Monday, July 21, 2014

Futurespective - Predicting the Unpredectible



Apart from the regular Scrum ceremonies - Sprint Planning and Commitment, Daily Stand up, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective , a new one has emerged that has proved to be quite effective for ensuring higher productivity across the future sprints.

Futurespective - It is a powerful technique that uses the concepts of Retrospective to make the future better. The idea is simple. Think of your new project and mentally take the team to the final deadline. Assume the project has been a miserable failure, brainstorm about what happened on the project to make it fail thinking of People, Organization, Systems, Processes, Facilities and Logistics and put all ideas up on a flip chart. Now look at all of the things that have been written down as a team. Ask them to vote to determine which of these are starting to happen (e.g. poor communications with Product Owner) in the current project. At the end of the session you'll have a list of priority actions that you should take now to resolve the problems that haven't happened yet. It is like taking a mythical Sprint Plan and then thinking of ways to make it fail.
During this exercise team asks themselves two questions:
 Assume this Sprint is a complete failure, and based on what we've committed to deliver, what are we going to do on this Sprint to make that happen?
 What actions can we take now to stop that happening and make our Sprint successful

Future-spectives help the team to establish practices and collaboration patterns early on that transforms a group of individuals to a real team faster.
This is more of a forward approach than backwards , it is more positive where the team can work together in advance to avoid problems. As a result the team feels more in control and is far more likely to put ideas into actions.

1 comment: