Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson’s “breathtakingly brief and agile introduction” to scrum is an essential read for any project manager. Whether you are just starting your career as a project manager or looking for a refresher on the basics of scrum, this short 46-page book gives you the tools to successfully project manage a team using the scrum framework.
Basics of Scrum
“Scrum is a lightweight framework designed to help small, close-knit teams of people develop complex products,” says Sims and Johnson.
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This team should consist of 7 (+/- 2) people, five to nine team members.
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The project is measured in sprints, short and focused bursts of development.
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There are three types of people in scrum: product owner, scrum master, team member.
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Scrum focuses on dealing with and finishing bite-size pieces of your project before you move onto the next phase.
Scrum for Startups – Project Management Lessons Learned from Scrum
Even if you don’t use the complete scrum framework, there are key tactics you can implement into your project management. Don’t fear feedback, inspections and stopping things that don’t work. According to Sims and Johnson, “So, why do we do development work in these short cycles? To learn. Experience is the best teacher, and the scrum cycle is designed to provide you with multiple opportunities to receive feedback-from customers, from the team, from the market-and to learn from it.”Meet regularly. Many businesses fear meeting fatigue, but the right meetings keep complicated projects cohesive. Scrum’s daily schedule for a one-week sprint is a great template to use.
Plan on Monday; Review on Friday. Meetings can go a lof of different directions. So keep your’s focused by planning on Monday and then reviewing work on Friday. This simple structure will help your project management significantly.
Teams need common definitions. You can adopt the scrum definition for words like “done,” “story,” “backlog” and “artifacts” or come up with your own definition of words. But the important thing is to get your whole team on the same page in every aspect of development.
Additional Scrum for Startups Resources
If want build your knowledge of scrum, here are additional scrum resources that will benefit you as a project manager.
Scrum in Under 10 Minutes (Video)
The Scrum Guide [PDF]Scrum-damentals (Video)
“Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction” ; Copyright Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson ; Published by Dymaxicon ; Available for purchase on Amazon
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