Blending PRINCE2 with Scrum Sprints
Each user story was used to estimate a series of tasks and resources. A user story is therefore something that is generally worked on by more than one person, and a task is generally worked on by a single individual.
But now, let us suppose we are part way through that same sprint.
Three situations could occur:
- The scrum development team forecast that they are exactly on track and will continue as originally planned
- The scrum development team can see they overestimated the amount of work to create that completed products, and will therefore choose the next highest priority user story to complete within the current sprint
- The scrum development team can see by underestimate it’s the amount of work required, and will not be able to complete all of the selected user stories. They therefore return one or more of the sprint backlog user stories
Let me show you a simple example here using the sprint Burndown chart as shown above.
In this example, the scrum development team called into much work initially, and still have nearly 600 hours to go on day 6 of a 11 day sprint.
The product owner was consulted and agreed to remove some user stories from the sprint, resulting as you can see, from a drop in remaining work hours. As you can see from that point onward, the scrum development team finished the sprint successfully.
During the daily scrum, each team member is cost to answer the following three questions:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Are there any issues (impediments) that of stopping you?
After each team member has responded, the team clearly understands why exactly what already been done and what work remains.
It’s important to understand that the daily scrum meeting is not a status update meeting, gathered by a manager, rather, it is a meeting in which the team members make commitments to each other.
Any issues or impediments that are raised become the responsibility of the Scrum Master to resolve as quickly as possible.
Scrum puts working products on a higher priority than creating documentation. So it’s no surprise that most of the planning and progress tools (called information radiators), are low tech often in the form of sticky notes, white boards, and flip charts.
The sprint backlog can be made easy to read and understand by presenting it on a Scrum Task Board. The development team members constantly update the task board which consists of a series of cards (often sticky notes).
If the team member thinks of a new task, they write this on a cart and place it on the task board. Each sticky note contains information about each task.
Here is a simplified picture of the scrum task board:
At some point during the day, estimates are changed and the cards are moved around the board. I have shown just to user stories in the example above each represented by a row.
Each task cartoon starts by being placed within the “To Do” column. They are then placed within the user story row in the relevant column up to the point where they are placed in the “Done” (complete) column.
They are then removed to make room for the next batch of cards.
PRINCE2 and Scrum Summary
In this article, I have given you a glimpse of the ease and power of blending PRINCE2 with Scrum, so to whet your appetite, you really should learn more and gain the following benefits to your projects (and career!)
- Scrum makes the transition to agile project management effortless
- Keeps your projects on time and on budget
- PRINCE2 Scrum lowers costs and speeds project completion
