There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. Turning the Sprint Review into a Sprint acceptance gate where stakeholders sign off features is unfortunately prominent and defies the idea of self-management.
Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint Review anti-pattern in 80 seconds.
There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. A Sprint Review without stakeholders may create an unhealthy bubble for the Scrum Team due to the disconnect, thus resulting in lower effectiveness.
Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of stakeholders avoiding participating in the Sprint Review in less than 150 seconds.
We started this series on remote agile with looking into practices and tools; we explored virtual Liberating Structures, and how to master Zoom. We had a look at common remote agile anti-patterns, and we analyzed remote Retrospectives and Sprint Plannings based on Liberating Structures. This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.
Are we still on the right track? Answering this question in a collaborative effort of the Scrum Team as well as internal (and external) stakeholders is the purpose of the Sprint Review. Given its importance, it is worthwhile to tackle the most common Sprint Review anti-patterns.
Update 2019-11-10: I re-edited text, added new graphics as well as an excerpt from the Scrum Guide to clarify the purpose of the Sprint Review.
Why running a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum. Beyond the basics, we have addressed the Sprint Retrospective, the Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog as well as the Daily Scrum.
While the initial meetups went smoothly, the last two meetups felt rushed given that we usually have about two hours. Also, the changing composition of the meetup attendees has become more challenging; less than 10 percent of the approximately 150 participants so far have attended meetups.
So, I thought it might be a worthwhile experiment to aggregate the previous meetups into a one-day immersive workshop on Liberating Structures for Scrum, built around climate change and MegaBrain.io, a struggling startup with little runway left and in desperate need of two successful Sprints. We ran that workshop last week, and this is what we learned.
The ninth Hands-on Agile webinar Sprint Review anti-patterns addresses twelve anti-patterns of the sprint review—from death by PowerPoint to side-gigs to none of the stakeholders cares to attend.
