An important scaled event of Scrum@Scale to help teams in resolving impediments
What is SoS –
As per the Scrum At Scale® Guide, Scrum of Scrums is a team of teams. This team operates at one level up from scrum teams. As part of scrum master roles and responsibilities, group of scrum masters meet and run two important scaled events. These events are Scaled Daily Scrum and Scaled Retrospective. Here I will talk about Scaled Daily Scrum.
Scaled Daily Scrum –
At team level, daily Scrum helps to understand team’s progress towards sprint goal. Same way Scrum of Scrums understands collective progress by ‘Scaled Daily Scrum’(SDS). As this is part of The Scrum Master Cycle, usually scrum masters join this event and focus on ‘How’ part of product development.
Here scrum master or at least one representative from all the teams, connects regularly, bring up the issues which team could not resolve on their own. The purpose of this team is to help participating teams in removing impediments, resolving dependencies, and making sure to have smooth delivery of product increment and achieving their sprint goals. joins and discuss progress about their respective teams.
Along with daily progress, this team discusses impediments/dependencies faced by teams and try to get resolutions. This team support each other to make sure that participating teams are
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Participants in SDS –
Representatives from all scrum teams, usually scrum masters, Chief product owner and anyone else who can help in achieving the purpose of this group. This team would have a Scrum of Scrums Master. This SoSM would be facilitating the events for this group and representing this group in MetaScrum.
Outcome –
This group meet regularly to review impediments and dependencies for scrum teams. These impediments and dependencies are tracked on a Kanban board and regularly reviewed. Based on the progress happened, these items are moved to right status on the board.
Prep work –
1. Setup discussion on working agreement between team representatives
2. Give overview to Scrum Master’s about SoS
3. Start tracking impediments, dependencies, and other issues on team’s board
Frequency –
Participating Scrum Masters should decide on the frequency. Factors to be considered to decide frequency
1. Number of open issues/impediments/dependencies
2. Frequency of Issues coming to SoS
3. Average resolution time longer than usual
Summary –
The purpose Scrum of Scrums is to help participating team to solve complex problem and work on large projects with the simplicity and power of scrum. Scaling is kept lightweight with following similar processes at all the levels; hence it is effective and easy to scale with Scrum@ Scale framework.