Four Ceremonies

Well every one of us is eager to succeed, may it be any industry or field of work or a business of your own.

Let's start with the basics of success. The idea is very simple, break it down.

Yes! that is correct, break it down to small and simpler tasks to achieve one big goal. Because... Every job big or small, if its done well, means a lot.

That's where the concept of SCRUM fits in.

"The word Scrum itself is not an acronym. It is the short form of the British word scrummage which is a rugby term for getting the ball in play"        

SCRUM is basically a framework which helps you / your team to structure and manage your work through a set of values and practices.

The Four Ceremonies

Four ceremonies are basically your phases along the way. More like one step towards your success or goal as one team.

1. Sprint Planning
2. Daily Stand-ups
3. Iteration Review
4. Retrospective        

• Sprint Planning

You pick the important items from the backlog or from the list of items that are important for you or stakeholders and prioritise. Then you plan and divide your goal as far as the planned items are concerned.

• Daily Stand-ups

One you are done planning, it's time to execute and make it a success. You keep a track and keep sharing information among your team members. This helps you take preventive actions on the spot and solve any problems or challenges that you face along the way. It even helps you manage time and control the outcomes (depending on the situation). The idea is to make sure that the things go as planned and you stay up to date on whats going on and it's not just you, but the stakeholders are also part of these stand-ups. This way you avoid any surprises at the end of the planned activity.

• Iteration Review

At the end of the sprint, you organise an information session with your team members and stakeholders, to demonstrate the outcome of the sprint. You mark and update the tasks as done for example and decide on whether to release these done items or to wait and merge these changes with the next or previous release items. Withholding the release usually happens when you are working on a bigger goal and you decided to divide that into smaller goals and then merge at the end to achieve a business objective.

• Retrospective

This is another session with your team on what has been useful during the sprint and how your team managed to solve the problems faced along the way. You actually document these things and mark these as lessons learned, to make sure that you don't repeat or end up in the same difficult situation again. Kind of a preventive action that helps you improve.

The Roles

Now the question is who are the players?

These are the ones responsible to make it a success. Each and everyone plays an important part and serves as a key player on its own.

The Players:

1. Your Team & You
2. Stakeholders

Well if you focus on the software development itself, the specific roles are as follows:

1. Product Owner
2. SCRUM Master
3. Team (Development Team)        

To sum it up, at the end of each iteration; Retrospective serves as a crucial phase. You get to review what have you done so far, which challenges you faced and what were the lessons learned.

This is the golden rule that makes you succeed; while you improve and lessons learned serves as a step towards improvement and success.

#Succeed #Lead