[teampractices] Story wall for the Scrum of Scrums

[Diederik van Liere]

[Sorry for cross-posting -- want to make sure that everybody who cares
about this topic is in the loop]

Heya,

Last week's Scrummaster Meetup and the brief email correspondence between
Tomasz and Ken regarding the distinction between the Scrum of Scrums (SOS)
and the Engineering / Operations Biweekly made me think a bit more about
how we could run the SOS and how it might differ from the Biweekly meeting.

1) Use a dedicated story wall to run the SOS meeting. An example of such a
wall is available at
https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/scrum_of_scrums/cards?favorite_id=1099&view=Wall[0]

2) The story wall is basically a matrix to highlight team
inter-dependencies:
a) each team is in it's own row
b) each team is a possible dependency
(so each team will appear once in a row and once in a column) -- the
current list of teams on the wall is not yet exhaustive.

3) Each scrum master, with assistance of the PM and/or other team members,
adds their stories *which have an interdependency on another team* to the
wall from their current sprint / next sprint / this week / next week
(whatever makes most sense, I think this will depend per team). So you
should not copy your entire story wall to the SoS story wall :) [1]
The upper-left / lower-right diagonal should always be empty -- only cards
with inter-dependencies should be discussed.

4) SOS participants are expected to have looked at the SOS wall before the
SOS meeting.

5) No cards on the wall -- no speaking time :)

6) Cards have 4 possible statuses (right now): Scheduled, In Progress,
Blocked and Done.

7) The SOS scrum master walks the SOS wall. This should keep the meeting
focused and make it clear what topics are going to be discussed.

8) You can add action-items to the card on the SOS wall or in your own
project -- whatever works best for your workflow.

The cards that are currently on the wall are created by me while attending
today's SOS. They are to illustrate the concept -- nothing more.


My hope by making this meeting more visual it will be easier to identify
interaction points / blockers / dependencies between the teams. This also
means that  the success of this meeting is dependent on the preparations
made by all participants instead of the skills of the SOS master -- that
seems like a win as well (Arthur really rocks btw). Another benefit of
visualizing the meeting is that non-participants can get fairly quickly an
understanding of what has been discussed and where the bottlenecks are -- a
nice feature for our managers ;). Finally, using a visual approach we can
more clearly differentiate this meeting from the Engineering / Operations
Biweekly meeting.

Please improve this idea!

Best,
D

[0] I am not trying to plug Mingle here, I don't have a strong opinion
about which tool to use either for this purpose. If you want to debate with
me about how bad mingle is then please start a new thread but please do not
high-jack this thread for that purpose.

[1] If you use Mingle you can use the 'Copy to' function and copy the
contents from your card to a new card in the SOS project. There is no
dynamic update after you copy the card.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/teampractices/attachments/20131015/71b1f821/attachment.html>