You could be a Scrum Master or a Team Member in a Scrum team. Everything is going well, except that the work remaining is not getting updated in the tool you are using. The team members forget to update, delay the updates. As a result though you learn a lot on what progress was made the previous day towards accomplishing sprint goals, you are unable to figure how the team is doing overall. What could be done to improve this situation?
Suggested solution:
Solutions tried out in different situations:
- Bring up the burn down chart at the start of the daily scrum, it works like a charm. The team members who have not updated their progress and work remaining will add “missed updating, will do right after the daily scrum”. The moment this data is made use of by the team, the need to keep it updated automatically syncs in.
- One team arrived at a unique mechanism, added a fourth question “Whether I have updated my progress and remaining hours?” This was suggested by a team member fresh out of college, I was skeptical, but thought why not give it a shot. This too works, tried in many teams. The beauty is that the fourth question is a transient one, in the sense that it gets dropped after a while, as it becomes redundant.
- This is done by those who have done scrum before, at the start they evolve team norms and the updating of progress and remaining hours is agreed upon as a team norm.
2 Responses
While the solution is simple, its implementation will be tough since the business would not easily sponsor them. While it is a good idea to write all technical debt stories, generally, there will not be any Product Owner who likes to own and accept since the PO comes with business mindset. These kind of work is pushed by external team (not the scrum team). Generally, these is a lack of ownership of these stories and pushed by external teams. I am purposefully, I am not the solution this gap in this comment. Want to hear from others.
I agree Guru. The reason why i mentioned this as a Dilemma for the Engineering manager is do we handle only the low hanging fruits and run with it, or would you work for a harder and more difficult transformation of creation of a working pipeline.
I know one manager I have interacted made the call and felt the next 6 months extremely hard to convince and influence different stakeholders. This is easier to accept while you are doing a transformation.