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, a group of Scrum Masters meet and run two important scaled events. Scaled Daily Scrum and Scaled Retrospective are these two important events. Here I will talk about Scaled Daily Scrum.
Scaled Daily Scrum –
At the team level, daily Scrum helps to understand the team’s progress towards the 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 the ‘How’ part of product development.
Here Scrum Master or at least one representative from all the teams, connects regularly and brings up the issues that the teams 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 discusses the progress of their respective teams.
Along with daily progress, this team discusses impediments/dependencies faced by participating teams and tries to get resolutions.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
Participants in SDS –
Representatives from all scrum teams, usually Scrum Masters, the 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 meets regularly to review impediments and dependencies for Scrum teams. These impediments and dependencies are tracked and reviewed on a Kanban board regularly. Items moved to the right status on the board, based on the progress happened,
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 the team’s board
Frequency –
Participating Scrum Masters should decide on the frequency. Factors that should be considered when deciding on the 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 of Scrum of Scrums is to help participating teams solve complex problems and work on large projects with the simplicity and power of scrum. Scaling is kept lightweight by following similar processes at all levels; hence it is effective and easy to scale with the Scrum@ Scale framework.