Let us have a poker tournament in our next Scrum planning session…
Core of the agile scrum methodology is the empowerment of the “team” and this empowerment is never more important than during the scrum planning meeting. We do not have dictatorship in scrum driven projects, i.e. a military general style project manager dictating who does what, when and more importantly how. However, we also do not have Swiss democracy in which every team member must cast their vote before the project can advance to the next beachhead. It is important, and often difficult, to select a core set of team members who are able to estimate effort and most importantly represent the “team”.
So what happens during these planning sessions?
An average duration of such a planning meeting is 8 hours, broken into a 4 hour product backlog selection and a 4-hour sprint preparation meeting. In the first half the product backlog items, relevant for the next 14-day sprint are selected, prioritized and estimated by the team using the Poker cards … more on these cards in a minute.
The second half of the planning meeting is dedicated to selecting, prioritizing and estimating sprint backlog items for the next sprint, again using Poker cards.
Why play poker, the Project Manager is asking in the back row?
Using the card values Ace=1, 2-10, Jack=11, Queen=12 and King=13, each team member in the planning session gets a set of poker cards.
Each item is discussed and then everyone get’s an opportunity to raise the card that is the most accurate estimation in terms of humanoid-days. At first there will be a wide variation of estimates, which requires a few more rounds of discussions and “poker play” until the team feels comfortable of the average estimate.
So what are the rules of the game?
The most important facet of Scrum we have learnt is that it is not a prescribing methodology and no-one should ever convince you otherwise. When creating the project and the project team you should have a ceasefire meeting to discuss and agree on the rules of engagement for the specific instance of a project, which includes agreeing on the power game rules. The scrum master must blend into the team and adopt the team’s understanding of scrum and modus-operandi into the scrum methodology for that project.
Scrum is supposed to be agile…