Scrum & Influencing Part 2 - Identify Top Vital Behaviors

Post date: Aug 11, 2013 9:09:22 AM

According to Pareto Principle, 20% of effort will yield 80% of the desired outcome. These 20% consist of the identifying and applying the vital behaviors needed to achieve the goal. The amount of contribution these vital behaviors give to the overall target is significant. The most difficult part is the identification. Applying it has to do with the various sources of influence and this topic will be explored in a next article.

What are the vital behaviors that Scrum promotes? Based on observation it seems that there are two of them: recognize when delays in delivery occur and talk about problems.

Recognizing when delays occur is not simple especially in corporate cultures where failure is not even a tolerated concept. Scrum encourages this behavior throughout the Daily Scrum where delays are a transparent, daily topic. When you talk daily about it, you are not afraid to talk about it in an open manner.

Talking about problems is encouraged in Scrum through all its practices (Daily Scrum, Review, Retrospectives, Demos, Planning meetings, even through the sprints and releases) where feedback is encouraged.

Through the propagation of these two vital behaviors at team level and throughout their consistent practice potential risks affecting project delivery can be mitigated on time and this way Scrum proves itself as highly successful in software delivery.