Scrum & Influencing Part 1 - Focus & Measure

Post date: Jul 21, 2013 9:19:03 AM

Goal setting is an important part of any endeavor, maybe the most important one when coming to success. Scrum offers the building blocks for building focus at different levels: the product, the release and the sprint.

Starting high level with an iterative product strategy that gets incrementally refined, product goals are discovered, enriched and decomposed into sprint goals which define the sprint direction and achieve focus for a certain time box. More on focus with regards to goals and the strategy of discovering and refining them can be read in Roman Pichler's Product Canvas entry: http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-innovation/the-product-canvas/.

Focusing and measurement are the first step in influencing since they lead to action and at the same time give feedback on those actions allowing for continuous adjustment. The Sprint burndown chart together with Spring Reviews and Retrospectives measure the execution dimension of the sprint. Story points and business value measurements give an assessment on the global business value of the product while velocity statistics bring in the measure for the team itself.

Concrete measurement values give feedback and allow for alignment, driving efforts in the right direction when all measurement dimensions at product, sprint and team level are combined and used regularly. But what it is more important at psychological level is that they build confidence - and this one is extremely important especially in the process of cultural change at organizational level when agile methods are first introduced.