The launch of your Scrum team is a pivotal moment. When launched well, your team will be prepared to hit the ground running and continuously improve. When launched poorly, your team will struggle to deliver and improve.
We don't want your teams to "just do Scrum." We want them to excel at it. Our Scrum team launch method is designed to launch your teams with a hyperfocus on professionalism - consistently delivering quality, valuable features to your customers.
How We Launch Scrum Teams
1. Teach
We teach Scrum by letting teams practice it. We teach a Professional Scrum Foundations course to give teams hands-on experience applying Scrum.
2. Launch
Our one-day Scrum Team Launch Workshop prepares everything a team needs to begin Scrum and hit the ground running.
3. Support
Teams need support to ensure new habits stick. We work with teams after launching to ensure common problems are addressed.
1. We Teach 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 gives them experience using and improving it.
Launching Scrum teams with members who have never attended Scrum training and have never practiced Scrum in a healthy environment can cause team launches to take longer. Without sufficient training, we have to spend significantly more time explaining the essentials of Scrum and trying to change the way team members think about getting work done. It is much more effective and efficient for teams to learn about Scrum in a classroom setting.
2. We launch 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:
- Creating a team working agreement to establish expectations of working with each other
- Determining when and where Scrum events will occur and who will own the meeting invites
- Establishing a definition of “done” for the development team
Preparing the team to begin working on the product backlog - Review the purpose of the team and any key upcoming milestones
Refine the top of the product backlog to prepare enough items for the first sprint - Providing examples of Scrum events and assisting the Scrum team in establishing agendas and understanding areas of responsibility
- Launching the first sprint with sprint planning
3. We support your team with Agile coaching
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.
Scrum teams that launch with expert Agile coaching:
- Establish good patterns that reduce team conflict and increase productivity
- Build new habits (and prevent regression to old habits)
- Fully adopt Scrum and resist from taking shortcuts the undermine Scrum’s effectiveness
- Have immediate access to expert advice to prevent common anti-patterns from becoming status quo
- Better understand the whys behind Scrum so they are better able to own their process rather than “just following 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 takes a step back and spends less time with the team. Our Agile coaches typically spend 2 to 6 months working with a team since it usually takes 1 to 3 months for a team to stabilize with Scrum.