Thursday, 18 September 2014

Responsibilities of various Scrum roles in an organization

In the previous posts, we discussed the roles in Scrum, and their desired traits. Now let’s have a summary of the responsibilities of each role in a Scrum project. The table given below provides a crisp outline of responsibilities of the Scrum roles.

 
Role
Responsibilities
Scrum Guidance Body
  • Establishes overall guidelines and metrics for developing role descriptions for Scrum Team members
  • Acts as a consultant to projects across organization at different levels
  • Understands and defines appropriate levels of grouping, roles, and meetings for Scrum projects
Portfolio Product Owner
  • Defines the strategic objectives and priorities for portfolios
Portfolio Scrum Master
  • Solves problems and coordinates meetings for portfolios
Program Product Owner
  • Defines the strategic objectives and priorities for programs
Program Scrum Master
  • Solves problems and coordinates meetings for programs
Stakeholder(s)
  • Is a collective term that includes customers, users, and sponsors
  • Frequently interfaces with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team to provide them inputs and facilitates creation of the Deliverables of the project.
Product Owner
  • Creates the project’s initial overall requirements and gets the project rolling
  • Appoints appropriate people to the Scrum Master and Scrum Team roles
  • Provides the initial and ongoing financial resources for the project
  • Determines Product Vision
  • Assesses the viability and ensures delivery of the product or service
  • Ensures transparency and clarity of Prioritized Product Backlog Items
  • Decides minimum marketable release content
  • Provides Acceptance Criteria for the User Stories to be developed in a Sprint
  • Inspects deliverables
  • Decides Sprint duration
Scrum Master
  • Ensures that Scrum processes are correctly followed by all team members including the Product Owner
  • Ensures that development of the product or service is progressing smoothly and the Scrum Team members have all the necessary tools to get the work done
  • Oversees Release Planning Meeting and schedules other meetings
Scrum Team
  • Takes collective responsibility and ensures that the project deliverables are created per requirements
  • Assures Product Owner and Scrum Master that the allocated work is being performed according to plan




 To know more click on:  http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/




Thursday, 4 September 2014

Is it best to just jump in or should the transition to Agile be slow?

A step-by-step transition to Agile presents several advantages over diving in head-first. When Agile is adopted slowly and carefully, teams will be able to see the incremental progress from which they are able to learn and gain Agile experience. Teams will need to develop a shared vision for the project and a collective definition for “done,” which are important components of monitoring progress during the project. This learning curve is absent when Agile is adopted hastily. Teams may experience an increase in incremental delivery of value but may not be able to sustain this drive in absence of any insights about Agile methods.
Agile is not just a framework that allows us to manage projects—it is a philosophy. This state of mind requires all stakeholders to be on board and have shared interest in the company’s goals and overall mission. The best way to accomplish this would be to start slow and small rather diving head-first into implementing Agile.
Coaching teams on Agile practices, though time-consuming, can help team members be better equipped to work on Agile projects.