Thank you, I'm honored.
Digital Transformation Leader | Chief of Staff Liaison | Business Agility Coach | Agile Project Manager | Modern Product Manager
8 年Joel Bancroft-Connors - couldn't find a way to mention you inline in the article - wanted to say thank you for sharing the original idea