Does your team struggle to meet sprint commitments?
The high-impact Producore Better Requirements for Scrum training course teaches you how to eliminate expensive carryover and rework, yielding smooth, predictable delivery sprint after sprint.
Want to Radically Improve your Scrum Team's Performance? Here's how...
Store requirements outside of work tickets
Align structure of requirements with structure of business
Version control requirements
Drive work from persistent requirements
Don’t start work that isn’t ready
Don’t close work items that aren’t really complete
Give teams the time they need to prepare before starting a story
Falling Behind
The Unrealized Potential of Scrum
Scrum is supposed to allow teams to comfortably meet their goals and commitments on a regular cadence, yet teams often miss their commitments.
Think about it. How many of your recent sprints have had all the backlog items completed by the end of the sprint without the need for heroics such as engineers working long hours or weekends?
Can't Move the Needle
The Invisible Problem
- “The engineers never do what they’re supposed to”
- “We don’t have enough time to handle all the unknowns”
- “The story wasn’t clear enough”
- “You should have known how that would work”
- “The team’s estimates aren’t accurate enough”
- “We don’t have the information to estimate correctly”
- “There’s not enough detail in the stories to get them done in time”
- “The story wasn’t small enough to complete in a sprint”
Holding Back the Team
The Cost of Immature Stories
Sometimes people even blame Scrum for these problems but it’s not Scrum and it’s not a lack of technical practices, story-writing techniques, or conversations about stories in a sprint that are causing these issues.
The underlying cause of all these issues is almost always that teams start implementing stories before they are mature. Working on a story that is not ready to be worked on leads to a litany of problems such as mid-sprint surprises, delays while someone chases down the answer to a question, missing dependencies discovered during development, missing details needed to make good product decisions, defects reported on scenarios nobody ever discussed, poor estimates, contradictory requirements, and more.
Some people believe this is how it’s supposed to be, that Scrum requires each user story to be a lightweight “promise for a conversation”. Yet user stories aren’t even a part of scrum. Scrum doesn’t even recognize the existence of user stories, so it certainly can’t have an opinion on what goes in them.
Unlocking Potential
Adding Requirements Maturation to Scrum
Scrum supports additions to your team process and one of the most important additions your team can make is to add our Requirements Maturation Flow, which ensures product backlog items are truly mature and ready to be implemented before they are transferred into a sprint backlog at sprint planning.
Implementing the Requirements Maturation Flow solves all the aforementioned problems, giving your team clear, complete requirements every sprint. This means they’ll be able to estimate well and make attainable commitments. They won’t be blindsided by missing dependencies or details and they’ll be able to deliver consistently, sprint after sprint.
Meeting sprint commitments will be the mode, not the exception. And the pace of delivery will actually increase. We’ve had teams that implemented the Requirements Maturation Flow go from being chronically behind to having their customers ask them to slow the pace of delivery.
Want to Radically Improve your Scrum Team's Performance?
In our 2-day, online Better Requirements for Scrum course, you will learn how you and your team can implement the Requirements Maturation Flow, guaranteeing a comfortable, predictable, reliable pace of delivery.