What is a powerful question?
06-07-2015Is your Scrum User Group really a user group?
27-07-2015The video on powerful questions made me think about the deeper purpose of the various Scrum activities. Can I formulate Scrum as a series of Powerful Questions to be general enough, that they might be useful outside of software development? Here is the image I came up with and below are the questions I think each of the Scrum Activities and artefacts strives to help you answer.
Sprint
- The Sprint is a container to limit ourselves to setting reasonable medium-term goals.
- What can we reasonably expect to accomplish by the end of the sprint?
Vision
- How will our efforts make the world a better place?
- Who needs our product and why?
- Why should we build it?
Product Backlog
- What characteristics should our product have?
- What goals must we accomplish to achieve our vision?
Backlog Refinement
- What could we do to get us closer to our vision?
- What small steps could take us nearer to our goal?
- How can we make the steps smaller and more likely of success?
Sprint Planning
- Part 1 – What is the best possible step forward, given what we know today?
- Part 2 – How can we accomplish these steps?
Daily Scrum
- What are our goals for the day?
- How will we accomplish them?
- What help do we need?
- Who needs to talk about what?
- What could be slowing us down?
Sprint Review
- What have we accomplished or learned?
- How does this change our vision?
Retrospective
- How can we work more effectively?
- What could be slowing us down?
Definition of Done
- How do we know a step was successful?
- How do we ensure the quality of our work?
- How do we know that what was done in the last sprint is still done in this sprint?
1 Comment
if you are interested in powerfull questions, you might want to look at (or help)
http://www.twitter.com/Retroflection or
http://www.retroflection.org for the app version of +2000 questions, posted since 01/01/2010