The SCRUM Series, Part Two: Agile Discovery Exercises To Establish Risk And Value

The Hangover



You’re probably going to be pretty confused when you come in late the next morning to stacks of cards with M’s S’s and C’s on them. Um…now what? Am you ready to start building? Nope. Not even close, and that’s absolutely okay. One of the main ideas behind Agile development is that you can’t possibly know every detail about a project at the beginning. That said, here are a few more discovery exercises to help your team and especially your client get focused. I learned the following exercises from Collabnet Scrum Master, Petri Heiramo at a recent Scrum Training course.

Exercise Four: Establish Value Viewpoints

Heiramo defines a value viewpoint as “a clearly defined, overarching business goal. These value viewpoints are specific to your release and will likely differ from one release to another. While the Product Owner is the final arbiter, some discussion will likely be useful before you start value estimating.”

You can apply this exercise to a project you’re working on now, or continue with the previous post’s imaginary example, “mybookshelf.com.” For the purposes of this exercise, let’s go with two value viewpoints that will apply to a lot of interactive projects: “Users attracted” and “Users retained.”

Exercise Five: Play Poker

PART ONE: VALUE ESTIMATION


For this exercise you will need poker chips in at least two different colors (preferably green and red).

Using the established value viewpoints from our previous exercises as your guide, put your chips on the user stories you feel are most valuable. Petri explains in slightly greater detail: “(Specifically,) you want to evaluate how each story contributes to these two goals (and ignore any other possible value dimension, e.g. revenue gained.)”

1. Lay the cards out on a large table so everyone can see each card.

2. Disperse a limited amount (8-10) of green poker chips to each person on the team. The limited number will force you to spend your chips on the “most valuable” stories.

3. Each member of the team should disperse their chips on the upper right hand corner of the story cards they feel are the most valuable.

NOTE: Do your best not to be influenced by the others. Scrum teams are cross-functional, self-organizing and self-managing. You’re on the team because your viewpoint counts.

4. When everyone has finished putting down their chips, discuss it for five minutes. Look for patterns and correlations between value and M’s (from the last exercise). You may be surprised. Feel free to move a few chips around.

PART TWO: RISK EVALUATION


Now that you’ve had fun with value, you must deal with risk. For the purposes of this exercise, risk is defined as any sort of risk, business or technical. However, the risk should be applied only to each individual user story and not to the project as a whole.

Repeat steps 2 through 4 using red chips.

5. When you have finished and have had a moment to reflect on where the chips fell, write the number of green chips and red chips on the top half of each card. Write the numbers side by side on the right hand corner.

But what does it mean?

You have now four categories of cards.

• high value / high risk
• high value / low risk
• low value / low risk
• low value / high risk

You might think that you should focus preliminary development on high value / low risk items. Sure, get off to a good start, do things that are easy, get everyone feeling great about everything and build confidence!…not so much.

Scrum is all about transparency. It seeks to expose risk and failure as well as value. Therefore, you’ll want to focus high value high risk PBI’s first because by tackling these first, you’ll have a good sense of if and how this project is going to work right away. That’s a lot better than going through four months of development with your head in the sand only to find out in Beta that the whole thing is worthless.

Ken Schwaber, one of the architects of Scrum framework put it best:

“Scrum will help you fail in 30 days or less.”

We’re not done folks. More exercises to come. Stay tuned for Part Three.

Further reading:

• The Scrum Series, Introduction: Tips For Agile Project Execution
• The Scrum Series, Part One: Three Agile Discovery Exercises
• Failure in Scrum
• Other Agile Estimation Techniques

As project manager at Mightybytes, James Johnston keeps the clients happy and his team motivated. Just don't ever, I mean *ever* feed him after midnight. Mightybytes is a Chicago-based web design and digital marketing firm and a certified B Corporation. Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest or fill out our contact form.