Agile Delivery

Story Points are often misunderstood and misused by teams and in some cases render them useless. In this post, we look at how you can educate the team on what Story Points are and how to use them.

The Waterfall methodology or model is the traditional approach to project management. It breaks down the stages of a project into sequential phases.

A user story gets its name from how it should be used, not how it should be written. A story should be told in a natural way through a good conversation. A good story conversation is about the who, why and not the what.

How many times have you created an agenda, or been passed an agenda for a meeting and thought, “Wow, great agenda, I love how this is written and presented and the agenda items are so exciting, I can’t wait to get started.”

This is fun and really simple Scrum retrospective you can run with minimal stationery. It’s easy to understand and uses the simple start, stop and continue approach to retrospectives, which many teams are familiar with.

You might want to know what Scrum is, or you’re using Scrum and having some problems, or you just to learn more about it. This introduction to Scrum is a mixture of the Scrum fundamentals, so pretty much what you get in the Scrum guide, mixed in with real-life experiences from within a digital agency.

This is a very simple retrospective idea that has a big impact on all teams. Other teams will be surprised when one full team of people approached their desks with a "Thank you" card. 

Story mapping is a great way to you visualise the stories you tell and create about a product or services. You don’t have to be creating software, it could be anything as it really helps you see the full journey for your customer, then break it down into sub-features

This is a great game to play with teams who are new to Agile and frameworks like Scrum. It teaches the attendees the benefits of working in sprints, planning, retrospectives and teamwork.

Agile, simply means able to move quickly and easily, that’s it!

There are a number of terms you’ll consistently hear when working with Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban or just discussing an Agile approach in general

The simplest description is the Product Owner decides on the what, the Development team work out the how and the Scrum Master help the team achieve the how.

Retrospectives can sometimes get repetitive and the last thing you want is the team going through the motions with their feedback. The Sail Boat approach gets the team up and involved right from the start and working together. 

This post has been created to provide a simple overview of the five key Scrum ceremonies.

A Scrum Master is not a Project Manager, and a Project Manager is not a Scrum Master, the roles are very different as they have a different set of responsibilities and approach to working with teams.

A retrospective is an opportunity to learn and improve as a team. It doesn’t matter what type of team, the industry or methodology, a retrospective is an extremely valuable approach for continuous improvement.