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Establish a New Scrum Team in Development Organization

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In this task, you will learn how to establish a Scrum team within your organization by utilizing the Agile and Scrum frameworks. This exercise is designed to help you understand the foundational elements of forming an effective Scrum team, setting up initial practices, and fostering a collaborative and adaptive work environment. By the end of this task, you should be able to effectively create and lead a Scrum team, ensuring successful implementation of Agile principles.

Your task is to form a new Scrum team for a new project at Adform, which involves enhancing one of the features in the Adform Flow platform. For smooth Scrum Team forming, you will need to plan and coordinate these steps:

Identify Team Members’ Roles and Responsibilities

  • Identify and assign team members to the roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team.
  • Define clear roles and responsibilities for each team member.
  • Assemble a team with a mix of skills required to complete the project, identify required and existing skills in the team.
    • Tip: Consider team forming exercises.

Educate the Scrum Team on Agile Principles and Scrum Framework

  • Create a plan of training sessions/workshops to educate team members on Agile principles and the Scrum framework.
  • Prepare workshops to train the team on Agile principles and the Scrum framework.

Set Up Initial Scrum Principles and Practices in the Team

  • Outline the schedule for regular Sprint cycle Scrum ceremonies (e.g., daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives).
  • Set up the necessary activities for Product backlog management (e.g., User Story writing and estimation workshop, Product Backlog refinement sessions).
  • Define Scrum Practices for Sprint execution, like Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Work In Progress Limit (WIP), Dependency management.
  • Identify your Stakeholders and their needs.
  • Define Team Working Agreement.

Initiate First Sprint

  • Establish Product backlog with your team, define milestones, and deliverables as Epics, start splitting these deliverables into User Stories. (Utilize collaboration tools like Jira or similar)
  • Set first Sprint planning session to kick off the first sprint. Make sure to set a clear and achievable sprint goal. The team should understand the work items selected for the sprint and commit to delivering them.
  • Plan first Sprint Review to demonstrate the completed work to stakeholders, gather feedback for improvement.
  • Facilitate first Sprint Retrospective to reflect on the sprint process and identify areas for improvement. Implement actionable improvements in the next sprint.

Inspect and Adapt

  • Using Coaching Structure, collect observations of initial Sprint, formulate hypotheses, define goals as improvements, define metrics that will allow measuring success, and identify coaching tools to use. Continue to use this as a tool for continuous improvement.

    1. The main goal of this task is to learn the comprehensive process of Scrum methodology and be able to plan step-by-step implementation of Scrum Practices in a new Scrum team.

    2. Even though it is important to set the right processes and practices when forming a Scrum Team, it is not just about processes, it’s a cultural shift as well.

    3. Address resistance to change through clear communication and demonstrating the benefits of Agile.

    4. Be prepared to adjust practices based on feedback and retrospectives. Encourage an open mindset and continuous learning.

    5. Suggested completion time is 3-4 weeks, where we suggest dedicating at least 1 week to exploring the relevant literature. The Inspect and Adapt step might require an additional 1-2 weeks.

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    Adform is a global technology company with innovation ingrained in our DNA. Our story starts in 2002 in Copenhagen, when our visionary trio of founders pioneered one of the earliest Ad Servers. Since then, we’ve grown into the most powerful media buying platform in the world, with more than 650 employees. We enable major advertisers, publishers, and agencies in over 25 markets to create, buy, and sell digital advertising at scale across the myriad of internet-connected devices.