17 Things to Try on Monday Morning

… to do better Scrum.

In my Scrum Performance MasterClass Workshop, the participants reflect on how their teams and organisations do Scrum, compare how they do Scrum with Scrum ‘by the book,’ and create both a long term vision for improving their organization and a list of things they could start Monday morning to begin the improvement process right away.

Here’s the list of things my participants identified to start doing on Monday after last week’s MasterClass:

1. Pairing: Two people work on each story. ( See ‘Pair & Share, How We Do Sprint Planning 2′)
2. Review the Definition of Done in my project
3. The Implementation Team, not the Product Owner or other manager, decides on how much work to accept in the Sprint.
4. Improve the quality of the User Stories in my project
5. Move testing from a separate group to the Implementation Team
6. Hold a retrospective with the Implementation Team and Management
7. Build awareness and acceptance for the Scrum mindset among our customers
8. Recognize the impact of technical debt and start working to eliminating it
9. Introduce the principle of Inspect and Adapt in management
10. Recommit to doing Scrum well 
11. Bring passion for doing things well back into the process
12. Apply the Test Driven Development to process design
13. Measure velocity instead of using it to drive Team commitments to the Product Owner
14. Order books to learn more
15. Create a company Agile library to help the curious find out about Scrum and Agile
16. Use real (potential) customers and users as personae for creating user stories
17. Look at Spotify as a role model for organizing and scaling my teams.