How Effective Is Your Scrum – Really?

Scrum Masters often ask themselves this crucial question as part of their continuous improvement process. Challenging your current approach might be the best way to ensure you're maximizing your team’s potential.

As a Scrum Master, your first priority is to identify the most critical practices you expect your development team to follow. Then, clearly communicate those practices to the team. Finally, ensure their consistent implementation by regularly following up.

In this post, I’ll outline five essential practices that should become an integral part of your Scrum process.

When implemented correctly, these practices can lead to a significant boost in your team’s performance. Even better, they’re simple to adopt—the "20%" in your Pareto principle that drives "80%" of the results.

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The Five Essential Practices

Among the various practices that support effective Scrum, these five offer a practical starting point. They address common challenges and can make a noticeable difference in your team’s effectiveness:?

1. Define & Respect the DOD (Definition of Done)
2. Control and Avoid Task Switching
3. Define & Respect WIP (Work in Progress) Limits
4. Define & Follow Capacity Utilization
5. Control and Reduce Tasks Variability?

Next Steps for You to Take

To put these practices into action, it's essential to take small, structured steps that ensure their adoption and consistent application. Here's how you can get started:

1. Create a Checklist - Create a concise checklist for these practices.
2. Communicate the Checklist - Share it with your development team in a clear way.
3. Follow Up Daily - During each Daily Scrum, use the checklist to verify that it is respected and reinforce the practices.

By doing this, you’ll create small but impactful Nudge that drive continuous improvement and elevate your team’s performance.

Resources

Nudge: The Final Edition?- Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande

The Principles of Product Development Flow - Donald Reinertsen

The Scrum guide - The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game

Agile Project Management with Kanban - Eric Brechner