Making use of goals

Especially in Scrum

This article has been originally published on my blog.

Cet article est également disponible en fran?ais.

I was telling how we added daily goals to our practice of Scrum, in addition to the Scrum Guide’s sprint goal.

There is something important that I have to spell out:

Set one and only one goal.

Stick with this rule with no exception. I know temptation can be strong to set two goals, or maybe even three. Small goals, you would say.

Hey, we know we’ll do all of them anyway, so why not?

Because from the moment you state two different goals, priority is going away. You are not required to list everything that the team will do today. Obviously the team will not stand still doing nothing from the moment that the daily goal is fulfilled. What we are looking for is rather a single thing that must absolutely be done!

This advice fully applies to the sprint goal

The mighty power of having only one goal is not restricted to the daily goal and fully applies to the sprint goal too.

I’m saying it again:

Set one and only one goal. From the moment you set several goals, you cancel out the power of the goal concept.

And, in case you were wondering, concealing several goals into one through a lengthy sentence does not work either.

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