How We Launch Scrum Teams
1. Teach
We teach Scrum by letting teams practice it. We offer a Professional Scrum Foundations course to give teams hands-on experience applying Scrum.
2. Launch
Our one-day Scrum Team Launch Workshop prepares teams with everything they need to begin Scrum and hit the ground running.
3. Support
Teams need support to ensure new habits stick. We work with them after launch to make sure common problems are addressed.
1. Teaching Your Team Scrum
We ensure every member of your team has adequate knowledge of Scrum to begin practicing it. We do this in a 2-day Applying Professional Scrum™ course that equips your team with essential knowledge of Scrum and provides them with experience using and improving it.
Launching Scrum teams with members who have never attended Scrum training or practiced Scrum in a healthy environment can cause a Scrum Team Launch to take longer. Without sufficient training, we must spend significantly more time explaining the essentials of Scrum and working to change the way team members think about getting work done. It is far more effective and efficient for teams to learn about Scrum in a classroom setting.
2. Launching Your Team with Scrum
We lead a 1-day Scrum Team Launch Workshop with your team that prepares everything needed to start using Scrum. We then launch your team with their first sprint. Our launch workshop includes:
- Create a team working agreement to set expectations
- Decide when/where Scrum events occur and who owns invites
- Establish a Definition of Done for the development team
- Prepare the team to start on the product backlog
- Review the team's purpose and key upcoming milestones
- Refine the top backlog to prepare items for the first Sprint
- Provide Scrum event examples, agendas, and roles
- Launch the first Sprint with Sprint Planning
3. Agile Coaching to Support Your Team
Learning Scrum and launching as a new Scrum Team isn't enough to be successful with Scrum. Your team will quickly run into roadblocks that cause them to revert to old habits. We support Scrum Teams with Agile coaching. Our Agile coaches have years of experience practicing and implementing Scrum in a number of environments, and help you and your team work through common problems that arise when putting Scrum into practice, especially after a Scrum Team Launch.
Scrum teams that launch with expert Agile coaching:
- Establish patterns that reduce conflict and boost productivity
- Build new habits and avoid slipping into old ones
- Fully adopt Scrum and resist taking shortcuts that undermine Scrum’s effectiveness
- Get expert advice to prevent anti-patterns
- Better understand the “whys” behind Scrum so they can own their process rather than just follow the rules.
We have learned from experience that Agile coaches are most effective when they spend the majority of their time with a team immediately after it launches. After the Scrum Team stabilizes with its new process, the Agile coach steps back and spends less time with the team. Our Agile coaches typically spend 2 to 6 months working with a team, as it usually takes 1 to 3 months for a team to stabilize with Scrum.