65 Minutes

Do you truly understand why your team uses Scrum? When your team first decided to adopt Scrum, they were likely trying to address a specific problem. Perhaps they struggled to reliably deliver to customers, or maybe they were frustrated by endless requirements documents and exhausting death marches. No matter the reason, the move to Scrum was likely met with both excitement and fear. If your team is like most, they started by adopting Scrum practices - they created a backlog of user stories, conducted their first sprint planning meeting, and created a timeboxed sprint. They measured their adherence to these practices " like the length of standup meetings or the increase of team velocity " but did not measure the impact on customers. Essentially, they were going through the motions of Scrum but did not understand why they were doing it.

If this story sounds familiar, you are not alone. Much of my recent consulting work has focused on deemphasizing my clients' dogmatic focus on adhering to Scrum practices and instead adopt the principles behind Scrum. From my experience, the goal of Scrum is for small teams to create fast feedback loops in complex environments to minimize the risk of building the wrong products. To build feedback loops, teams must regularly inspect and adapt " they must allow customers to thoroughly inspect incremental versions of the product they create each sprint, and they must immediately adapt their plans for the next sprint. Without fast feedback loops, even the strictest of adherence to Scrum practices will barely move the needle.

In this talk, I will discuss how to create a culture of learning and feedback by focusing on the why behind Scrum - inspection and adaptation rather than only the framework and practices. I will offer a simple analogy designed to be used with leaders about the importance of establishing feedback loops. Finally, I will simulate the incremental development of a product using inspection and adaption to help attendees visualize the lessons. Attendees will leave the talk with a solid and renewed understanding of the importance of feedback loops in product development.

Speaker Steven Granese

Steven Granese has been building innovative teams and solutions for his entire nineteen-year career in the technology industry. His expertise lies in transforming organizations to deliver their desired business outcomes by adopting an agile way of working. He holds multiple agile certifications (CSM, CSP, PMI-ACP) and is an avid speaker for companies, conferences, and user groups. He holds master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University and a bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University.

PDU Credit: If you have a PMP or other PMI certification, you can claim/self-report 1 'Ways of Working' (formerly Technical) PDU by logging the following: Education - Digital Media/Webinar & Activity Title. For more on PDU reporting, visit https://www.pmi.org/certifications/certification-resources/maintain/pmi-talent-triangle-update, and for future questions, reach out to [email protected]

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