I Hired a Certified ScrumMaster

June 26th, 2007 by Hal

Why would a lean projects guy hire a Scrum software development ScrumMaster? Short answer: it seemed like a good idea at the time. Seriously, I'm doing some work for an architectural engineering firm. The company focuses on designing technically sophisticated manufacturing facilities. We are developing for them a responsibility-based planning approach. It's starting out as a Scrum adaptation of the Last Planner System® (LPS). I thought…what better way to understand how Scrum can inform the changes to LPS than to perform our own development effort as a Scrum project.

Scrum is unlike the usual construction project.

We just started. We are almost done with the planning session. I'm the Product Owner, so I've been describing what it is that I want done in the first sprint of the project. While I've been following Scrum for five years, working on a project with a ScrumMaster has been challenging. So far, I really like the self-organizing aspect. The team negotiates with the product owner what will be included in the coming sprint. Then, the team decided who will do the work. But not all the work. Some of it stays in backlog until the first work is finished. One things for certain: Scrum is unlike the usual construction project.

The first sprint is 15 workdays. I'll continue to share my experiences as the project progresses.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 9:03 pm and is tagged: Language Action Perspective, agile, project planning, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Convert this post to a PDF document.

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3 Responses to “I Hired a Certified ScrumMaster”

Kevin Rutherford Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 3:44 am
Hi Hal, This is a really interesting article. I believe this is the kind of application for which Scrum is ideally suited. It brings a clear and simple structure to the process of developing something, and expects the application’s domain to provide the tools and techniques that will deliver value each iteration.

I’ll be watching with interest as the experiment unfolds.
Josh Nankivel Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Keep us posted! My development team just starting using SCRUM, and so we’re working through the initial pains of it now.
Hal Says:
June 27th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I will keep writing about this. Our Sprint is 15 workdays. With the holidays we finish sometime around July 19 or 20. The (building) architect on our team is quite enthusiastic about Scrum.

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