Intro: Welcome to the E6S-Methods podcast with Jacob and Aaron, brought to you by E6S Industries, your weekly dose of tips and tricks to achieve excellent performance in your business and career. Join us as we explore deeper into the practical worlds of Lean, Six Sigma, Project Management and Design Thinking. In this episode number 103, Jacob discusses "That SCRUM Stuff," in part 3 of our "Jacob Goes Agile" series. Here we go. http://bit.ly/E6S-103; http://bit.ly/E6S-iTunes

Scrum

Scrum is a general empirical control based framework to deliver results with the most business value in the shortest amount of time

Scrum is trying to do “Gamification of work” to make work fun, with some minimum set of guidelines that’ll help the players (in this case the team) be successful.

AGILE is the set of principles that the experts put together to help people create things that work, to partner with clients and being able to respond to change.

Players in a Scrum team

· Product Owner – Focus on the Customer

o Providing fuel & direction to the team

§ Translate product vision to product backlog

§ Decide on release date and content

§ Prioritize based on business value

§ Adjust priorities every sprint, as needed

§ Accept or reject work results

o Criteria for good Product Owner

§ Balance competing priorities

§ Always available to the team

§ Is empowered to make decisions about the product

· Scrum Master – Focus on the Team

o Oil in the engine

o Specially formulated to provide outstanding

§ Protection

§ Guidance

§ Leadership

o Impediment (road block) removal

o Responsible for enacting Scrum values and practices

o Shield the team from external interferences

o Ensure a long lasting, high performing team

· Development Team (could be a combination of Business Analyst, Developers, User Researchers, User Interaction Designers, QA, etc)

o Responsible as a while to deliver the committed delivery in time and with the defined quality – Good result or failure is always attributed to a team vs an individual on the team

o Ideal size of a scrum team is 7 +/- 2

o Balanced set of skill, but advantageous to have multi-disciplinary team members

o Scrum team is empowered to decide things:

§ What will be delivered at end of the sprint

§ Who will perform the tasks necessary to complete the work and in what order

o Ideal when team members are co-located

Basic Scrum Framework: involves 6 key stages

1. Initial Product Backlog

a. Define Product Backlog Items (PBI)

b. Prioritize

c. Colorize

d. Size – DoD (Definition of Done)

a. & b. are done by the Product Owner and the Stakeholders together

c. & d. is the time when the team is participating along with the product owner

· Size = Effort needed to get the thing done

· Guidance on DoD is provided by the Product Owner and refined by the team

Outro: Thanks for listening to episode 103 of the E6S-Methods Podcast. Stay tuned for rest of "Thats SCRUM Stuff" in episode 104. If you have any comments, suggestions, or would like to be a guest on the podcast, contact us through our website or find us on Twitter @e6sindustries. Join our mailing list! Subscribe to past and future episodes on iTunes or stream us on-demand with Stitcher Radio. Don't forget to leave a review and share us with a friend. Find outlines and graphics for all shows and more at www.E6S-Methods.com. “Journey Through Success - If you're not climbing up, you're falling down.”